Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray

Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray PDF

Author: Judith Sargent Murray

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0195100387

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With selections from The Gleaner and Murray's other publications, this edition unearths an important early American feminist voice.

First Lady of Letters

First Lady of Letters PDF

Author: Sheila L. Skemp

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-08-24

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 0812203526

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Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), poet, essayist, playwright, and one of the most thoroughgoing advocates of women's rights in early America, was as well known in her own day as Abigail Adams or Martha Washington. Her name, though, has virtually disappeared from the public consciousness. Thanks to the recent discovery of Murray's papers—including some 2,500 personal letters—historian Sheila L. Skemp has documented the compelling story of this talented and most unusual eighteenth-century woman. Born in Gloucester, Massachussetts, Murray moved to Boston in 1793 with her second husband, Universalist minister John Murray. There she became part of the city's literary scene. Two of her plays were performed at Federal Street Theater, making her the first American woman to have a play produced in Boston. There as well she wrote and published her magnum opus, The Gleaner, a three-volume "miscellany" that included poems, essays, and the novel-like story "Margaretta." After 1800, Murray's output diminished and her hopes for literary renown faded. Suffering from the backlash against women's rights that had begun to permeate American society, struggling with economic difficulties, and concerned about providing the best possible education for her daughter, she devoted little time to writing. But while her efforts diminished, they never ceased. Murray was determined to transcend the boundaries that limited women of her era and worked tirelessly to have women granted the same right to the "pursuit of happiness" immortalized in the Declaration of Independence. She questioned the meaning of gender itself, emphasizing the human qualities men and women shared, arguing that the apparent distinctions were the consequence of nurture, not nature. Although she was disappointed in the results of her efforts, Murray nevertheless left a rich intellectual and literary legacy, in which she challenged the new nation to fulfill its promise of equality to all citizens.

Judith Sargent Murray

Judith Sargent Murray PDF

Author: Sheila L. Skemp

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 1998-02-15

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780312115067

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"An accomplished essayist, playwright, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) was America's first notable feminist. This brief study of her life and work takes a novel topical approach to provide a window on the gender issues that were being debated in the United States and Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the first half of the book, nine thematic chapters examine Murray's experience of and pronouncements on marriage, motherhood, religion, women's education, writing, and the construction of gender in American society. The biography is followed by fifteen primary documents - letters, poems, and essays, many of which have never been published before - that give readers firsthand access to Murray's views. A chronology, a bibliography, and an index are also included."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Gale Researcher Guide for: Judith Sargent Murray and the Emergence of an American Women's Literary Tradition

Gale Researcher Guide for: Judith Sargent Murray and the Emergence of an American Women's Literary Tradition PDF

Author: Bonnie Hurd Smith

Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning

Published:

Total Pages: 9

ISBN-13: 1535848146

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Gale Researcher Guide for: Judith Sargent Murray and the Emergence of an American Women's Literary Tradition is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians

Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians PDF

Author: Lydia Maria Child

Publisher:

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 58

ISBN-13: 9780813511634

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First published in 1824, Hobomok is the story of an upper-class white woman who marries an Indian chief, has a child, then leaves him--with the child--for another man.

Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren

Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren PDF

Author: Kate Davies

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-12-22

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 0191535834

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Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren were radical friends in a revolutionary age. They produced definitive histories of the English Civil War and the American Revolution, attacked the British government and the United States federal constitution, and instigated a debate on women's rights which inspired Mary Wollstonecraft, Judith Sargent Murray, and other feminists. Drawing on new research (including recently discovered correspondence) this is the first book to consider Macaulay and Warren in the context of the revolutionary Atlantic. In a series of detailed interdisciplinary studies, Davies suggests the centrality of both women to transatlantic political cultures between the middle of the eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth. The experience of Anglo-American conflict formed Macaulay and Warren's friendship and radically changed their writing lives. In showing how it did so, Davies also explains how the revolutionary Atlantic shaped modern ideas of gender difference. Anglo-American separation had a politics of gender which defined Warren and Macaulay's awareness of themselves as women and of which their writing also offered important critiques. Davies's book reveals the political significance of Mercy Otis Warren and Catharine Macaulay to an era when the truths of patriotism, nationhood and empire were never wholly self-evident but were hotly contested.

The Fair Sex

The Fair Sex PDF

Author: Pauline E. Schloesser

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2005-10-01

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0814786960

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Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2002 Once the egalitarian passions of the American Revolution had dimmed, the new nation settled into a conservative period that saw the legal and social subordination of women and non-white men. Among the Founders who brought the fledgling government into being were those who sought to establish order through the reconstruction of racial and gender hierarchies. In this effort they enlisted “the fair sex,”&#—white women. Politicians, ministers, writers, husbands, fathers and brothers entreated Anglo-American women to assume responsibility for the nation's virtue. Thus, although disfranchised, they served an important national function, that of civilizing non-citizen. They were encouraged to consider themselves the moral and intellectual superiors to non-whites, unruly men, and children. These white women were empowered by race and ethnicity, and class, but limited by gender. And in seeking to maintain their advantages, they helped perpetuate the system of racial domination by refusing to support the liberation of others from literal slavery. Schloesser examines the lives and writings of three female political intellectuals—;Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Smith Adams, and Judith Sargent Murray—;each of whom was acutely aware of their tenuous position in the founding era of the republic. Carefully negotiating the gender and racial hierarchies of the nation, they at varying times asserted their rights and demurred to male governance. In their public and private actions they represented the paradigm of racial patriarchy at its most complex and its most conflicted.

The Citizen Poets of Boston

The Citizen Poets of Boston PDF

Author: Paul Lewis

Publisher: University Press of New England

Published: 2016-04-05

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1611689309

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Welcome to Boston in the early years of the republic. Prepare to journey by stagecoach with a young man moving to the "bustling city"; stop by a tavern for food, drink, and conversation; eavesdrop on clerks and customers in a dry-goods shop; get stuck in what might have been Boston's first traffic jam; and enjoy arch comments about spouses, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and poets. As Paul Lewis and his students at Boston College reveal, regional vernacular poetry - largely overlooked or deemed of little or no artistic value - provides access to the culture and daily life of the city. Selected from over 4,500 poems published during the early national period, the works presented here, mostly anonymous, will carry you back to Old Boston to hear the voices of its long-forgotten citizen poets. A rich collection of lost poetry that will beguile locals and visitors alike.