THE GLEANER Judith Sargent Murray

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And this harbor that we're looking out at has been filled with scooters like this, merchant Briggs, and Gallians since 1623. Ooh. But our story begins May 1st, 1751. Hmm. A baby girl has just been born to a family of seafarers. They named her Judith and she will come of age in Massachusetts colony in the age of piracy and revolution. When men risked their lives going down to the sea and ships every day while the ladies paced the widow's walk. I hope she didn't just paced the widow's walk or this episode is not going to be very entertaining. Uh, you are a bit prescient. But I don't think it's for the reasons you're thinking of. Oh. She didn't get married and wasn't a widow. She. Nope. Good guess. Became a sailor herself. No. Oh. She had the grand house. She. But why would you not paced the widow's walk when your husband is away as she is? Because you don't like him. Yep. Cause you don't care. Yeah. Hope he dies. Nice. So that's the romantic big picture anyway or not so romantic big picture. And a dramatic big picture. Yes. Like all good colonial women, she's going to marry at age 18 to a brave and adventurous sea captain. And I'm sure someone gifted her some pearls on her wedding day so she could paced the widow's walk, clenching her pearls and siding. And we already know all about society's ideal colonial woman from our episode The Good White Elizabeth Bray Allen. Proverbs 31. Right. And here we have another woman who's navigating that same world but with very different results. Here's a pop quiz. Curdacy of Judith. What's the difference between gossip and ground breaking scientific discovery? Oh, um, oh, who did it? Did a woman do it or did a man do it? You're almost there. Her answer is access to education. Judith Sargent Murray would become the first American male or female to publish a declaration that the sexes should be equal. Yay. Mm-hmm. But she did not get to that mental space easily. As we know, and you don't just wake up one day and go, "Wait, everything they told me is wrong." Yeah. But of course, it was the storms that gave her that novel perspective on life. You know, I've been comparing her and my mind to Elizabeth Bray Allen a lot. If your life is easy and comfortable enough, like Elizabeth Bray Allen, then will you wake up? Hmm. Do you need to be shaken to your core? Do you need to be broken down by life in order to be broken, open? Yes. Yes. So, to the age of piracy in New England, we go. Oh, hey. Heave ho! A vast, a vast, artis. You're so authentic. Yo ho. I'm Katie Nelson and I'm Olivia Mikkel and this is What's Her Name. Fascinating women you've never heard of. Here's a cool thing. Judith Sargent Murray's house still stands in Gloucester, Massachusetts. The house is a major character in her story. So let's climb this hill up from the harbor and go inside. We are meeting with Dr.al candidate at UMass Amherst. Jen Turner and I am the lead tour guide at the Sgt. House Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Jen Turner lives surrounded by the legacy of some of America's great revolutionary women. She lives in Quincy, home of Abigail Adams and she works at the Sargent Murray House. I'm working on my doctorate and I teach at a local college and so I keep going like, do we want to like, slip up the Gloucester? Because I'm from the social. But I love her so much that I'm like, oh, I'll just come back one more season. So I'll probably come back for a while. Where do you live? I live in Quincy. Oh, so the-- So that's Abigail Adams? Well, I actually-- well, I really have that. It's like I live on land that I'm almost positive was owned by the Adams family. And she has a real soft spot for Judah who was raised with three brothers and was always having to fight for her place in the world. She was originally one of nine children and only four of them survived into adulthood and she was the only girl. And I think that she just always felt like she had to stand up for herself in her family to try to put herself in equal footings with her brothers. But she also really resented her parents and her-- for the way they treated her and regards to education. Because her brothers went through up in Fitzwilliam. They both attended Harvard. And she was very upset about the fact that she didn't have the same access to education that they did, particularly because she helped actually tutor Fitzwilliam, her youngest brother, to get into Harvard because of the entrance exam that he had to take. So she was very upset about that. So she did the best that she could in the time period, which was she read as much as she could from her parents' library. And so she really became sort of self-educated. And I think that that might have influenced the way she was able to just keep going and finally to publicly say that she believed in women's equality and essentially that she was a feminist. In 1769, she married a romantic sea captain, John Stevens. At age 18, like a good woman should. And her father was pretty wealthy, successful in-- we think the China trade, as in like fancy dishes. It's actually a set of those dishes in the house. And John Stevens was obviously expected to be equally successful. He's from an equally prominent fancy family. But he wasn't rich yet. So they scrimped and saved for years, and Judith probably lived with family members while he was out to sea. A couple years go by, and I'm sure all the women around her are like, "Judith, when can we expect a baby?" Another year, another year. Judith, maybe you should try this trick my grandmother used or drink this tincture. This'll do the trick. Yeah, and that's not-- I mean, that's your whole job as a colonial woman. That is your entire reason for existing. It's really her struggle to become a mother that I think really defines her because even though she was a feminist, she believes so highly in equality. She desperately wanted to be a mother. And she really felt that loss very keenly because at a time period when motherhood was so revered, she felt inadequate as a woman because she didn't produce children in her marriage. I