WANTED: One history-making woman for the Mass. State House
Last month, Senate President Karen E. Spilka invited the public to nominate a trailblazing woman with ties to Massachusetts for the honor of having a bust of her installed in the State House.
Massachusetts has several deserving candidates who can and should be up for consideration. As a student of literary Boston between the Revolution and Civil War, I am familiar with a number of worthy nominees, starting with Phillis Wheatley Peters, whose 1773 “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” was the first book of poetry written by a Black woman.
Others include editor, author, and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, and poet Emily Dickinson.
Still, the person who stands out for me in this extraordinary company is Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820). As an essayist, playwright, poet, and novelist, Murray advanced progressive ideas about women’s equality before Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” was published in 1792.
Though little known today, Murray wrote “The Medium” (1795), which was the first play by an American performed in Boston. In her regular contributions to The Massachusetts Magazine and in the three-volume collection of her work published in 1798, Murray insisted that women are emotionally and intellectually equal to men; girls needed to be given the same education as boys and raised with self-esteem based not on their looks but on their minds; most marriages were failing to make people happy; and women should be able to support themselves by depending “on their own efforts.”
Each of these ideas was on the cutting edge of thinking about women’s place and potential in the 1790s.
Because she wrote across genres, Murray could embody her ideas in characters. Where contemporaneous novels depicted young women who were seduced and ruined, the heroine of Murray’s novel “The Story of Margaretta” eludes the clutches of the dangerous man who tempts her because she was given the kind of rich education then generally reserved for boys.
In making the case for women’s economic self-reliance, Murray describes a “woman of Massachusetts” who overcomes a poor education in childhood by studying agriculture and botany on her own. Once she obtains “a considerable knowledge” of soils and manure, she starts a tree farm and becomes both “an oracle” to other farmers and a successful businesswoman.
As a Universalist who read the Bible metaphorically, Murray was able to argue that male figures in the Old Testament, including Abraham, Moses, David, Job, and Solomon, displayed the kind of weaknesses falsely associated with women. In this way, Murray observes, Moses spoke with an “unsaintlike tongue” and “with rash hands” broke the tablets; Job was impatient. And striking at the foundational myth of Western misogyny, Murray argued that Adam, not Eve, was responsible for The Fall. Only men “blinded by self-love” and “wholly absorbed in . . . admiration of their own abilities” could miss these biblical challenges to the doctrine of male superiority, Murray argued.
In September 1794, Murray moved from Gloucester into a row house across from Boston’s first professional theater, which had opened only seven months before. It was a time when carts and coaches rumbled through the streets, cows still grazed on the Common, and the remnants of Puritan belief clashed with the rise of progressive reform.
At the center of these arguments, Murray used her columns to advance the case for the equality of women. Drawing on her lived experience and extensive reading, she was herself a striking example of what women can achieve.
A trailblazing but largely forgotten writer and thinker, Judith Sargent Murray deserves to be honored in the State House.