Judith Sargent Murray and the Roots of American Feminism

A forgotten voice sharpened the edge of American liberty—she did it with clarity, courage, and a printing press that didn’t always want her words. We sit down with Dr. Kirstin Burkhaugto explore the life and legacy of Judith Sargent Murray, the self-taught Boston writer whose 1790 essay On the Equality of the Sexes argued that women possess the same moral and intellectual capacities as men. Years before Mary Wollstonecraft’s landmark work, Murray was already building a distinctly American case for women’s political equality—rooted in empirical observation, everyday experience, and a Universalist theology that saw all souls as one.

We trace how Murray turned personal frustration into public contribution, growing up in a prominent family where her brother received the education she craved. That slight fuels a relentless autodidact who reads widely, writes cleanly, and navigates a male-dominated publishing world with strategic savvy. Rather than attacking the founders head-on, she dedicated essays to John Adams and leveraged the era’s language of liberty to expand its logic: if rights are universal, they cannot stop at the gender threshold. Along the way, we unpack the Universalist belief that earthly differences do not change the worth of a soul—and how that spiritual framework emboldened a political argument for inclusion.

The conversation lands in the present with fresh relevance. We connect Murray’s claims to modern questions about who gets educated, who leads, and how families balance care with public life. You’ll hear practical pointers for reading her today—start with On the Equality of the Sexes and Sheila Skemp’s biography, The First Lady of Letters—and a candid look at the resistance she faced from literary gatekeepers who tried to mute her voice. If you rethink the founding through a wider lens, this story will change how you hear the word “we.” Subscribe, share with a history-loving friend, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway so more listeners can find these Founding Mothers.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introducing Judith Sargent Murray
• 1:56 Self-Taught Scholar in Boston Society
• 3:36 Universalism and the Equality Argument
• 5:11 Publishing, Pushback, and Strategy
• 7:41 Why Her Ideas Still Matter
• 10:06 Where to Read Murray Today
• 11:46 Series Wrap and Thanks

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:46

Welcome back to Judith City. We are continuing our series on the Founding Mothers. And again, we have with us our expert, Dr. Kirsten Burkhog. And Dr. Burkhog, today we are talking about Judith Sgt. Murray. So can you give us a little bit about who was Judith Sgt. Murray and what role did she play in early American intellectual and social life?

SPEAKER_01: 1:09

Definitely. So Judith Sgt. Murray, definitely kind of a lesser-known name. Even Mercy Otis Warren, the subject of our last podcast episode, even though people might not know a ton about her, oftentimes the name sounds familiar. Judith Sgt Murray, when I mention her name, oftentimes I get a lot of who is that or blank looks. She's a super interesting figure, a little bit younger. We've talked about Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren so far. And Judah Sgt. Murray is born slightly down the road. So she's born in 1751, a little bit younger, though she was in the same Massachusetts social scene. So there's a very good chance she would have run into people like Abigail Adams or Mercy Otis Warren, but we don't have a ton of records of them necessarily being super close friends or anything like that. Judith Sgt. Murray, unlike Mercy Otis Warren, who had the opportunity to be very well schooled in her young years, Judith Sgt. Murray comparatively is completely self taught. She's the oldest of a relatively prominent family in Boston, and she's a younger brother who receives the education in the family, of course, because that was how things work in those sorts of days. And in her personal writings, Murray never really gets over this. She's always quite a bit cranky that her brother got to have this education when truly she was the person who desired to be a person of letters in her family and did all of the writing, and her brother kind of squandered his education and all of these sorts of things. So she was always someone who desired to be well read, but was very much, in the end, an autodidact. She taught herself a lot of these things beyond the sort of basic education that women were given at the time. So, like I said, really prominent family, very involved in the establishment of the universalist church in America. The universalist church is sort of part of the wave of the first great awakening that kind of comes through Europe and America prior to the American Revolution. And universalists theologically, their big idea is that all humans in the afterlife are part of the same singular entity. And as a result, any differences that humans have on Earth, whether that be brown hair or black hair, tall or short, and specifically male or female, are ultimately not, they don't have any actual effect on the person's soul because all souls are part of the same singular entity. So that's the theology. The Murray family and the Sargent families both are involved in planting the Universalist Church in Boston. And in fact, Murray is largely considered the first first lady of the Universalist Church. Her uh marriage to uh John Murray ends up lasting a good deal of her life, is a sort of pivotal moment in establishing this part of her thinking. So this is the root of what ends up being Murray's argument for political sexual equality in the United States. She begins writing about the equality of men and women and the need for men and women to be politically equal in 1790, which is two years before Mary Wollstonecraft publishes Vindication of the Rights of Women. So we have an American proto-feminist before the very, very first proto-feminist. And somehow we tend to forget about her. And her argument is just simply that men and women have equal moral capacities. And current laws in her day that treated men and women different politically were not respectful of that equality. Um, so she writes two essays on sexual equality, and her most famous, which is called On Equality of the Sexes, is published in 1790. So that's a little bit about Murray and how she's influencing the intellectual and social scene in her day. Would love to know other questions that you have. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 5:25

