Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
3.12 JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY
(1751–1820)
Hailing from a wealthy sea merchant
family, Judith Sargent Murray received
an education unusual for women of her
era. Along with her brother Winslow,
Murray was tutored by a clergyman in
classical languages and mathematics.
Like women of her era, though, she
endured the joys and vicissitudes of
marriage and childbirth. She married
her rst husband, Captain John Stevens,
in 1769. A sailor who traded goods,
Stevens suered economic catastrophes
from the Revolutionary War and died
a debtor in the West Indies. Murray’s
second marriage, to the Reverend John
Murray (1741–1815), proved a spiritual
and intellectual partnership to which
Image 3.18 | Judith Sargent Murray
she remained devoted even after his Artist | John Singleton Copley
Source | Wikimedia Commons
death. They had two children, with only
License | Public Domain
a daughter surviving infancy.
Unlike women of her era, Murray wrote and published a number of works,
including poems, essays, and plays. Her later writing activities remained primarily
within the relative position of wife, as she edited her husband John Murray’s
letters, sermons, and autobiography. Yet her more enduring and inuential
writing uniquely focused on women as individuals with claim to rights equal
to that of men. With logic, scientic method, and wit, Murray targeted societal
constructs that both assumed and imposed on women their “inferiority,” adversely
aecting their spiritual and mental well-being. Murray advocated equal education
as an important means to correcting these wrongs. She also took conviction from
her universalist faith through which she advocated the need for women to hold
themselves in reverence.
The Gleaner (1798) proved to be her most protable work. She used various
pseudonyms for her writing, including the male pseudonym of Vigilius, or the
Gleaner, from which the title of this collection derived. At its conclusion, Murray
put aside this pseudonym and presented her true self to her readers, pointing to
gender biases when she explained her “deception” as due to her doubts of her works
being taken seriously if known from the start as written by a woman. In 1820, she
died in Natchez, Mississippi, in her daughter’s home.
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