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Judith Sargent MurrayA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Judith Sargent Murray utilizes this term to reference both a formal education and a self-taught education. Both she and her brother were schooled by a private tutor, but her brother was later enrolled in Harvard. Murray believes that formal education is the best type and should be afforded to young men and women equally. Likewise, she considers that continuing study and self-improvement are important throughout life for both the sexes and that women should be enabled to have intellectual pursuits alongside their duties. In a time before universal education, access was limited to those with financial means: Murray argues for equal access to education for men and women, but her essay does not argue for universal education or increased access across the social strata.
Appearing in the title of Murray’s essay, the idea of equality is framed with regard to equality of the sexes, at the heart of Murray’s feminist purpose. Murray’s essay asserts that equality between the sexes is innate and natural and that only social structures (such as financial dependence, lack of education and opportunity, legal oppression, etc.) keep women from being equal to men in practice. In the late 1700s, the ideal of natural “equality” was a key part of America’s identity, although this equality was in practice only recognized for white male citizens. Murray therefore widens the common definition of equality at the time to include both men and women.
Murray frames imagination as the ability to conceive of ideas that might come to fruition in the future and consider how these ideas might play out. She also sees it is the ability to entertain oneself with fantasy and to escape an unhappy life. Murray utilizes this term when she makes a logical appeal to establish the equal intellectual ability of women. She explores it as one facet of an individual’s mind and indicates that women are more well-regarded for their ability to imagine than men, partly because their confinement makes them more reliant on their imaginations.
Knowledge is ultimately the accumulation of information over time and is therefore determined by an individual’s access to education and opportunity. Knowledge can come from a variety of different sources or experiences and generally makes up the information an individual utilizes to perceive and navigate the world. For Murray, knowledge is essential to enable people to behave responsibly and with a useful level of independence in the world. Knowledge thus acts a central part of Murray’s argument because she is concerned with how knowledge can help women lead happier and more socially responsible lives.
“On the Equality of the Sexes” draws on Enlightenment definitions of “nature” as referring not merely to the natural world but to the natural order of things. Philosophers like John Locke contended that certain rights—e.g., to liberty—were “natural” and that humans could discern these rights based on empirical evidence. Murray’s appeals to nature take place within this context, as she follows the Lockean method of seeking evidence in life, to which she applies reason. When she argues that nature has made the minds of women just as capable as those of men, she implicitly argues that women’s societal inequality violates natural moral law. Murray personifies nature and refers to her with female pronouns—a common convention in Western literature but one that also rhetorically supports her claims about women’s worth.