Murray, Judith Sargent Stevens

▪ American writer

née  Judith Sargent 

born May 1, 1751, Gloucester, Mass. [U.S.]

died July 6, 1820, Natchez, Miss., U.S.

      American writer during the early republic, remembered largely for her essays and journalistic comment on contemporary public issues, especially women's rights. (women's movement)

      Judith Sargent was the daughter of a wealthy shipowner and merchant and received an unusually good education for a girl of her time. In 1769 she married John Stevens, a sea captain. She began writing in the 1770s, at first writing verse but soon turning to essay form, as the intellectual ferment of the Revolutionary period aroused interest in women's rights. In 1784, under the pseudonym Constantia, she published a few essays in a Boston magazine, the Gentleman and Lady's Town and Country Magazine, beginning with “Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms.” Her husband died in 1786, and two years later she married John Murray, pastor of the first Universalist meetinghouse in America.

      In 1790 Murray's poems began appearing in the Massachusetts Magazine, and from February 1792 to August 1794 she contributed a monthly column entitled “The Gleaner,” in which she commented on affairs and public questions of the day and especially on her particular interest, equal education for women. In March 1795 her play The Medium, or A Happy Tea Party was produced at the Federal Street Theatre in Boston, probably the first play by an American author to be produced at that theatre. Both that play and her next, The Traveller Returned (produced 1796), were unsuccessful. In 1798 Murray's “Gleaner” columns were collected and published in three volumes under that title. She edited her husband's Letters and Sketches of Sermons (1812–13) and, after his death in 1815, his Records of the Life of the Rev. John Murray, Written by Himself, with a Continuation by Mrs. Judith Sargent Murray (1816). In 1816 Murray left Boston to live with her daughter in Natchez, where she died.

* * *