Mary Marshall Dyer
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Mary Marshall Dyer was a voice for the largely forgotten Anti-Shakerism sentiment in rural New Hampshire. In 1813 she joined the Shakers of Enfield, New Hampshire. It took only two years later for her to leave and blame them for alienating her from her children. Despite that her husband and her family decided to stay. This irritated her so she did tours and wrote tracts against the Shakers. The main writings she did were A Brief Statement of the Sufferings of Mary Dyer and A Portraiture of Shakerism in 1822. She also got a mob together to storm the Enfield Shaker Community to take her children back, but this effort failed. One problem she had was that her husband Joseph remained devout to the community and criticized her in strong terms. Another was that only one of her five kids ever left the Shakers and he never became close to her. By the 1850s her anti-Shakerism seemed extreme, in New England at least, and she died as a largely forgotten figure in 1867.
