Judith Sargent Murray: the "So-Called" Feminist
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Constructing the Past Volume 1 Issue 1 Article 4 2000 Judith Sargent Murray: The "So-Called" Feminist Sara Scobell Illinois Wesleyan University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing Recommended Citation Scobell, Sara (2000) "Judith Sargent Murray: The "So-Called" Feminist," Constructing the Past: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol1/iss1/4 This Article is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Commons @ IWU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this material in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This material has been accepted for inclusion by editorial board of the Undergraduate Economic Review and the Economics Department at Illinois Wesleyan University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ©Copyright is owned by the author of this document. Judith Sargent Murray: The "So-Called" Feminist Abstract This article discusses the writings of Judith Murray, and critiques the notion that she was an early feminist and supporter of women's right to move outside of the domestic sphere. This article is available in Constructing the Past: https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/constructing/vol1/iss1/4 Sara Scobell 4 Constructing The Past 5 Judith Sargent Murray: The''So-Ca1led'' Femlntit extensively upon Judith Sargent Murray's published essays, short stories, and plays. More important than these authors' brief forays into Murray's Sara Scobell writings, though, are their historical interpretations of the wider changes in women's lives and thought during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary he heard the roaring guns and rebel cries of the American Revolution, periods. read the blazing words ofJohn Locke and his fellow Enlightenment Beginning with the observation that Enlightenment ideas traveled to and philosophes, and felt the surging tides of change beating against deeply affected America before the Revolution broke out, Kerber relates the S life-altering political, social, and technological changes wrought by the Great and eroding the shores of convention. Indeed, Judith Sargent Murray lived in an era and in a country that confronted all of her senses with radically new War and the Enlightenment thought preceding it. In the midst of America's ways of life and thought. Like so many other literate, upper-class women who violent transition from a "restrained, deferential democracy" to an "aggressive, lived in the late eighteenth-eentury United States, Murray recorded her reactions egalitarian, modem participatory dernxracy," Kerber argues that women became to the atmosphere of radical sentiment in various essays, poems, letters, and strongly politicized. Politicization, while a radical effect for many women, did plays. For notably influential historians like Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton, not automatically offer them an outlet in a public realm where traditional these works by Murray, particularly her boldly titled essay "On the Equality of paternalistic views held sway. Looking, then, for a way in which they could the Sexes," represent the first strains of feminist thought in America. t Though influence the republic and demonstrate their new political natures, women Murray did produce some of her nation's e~liest writings on the topics of eventually found a socially acceptable way of exercising their newfound "civic female education, abilities, and rights, her prose (especially when compared to virtue" as "republican mothers." Kerber, who coined this now familiar phrase, treatises written by her male contemporaries upon the same subject) reflects a contended that women turned to their roles as educators of America's future more traditional view of women's role. Where modem scholars of women's virtuous citizens in order to exert their power over the public world from the history paint aportrait ofJudith Sargent Murray, the feminist, popular literature safety of the domestic sphere. Judith Sargent Murray's arguments {or educating by late eighteenth-eentury male authors, and indeed many of Murray's own women so that they could later teach their children republican virtue definitely words, support a much different depiction of Murray-that of a woman who fi ts into the mold of Kerber's "republican mother."3 dedicated herself to the advocacy of a traditional female domestic sphere. Mary Beth Norton, in the same vein as Kerber, touches upon Murray's For the past two decades, scholars in the field of women's history have contributions to the rhetoric offemale education. Norton emphasizes the radical devoted significant attention to the study of the American Revolution and its nature of Murray's words along with the "revolutionary experience" of most effects upon women in the United States. Judith Sargent Murray, as a widely women during this period. According to Norton, the experience of Revolution read author and playwright of this time, reflected in her compositions many of (which included American women's first real public activism through economic the ideological trends recognized by historians researching this period. These boycotts and formalized patriotic groups) awoke women's political awareness. same historians frequently refer to Murray's writings in their works, but only In all ofher descriptions of women's exploits during and after the Revolutionary one book (Sheila Skemp's Judith Sargent Murray. A BriefBiography) focuses War, Norton tends to accentuate the female population's newfound wholly on Murray and her contributions to post-Revolutionary America's independence, activism, and radicalization. Where Kerber takes a more reserved changing conceptions ofwomen.2 Nonetheless, the books and articles recently view of women's activities in the democratizing wake of the Revolutionary published about women, ideology, and the American Revolution provide a War, Norton makes grand generalizations about the conflict's alteration of necessary contextual analysis of the time in which Murray lived and the trends women's ideology and lives. Norton, though differing from Kerber upon many that she absorbed and reflected. topics, finds herself ultimately agreeing with Kerber's position that post The two most prominent historians of women in the Revolutionary era, Revolutionary American women found their niche in America's new political Kerber and Norton, inaugurated the trend ofstudying women in late eighteenth culture by imbuing their maternal and matrimonial roles with the power to century America with the simultaneous publication of their seminal works, influence the American republic.· Women ofthe Republic: Intellect andIdeology in Revolutionary America and Jane Rendall, author of The Origins of Modem Feminism: Women in Liberty ~ Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience ofAmerican Women, 1750 Britain, France and the United States, 1780·1860, obviously draws heavily 1800 (respectively) in 1980. In their books, both Kerber and Norton rely from Kerber and the theory of Republican motherhood. However, in her discussion of early American feminism, she distingui:>hes herself by placing Sara Scobell 4 Constroctlng The Past 5 Judith Sargent Murray: The ''So-Called'' Feminist extensively upon Judith Sargent Murray's published essays, short stories, and plays. More important than these authors' brief forays into Murray's Sara Scobell writings, though, are their historical interpretations of the wider changes in women's lives and thought during the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary he heard the roaring guns and rebel cries of the American Revolution, periods. read the blazing words ofJohn Locke and his fellow Enlightenment Beginning with the observation that Enlightenment ideas traveled to and philosophes, and felt the surging tides of change beating against deeply affected America before the Revolution broke out, Kerber relates the S life-altering political, social, and technological changes wrought by the Great and eroding the shores of convention. Indeed, Judith Sargent Murray lived in an era and in a country that confronted all of her senses with radically new War and the Enlightenment thought preceding it. In the midst of America's ways of life and thought. Like so many other literate, upper-class women who violent transition from a "restrained, deferential democracy" to an "aggressive, lived in the late eighteenth-<:entury United States, Murray recorded her reactions egalitarian, modem participatory democracy," Kerber argues that women became to the atmosphere of radical sentiment in various essays, poems, letters, and strongly politicized. Politicization, while a radical effect for many women, did plays. For notably influential historians like Linda Kerber and Mary Beth Norton, not automatically offer them an outlet in a public realm where traditional these works by Murray, particularly her boldly titled essay "00 the Equality of paternalistic views held sway. Looking, then, for a way in which they could the Sexes," represent the first strains of feminist thought in America.' Though influence the republic and demonstrate their new political natures, women Murray did produce some of her nation's eMliest writings on the topics of eventually found a socially acceptable way ofexercising their newfound