Judith Sargent Murray

Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, was an essayist, poet, and playwright, and one of the earliest American advocates of women's intellectual equality. Her essay "On the Equality of the Sexes," published in 1790, appeared before Mary Wollstonecraft's better-known work, and her 1782 catechism is considered the earliest published writing by an American Universalist woman. Widowed in 1786, she married the Universalist preacher John Murray in 1788 and took part in the establishment of early Universalism in America. Her collected essays appeared as The Gleaner (1798), whose subscribers included George Washington and John Adams; she died in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1820.

The earliest religious-education work of American Universalism, and the earliest published writing by an American Universalist woman: a catechism for children setting out Rellyan universalism in question-and-answer form, printed at Norwich, Connecticut, in 1782 — with a preface in which its author (then Judith Sargent Stevens, later Murray, whose Gleaner is also in this collection) defends a woman's authority to write on divinity. No digitized scan of the original pamphlet has been located, as it survives in only a handful of copies; a modern transcription by Bonnie Hurd Smith is linked in this book's metadata.

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Judith Sargent Murray — essayist, poet, playwright, wife of John Murray, and author of the Universalist catechism of 1782 — collected her celebrated 'Gleaner' essays in three volumes sold by subscription, with George Washington and John Adams heading the list. Writing under a male persona, she ranges over education, manners, politics, religion, and the capacities of women, extending the argument of her famous 'On the Equality of the Sexes.' One of the first self-published essay collections by an American woman, from the first family of American Universalism.

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The second volume of Judith Sargent Murray's essay collection (Volumes I and III are also in this collection), continuing the 'Gleaner' persona's essays on education, manners, politics, religion, and the capacities of women, together with installments of her serialized fiction. This copy is the British Library's scan from its eighteenth-century collection — a much larger file than the other volumes, retained so that the three-volume set is complete.

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The concluding volume of Judith Sargent Murray's essay collection (Volumes I and II are also in this collection), containing among much else her plays and the closing 'Gleaner' essays in which the pseudonymous author unmasks herself — a deliberate demonstration that a woman had sustained the persona readers assumed was a man's.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)