On the Equality of the Sexes

Born into a well-to-do merchant family in 1751, Judith Sargent Murray was given an education superior to most women’s in the 18th century. For a time, she shared a tutor with her brother, after which she self-taught using her family’s library. Although her education was unusually comprehensive for a woman at the time, it was very restricted in comparison to that of her brothers and other young men of class. Murray believed that women’s under-representation in intellectual life was a result of their limited education and opportunities, not of any natural inferiority.

Murray was married at 18 to John Stevens, a prosperous trader. While fulfilling the traditional role of wife, Murray wrote numerous essays, novels, plays, and poems throughout the late 1700s and into the 1800s. Many of these were written for private circulation amongst the intelligentsia and were not published in her lifetime. Murray’s husband’s business was ruined during the War of Independence, and she turned increasingly to published writings to make an income. In 1786, Stevens fled the country and died shortly afterwards. Murray remarried in 1788, to the Reverend John Murray. They had two daughters, only one of whom survived past infancy, and adopted two of Stevens’s orphaned nieces.