The family moved to Boston the next year, where Murray’s play, The Medium (1795), was likely the first by an American author to be produced on stage. In 1792, she assumed a male identity and pen name “The Gleaner” for her column in the Massachusetts Magazine. Throughout, Murray built a literary life, often writing under a pseudonym (sometimes as “Honora,” “Martesia,” or “Constantia”). Traveling with her husband, Murray met prominent people, including George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Catherine Littlefield Greene. At age 38, Murray gave birth to a son who lived only a few hours in 1791, at age 40, she delivered her daughter Julia Marie.
Two years later, Judith Sargent married John Murray, a Unitarian/Universalist minister she met years earlier and to whom her family had given land to build America’s first Universalist/Unitarian Meetinghouse in 1780. Stevens fled to the West Indies, where he died in 1786. In 1784, Murray tried publishing under a pseudonym to end their financial woes, to no avail. During the American Revolution, however, Gloucester’s shipping industry suffered, with Stevens facing debtor’s prison by war’s end. In 1769, Murray married John Stevens, a ship captain, and they adopted his orphan nieces and her cousin. At age nine, she began writing poetry, which her father proudly read to family members. With reading and writing the only education typical for women of her time, Murray relied on the vast family library to teach herself history, philosophy, geography, and literature.
Only three of her siblings survived into adulthood. Her essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” was published a year before Mary Wolstonecraft’s renowned 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Women.īorn on in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Murray was the oldest of eight children of the wealthy merchant family of Winthrop Sargent and Judith Saunders Sargent. A prominent essayist of the American republic, Judith Sargent Murray was an early advocate of women’s equality, access to education, and the right to control their earnings.
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