Judith Sargent Stevens Murray, an influential 18th and 19th-century American writer, was widely known for her journalistic essays on contemporary issues, especially women’s rights. Murray served as an early advocate for women’s equality, access to education, and the right to control their earnings. Murray was born a daughter of a wealthy shipowner and merchant, relying on the family’s library to teach herself philosophy, history, literature, and geography. Murray married her first husband John Stevens, a sea captain, in 1769, publishing her essays and poems after her husband accumulated debt following the Revolutionary war. The young author first published a few essays including “Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms” (1784) in a Boston magazine known as Gentleman and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine under the pseudonym “Constantia”. Two years after the death of her first husband, she married John Murray, a Universalist pastor. Universalism, a strand of English Protestantism, influenced Murray’s challenge of the “female brain being inherently inferior”. Murray argued that women should be addressed as rationally capable beings and given equal access to education. The author contributed to monthly columns entitled “The Gleaner”, commenting on public affairs and publishing her essays among the riveting “On the Equality of the Sexes” in 1790. Murray reasoned that women were not physically limited, but intellectually limited by lack of access to education. She believed “the success of a new nation required intelligent and virtuous citizens” since the education of “patriotic sons” fell on mothers they should be educated as well. In 1798, she published “The Gleaner’s” collected columns, and recruited presale subscribers with the endorsement of President Washington and Vice President John Adams. Murray’s work was vital to the post-revolutionary idea of “Republican Motherhood” and intellectual excitement that aroused interest in women’s rights. (300)

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