First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Independence (review)

Judith Sargent Murray took great, if never thoroughly successful, pains to conceal her identity as a playwright. She refused to take the stage in Boston, as Susanna Rowson often had in Philadelphia. She asked that her fair copy be reprinted out of town to avoid recognition of her handwriting, that its rehearsals be moved to Newport, and that no mention even of its American authorship be made in advertisements or before the censors who would have to certify its moral content. The stakes for Murray were high. Her second husband, the pioneering Universalist minister John Murray, already a target for his theatrical sermons and heterodox beliefs, could not afford to be further associated with a play. And though she claimed literary fame, not lucre, was her ultimate aim upon entering the public sphere, Judith also needed the money.

Born into a prominent and prosperous family and having married first into an enterprising commercial clan, Judith suffered a tremendous decline in wealth when John Stevens's business ventures failed. Her second marriage, to the Reverend John Murray, did not promise a return to financial stability. Rumor of any desire for material gain would tarnish the claims to gentility and respectability that had allowed Judith to retain class prerogatives despite financial struggles and, even more, would be perceived as indecorous, if not scandalous, behavior for a woman of her time. Thus the pressures on Murray, as she settled into her box seat at the Federal Street Theater, were enormous.

Sheila Skemp gives readers unprecedented access to Murray's private writing, shared almost exclusively with family members and close friends, at these and other momentous occasions in her exceptional new biography. Skemp takes us beyond Murray's more familiar published work to her richly descriptive thoughts on the terrors of childbirth; travels; visits with the likes of Washington and John Adams; and the travails of educating her daughter, two girls also under her stewardship, and the boisterous sons of her brother, who had been sent north from Natchez with Harvard in their sights. This is the first book-length treatment of Murray's life since 1934 and the first ever to make use of Murray's letter books, now housed in the Mississippi Archives following their remarkable recovery by the Unitarian-Universalist Reverend Gordon Gibson. We may appreciate Skemp's title doubly. Murray's private letters, numbering some 2,500 documents, situate Murray at the nexus of social, sexual, political, religious, and aesthetic life between the ratification years and her death in 1820, while her publications (essays, poems, plays, and fiction) demonstrate her desire to be an active participant in, and not solely a witness of, her times.

Skemp deftly takes her readers through this archive with a focus on Murray's recognition and disappointment that women's roles in the early republic demeaned their strength of character and of mind. Having composed a first draft of her now well-known essay "On the Equality of the Sexes" in 1779, Murray continued to rebel against assumed distinctions between men and women. Conceding only physical superiority to men, Murray believed that in imagination, reason, memory, and judgment "women were not deficient, indeed that they might well be superior to men" (4). Moreover, as she wrote to her brother, Winthrop, she denied any "corporeal conjunction" (226) between mind and body. What better way to employ these skills than in learning and teaching? Skemp describes a young Judith demanding from her parents an equal education to her male siblings, and if this was never fully afforded her, she was determined to supply those children, whether boy or girl, under her own pedagogical supervision with "a foundation for independence" (106). Nevertheless, Skemp does not romanticize Murray's feminism, which was to be restricted to elites for whom the skills of self-reliance, sociability, gentility, and appreciation for the moral virtues of republican society were deemed essential. According to Skemp, for Murray...