An American poet, essayist, and playwright, Judith Sargent Murray was surpassed in her day only by British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft in her willingness to examine and probe the limits that her society placed on women. Murray's views were traditional in many ways: she exhibited little interest in voting rights for women, disapproved of divorce, and looked at politics and society through the lens of an elite Federalism that valued order and hierarchy over equality. Yet her willingness to demand the fruits of independence and liberty for women; her insistence that in most instances masculinity and femininity were human constructs, not natural or God-given reality; and her assertion that the mind has no gender gave her work a feminist edge that set her apart from most of her American contemporaries.

Judith Sargent was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on 1 May 1751. The oldest of eight children, four of whom lived to...