Yeah. So did she draw on or push back any of on any of the male thinkers of her time? Because I know that we've in the last episode talked about John Locke. Like, was there any kind of drawing on those thinkers? Or again, pushing back? Because it doesn't sound like she she would just draw on them and be fine. It it feels like as a feminist in this time, there's going to be a lot of pushing back.

SPEAKER_01: 5:51

Certainly. So, in general, Murray's approach is often to articulate that she's saying similar things to people like Jefferson, who are articulating equality of people or equality of humans, and to kind of come alongside this and say a corollary to this sort of fight for equality and liberty is the equality and liberty of women. So this is usually the tack that she takes, as opposed to sort of confronting the men of her generation head on. In fact, she writes a couple of really long sets of essays and she dedicates them to John Adams in part because she wants to affiliate herself with the founders. This is her approach. She doesn't want to fight them. She wants to say that she's doing the same sorts of things that they are. Now, this is not to say that she doesn't run into uh challenges and struggles with some men in her day. In fact, there are a couple of literary kingmakers, people who owned uh established presses and newspapers who are actively kind of trying to box her out of the publishing industry. On the one hand, because she's extremely pushy and believes that like she has something to say and wants to say it and is going to find whatever outlets she can find to have you know her voice heard. Uh and on the other hand, because they really don't like her ideas, right? So it's sort of a twofer where, you know, by merit of putting forth great effort to get her ideas out there, she makes herself some enemies. And also by having ideas that some really disapprove of, the same thing happens.

SPEAKER_00: 7:27

In what ways would her arguments about women's intellectual equality still be relevant today? Because I think one of the things we try to do is say, here are the people you know that helped with the founding. And, you know, when I was in the classroom, I'd uh kids would always say, Why does that matter today? Like, who cares? Who cares about Judith Sgt. Murray? What is the relevance of those arguments today?

SPEAKER_01: 7:51

Well, I think the relevance is across a couple of different dimensions. One, I think the kind of unique theological backing that Murray gives her arguments, you don't necessarily have to agree with the theology to understand that this represents an important theological voice of the founding, right? So the United States has always been a religiously pluralistic nation. This has always been true, even when most of that variance is just between different Christian denominations. There are still different Christian denominations. And those different Christian denominations have very different ideas about politics. So, in a kind of microcosm, this represents ways in which different religious perspectives lend themselves to, you know, political pluralism as well as religious pluralism. So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, I don't think you have to be a universalist to see the argument. And in fact, in On the Equality of the Sexes, she's not making a theological argument. She's just simply saying, you know, we have evidence that women can be educated and that women are moral and that women are smart. And, you know, is it's is it simply a sort of construction of our society that they're not offered a role in politics? One of the things that she also wants to talk about a lot is how, you know, the desire for political equality does not equate for most women who desire it to a dismissal of the role of the home or the homemaker. That like people still want to be, women still want to be engaged with their children and their families, but also they want an outlet for their intellectual and political ideas. And that these two things need not be, you know, an either or, that they can exist simultaneously.

SPEAKER_00: 9:42

Okay, so you know the question I'm gonna ask. I I want to know more about Judith Sgt. Murray because she sounds like my kind of gal. I love that she's just kind of pushy and not going away. Where can I learn more about her? Because again, she just sounds amazing.

SPEAKER_01: 10:00

She is so cool. So I would recommend if you want to read a primary source on Judith Sgt. Murray. Her essay on the equality of the sexes is publicly available online. It's a relatively short read, a relatively clear read, I think. I think she's a quite succinct, concise writer. And also, there's not a ton of biographies on her, but there is one really good one by Sheila Skemp called The First Lady of Letters. And this is a terrific bio biography. I've read it several times. Would recommend it to anyone who wants to know about she herself.

SPEAKER_00: 10:34

I love that. Dr. Burkhog, again, thank you so much. And I look forward to more on our series of founding mothers. Awesome. Thank you.