The Woman Who Signed Her Own Name — Judith Sargent Murray
A parlor in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in spring. A woman sits at a small tea table with ink and paper and writes an essay arguing that her mind is the equal of her brother’s. She knows she will not publish it for years. A woman who oversteps is already a woman talked about, and her household carries debt enough.
It is 1779.
She does not just believe women are equal. She writes the argument down, that a woman appears to be less only because she was taught less, thirteen years before Mary Wollstonecraft would make the same case in England.
She does not just hide behind a pen name. She signs her early work Constantia, the way a careful woman must, and waits for the day she can do otherwise.
She does not just place essays in a magazine. She brings out three volumes under her own name and sells them by subscription, with Washington, Adams, and Jefferson among the men who paid to read her.
Her Spark of Liberty was her own name. The right to set it at the head of her own thinking and let it stand there in the open.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life”
She wrote On the Equality of the Sexes in 1779 and did not publish it until 1790, in the Massachusetts Magazine, where it argued that the apparent inferiority of women was the work of unequal schooling and nothing else. In 1798 she brought out The Gleaner in three volumes under her own name, one of the first American books to demand an equal education for daughters. She wrote as Constantia when the times required the cover, and she put her name on the title page when she could carry the risk. She died on July 6, 1820, at her daughter’s home in Natchez, Mississippi.
Her name was Judith Sargent Murray.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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