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  • Gender Roles and Revolutions
  • Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor (bio)
Sheila L. Skemp . First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. xvi + 484 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $39.95.

Judith Sargent Murray was an unlikely feminist hero for revolutionary times. From her earliest days, she valued gentility and order, carefully guarded her elite status, and disdained fellow female playwright Susanna Rowson's willingness to appear on stage, selling herself. And yet, as Sheila L. Skemp shows in this fascinating biography, Murray's relentless drive for literary fame and financial success, as well as her new vision of gender as a social construct, make her a striking and essential addition to our understanding of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Several decades of scholarship on women and the revolutionary era have familiarized us with the limited claims of republican motherhood, an ideology that valued free white female education insofar as it made women virtuous mothers. Pathbreaking articles and biographies have analyzed the "I'm not a feminist, but"-style rhetoric of Abigail Adams, who famously and playfully encouraged John to "Remember the Ladies" in writing a new American code of laws.1 In Judith Sargent Murray, Skemp presents a lady who demanded much more. Through Murray's life, work, and letters, she introduces a wider "transcontinental conversation about gender issues" (p. x) that casts the revolutionary and early republic periods as filled with greater potential and correspondingly greater disappointments for gender egalitarianism.

Judith Sargent was born in 1751 in Glouchester, Massachusetts, a setting that fostered her appreciation of status as well as her openness to the new ideas, people, and goods circulating in the Atlantic world. The men in her family were merchants, attuned to the capricious fortunes of a trade that was vulnerable to sunken ships and failed commercial friendships. At the same time, her extended family had wealth, status, and the kind of "casual sense of entitlement" that came with their longstanding genteel status (p. 15). The boys in her family also had excellent classical educations. Judith Sargent did not, to her everlasting outrage. Her inferior education was a personal burden and a symbol of the artificial distinctions made between boys and girls, distinctions [End Page 431] that she believed created differences in capacity and achievement for the rest of their lives. This insight—that gender differences in intellect, ability, and discernment were created rather than inborn—was one she would tirelessly explore in her written work.

What Judith Sargent did have was access to books, paper, and pens. Her self-education was a product of the expanding eighteenth-century world of novels, plays, and essays, especially those written by women. Reading allowed her to explore ideas and imagine alternative worlds; writing letters shaped her voice as an author. Eighteenth-century letters, even those between friends, functioned as public documents, circulated by a wide circle of kin and associates. Murray also made copies of her letters, and the resulting letter books—making up twenty volumes, stuffed with thousands of missives as well as unpublished essays and poems—provide the core material for this biography. Long believed to have been lost, the letter books turned up in Natchez, Mississippi, where Murray spent her final days. The books, transported on an arduous final journey and bequeathed to her daughter, represented Murray's last hope for literary renown. While alive, she shared the letter collection with interested friends and mined it for details and ideas to use in her published work. Forced to relocate to the deep South, she protected the letters even when most of her other belongings had to remain behind in New England. Two hundred years later, this legacy has finally received the attention she hoped for.

Starting from the letter books, Skemp analyzes Murray's life through an impressive range of perspectives. We see Murray as a Federalist, a genteel free white woman, a New Englander, Universalist, and mother, with the implications of each receiving thoughtful, in-depth consideration. Skemp deftly weaves together multiple strands of Murray's life, depicting personal, professional, and social life as having shaped each other. For example, her discussion of Murray's...

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