JAne SArgent Murray

In this day and age, women have liberties that are often taken for granted. Women have the freedom to choose which university they will attend (if they plan on attending college), what career they wish to pursue, and also who their mate in marriage will be. In early American days, liberties of women were looked upon from society as being wealthy and holding high social status but Judith Murray sought to change this. Judith Murray was an advocate for women equality. One of her greatest works were “On the Equality of the Sexes”. She was a woman that was far too advance for her time period and ours also.
During the pre-revolutionary period, more and more men worked outside the home in workshops, factories or offices. Many women stayed at home and performed domestic labor. The emerging values of nineteenth-century America, increasingly placed great emphasis upon a man's ability to earn enough wages or salary to make his wife's labor unnecessary, but this devaluation of women's labor left women searching for a new understanding of themselves. Judith Sargent Murray, who was among America's earliest writers of female equality, education, and economic independence, strongly advocated equal opportunities for women. She wrote many essays in order to empower young women in the new republic to stand up against society and make it apparent that women are equals. “On the Equality of the Sexes” is perhaps Murray’s most influential essay. Here she radically questioned the system that held women subservient to men. She argued that the capacities of imagination and memory are verifiably equal in men and women, and the apparent inequalities in reason and judgment arise only from a difference in education. Murray argued that housework and needlework are mindless activities, ones that deny women any exercise of their intellectual faculties. If women were given the same education as men, Murray maintained, their reason and judgment would develop equally. It is interesting to note