The writings of Judith Sargent Murray

Judith Sargent Murray

Introduction

Early feminist thought emerged in Western Europe and America at about the time of the American Revolution. Inspired by Enlightenment philosophy and the republican ideology of equal natural rights, it appeared as part of a broader challenge to traditional Western patriarchal structures that confined political and productive power to small groups of propertied males. As American men organized an independent republic, many women, such as Judith Sargent Murray and Abigail Adams, carried republicanism to feminist conclusions that defined men and women in terms of Revolutionary American ideals.

Women were among the most outspoken proponents of republican motherhood. In addition to reformers such as Judith Sargent Murray and Mercy Otis Warren, there were countless nameless adherents, some of whom published in local presses, as well as the authors of housekeeping manuals, novels, and political and religious tracts. Although republican motherhood blurred the lines between public and private by integrating politics and domesticity, it also reinforced them. By casting themselves as the protectors of republican virtue, women espousing this ideology did not expand their roles in society; instead, they redefined the meaning of their actions as wives and mothers. Rather than challenging their exclusion from political activity or their lack of a recognized political identity, they gave a political meaning to their everyday experiences.

Discussion & Analyses

Judith Sargent Murray is surely more than the “virtually unknown commodity” her contemporary biographer claims. She appears in every biographical dictionary of American women writers, and takes influence from both the Norton and Heath anthologies of American literature, which means thousands of students have read her critical essay on the equality of the sexes. Exactly this reputation, however, justifies Sheila L. Skemp's detailed and scrupulously decent biography. The biography presents three sections: first comes Murray's life until around the age of forty, then her years of scholarly productivity, and finally the declining years.

When, as a widow, she moved to Natchez, Mississippi with her married daughter in 1818, the written record ceases, but Murray took with her to Natchez nine letter books containing many years of carefully redacted correspondence. Long thought to have disappeared, they were unearthed in 1984 by Unitarian- Universalist minister Gordon Gibson and turned over to the Mississippi State Archives. Hoping for literary fame and extraordinary income, Murray (1751-1820) contributed numerous essays to Massachusetts magazines during her years in Gloucester and then Boston. These essays used the going conventions of eighteenth- century essay writing, with various personae, allegorically named characters, didactic fictions, and the like.

The three plays she wrote took place in Boston, although they did not do well on stage. As though to vindicate their quality, Murray published two of them in The Gleaner, her massive three-volume miscellany combining previously published and new pieces published in 1798. The Gleaner is one of the high points of female literary production from the early years of the new republic. Literary scholars see Murray as one of the most important American women writers of her era, not only for her ...