Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) JUDITH SARGENT MURRAY-Works were found at Arlington Judith Sargent Murray held many ideas about women’s education that were extremely radical for the late 1700s, and perhaps even for today. She felt that the typical chores of women’s lives did not offer any intellectual stimulation and that if women did not find more uses for their intellect, they would use it for ill purposes. She also believed that the accusation that women were intellectually inferior stemmed not from their natural abilities, but from the way they were raised, as boys were encouraged to learn while girls were neglected. The Mississippi Territory was still very much a frontier, and the mental giant from Boston, the center of national intellect, was isolated from any outlet for her thoughtful writing. She died in Natchez on June 9, 1820, at age 69, and was buried in the Bingamon Cemetery on St. Catherine’s Creek, near a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Murray’s letter books were discovered at a nearby Natchez plantation 164 years later. Ten of them have been published so far. Judith Sargent Murray was a staunch believer in improved educational opportunity for women. https://nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/judith-sargent-murray/ *History is forever indebted to the Reverend Gordon Gibson for locating these letter books in 1984. He found them in an antebellum mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, called Arlington. Judith had died at another Natchez mansion called Oak Point in 1820, after moving there from her home in Boston to live with her daughter, Julia Maria, who had married a Natchez planter named Adam Lewis Bingaman. To this day, no one knows how the letter books made their way from Oak Point to Arlington. jsmsociety/Letter_books.html
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 02:03:47 +0000
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