Born May 1, 1751
Gloucester, Massachusetts
Died July 6, 1820
Natchez, Mississippi

Writer and editor

"I expect to see our young women forming a new era in female history."
Portrait: Judith Sargent Murray. Reproduced by permission of the Sargent-Murray-Gilman-Hough House Association.

Judith Sargent Murray was an eighteenth-century writer known for her essays on education for women, on equality, and on economic independence for all people. Murray was the first American woman to self-publish a book, one of the first American writers of plays, and the first woman to have a play produced on stage in America. Her personal letters, discovered only in modern times, offer valuable insights into life in revolutionary America.

Judith Sargent Murray was born in 1751 in Gloucester (pronounced GLOSS-ter), Massachusetts, to Captain Winthrop Sargent, a wealthy ship owner and merchant, and his wife, Judith Saunders, who was from a well-known seafaring family. Murray was the...