remember experiencing this. I don't know if every woman in a patriarchal society probably still experiences this where you feel like people don't consider you like a real woman until you've had kids. And then it's like, "Oh, you're not a grown-up. You're not a real grown-up until you're in the kids." They ended up adopting nieces of John Stevens' sister Anne. So they did raise two nieces in this hall, Mary, and Anna Plummer. Meanwhile, the same time, the American Revolution unfolds right in front of them. Gloucester plays a major role from the very start. Right after Lexington and Concord, 1775, British ships bombarded Gloucester from the sea and tried to burn the entire city to the ground. Wow. Lexington and Concord, the American Revolution, were in the back of the city. They were able to sort of piece by piece by up the land that became their front garden and then the house part itself. They're building her dream house overlooking the harbor. The surrender at Yorktown happened in late 1775. 1981 and America is born a new republic. Massachusetts becomes a state and by spring so too has her dream house been completed and she gets to move in. Hi! They built it so that they would be able to see the harbor from their front door and it was designed to be kind of a very imposing structure. The road was here. This eventually becomes the downtown Gloucester but the original downtown was actually a little further north. Yeah, so you can imagine houses that were a little bit smaller, you know, warehouses, war, business offices, which kind of got mainstream. And they had their imposing Georgian mansion built on the hill. Of course. Wow, what a view. It's very cheerful, like a goldish yellow color classic. It's very, very timbre, colonial. It's really, it's very, very charming. I would buy it in a second if I had $5 million. That same year, the same year she gets to finally move into her dream house, she published something really interesting. A Unitarian Universalist children's catechism. Wow. And Unitarian Universalism was brand new. Yeah, I was gonna say. That was cutting edge. She's right on the edge. In fact, her father had played a major role in bringing to America the very first Universalist minister. Wow. She was John Murray. Universalists believe in things like universal salvation for everyone. They believe that no matter how subordinate you were in colonial America, everybody was spiritually equal in the eyes of God. So certainly in the sort of egalitarian message that's swirling around right around the time of the revolution was compelling to Winthrop due to his dad. And so he ends up stopping attending the Congregational Church in town regularly. He starts holding private prayer meetings in his home. And eventually he's the one who invites John Murray to town in November of 1774. So this is where universalism really starts in the United States because eventually what happens is about six years after John Murray arrives in Gloucester, he uses Gloucester as his home base. But he still travels extensively preaching about universalism to other parts of the colonies. And then in 1780, primarily funded by the Southern family, the first universalist church in the United States is founded in Gloucester. The very first universalist church in America, right there in Gloucester, it's like right around the corner from her house, her family built it. And she becomes the first American woman universalist who publishes in the United States. So in 1782, she publishes a catacism, so children's catacism based on John Murray's sermons. And it's interesting, it takes a Q&A format. It's basically like frequently asked questions with simple answers aimed at children. And it gets pretty deep, like theologically, surprisingly deep. And she knows it's really bold of her, a woman, to present herself as expert enough to become an educator. And John Stevens, her husband is so proud of it. He's very proud of that publication, and so he actually buys 100 copies of the catacism to distribute to friends and family living in Gloucester. He is just all about it. So she's got new house, new dreams, new achievements. Her life is finally on track. Oh no. I don't like when you say that. That never goes well. I often think that in my own life too. I at the plot point. And sure enough, bang, bang, bang, on the door. Her husband's a way at sea. And the person at the door says, "I'm here to collect a debt, fancy lady in your fancy house. Your husband clearly does have money, and it's time for him to pay his debt." No, no. It was the books. I know. I'm like, how much did he pay for those hundred books? The next day, somebody else comes to the door, pounding, demanding repayment. The next day, somebody else comes to the door. John's at sea. She says, "I don't know what's going on. Surely there's got to be some kind of terrible mistake will sort it out when he gets home." But over the months, and then over the years, it becomes clear to her that John Stevens has not. been telling her the truth. When she married John Stevens, she assumed that she was marrying into a very good family in Gloucester. They were both from prominent families. And he ended up just having so much financial problems that he was kind of successfully able to hide from his wife, from most of their marriage. And so she really doesn't know about how much debt he's actually accruing. In reality, she finds out he was not a noble merchant like her father. During the American Revolution, he was a privateer. For the fall of the revolution. Smuggling, he was a pirate. Wow. Gentleman pirate. But not a good one. Yeah, but he utterly failed. Much like, Steve. Not doing that. As Gentleman pirates do. He's basically on the verge of financial ruin for most of their marriage. And John's like, "I can fix this. One more big job. One more big gamble. Yeah, always works. He's in denial. Yes. And off he goes again. He could look out basically her front door, her front windows, and see Gloucester Harbor. So I picture Judith looking out every day, clutching her pearls, waiting for him to come home. They come home, yes, or, you know, happy that he left. I mean, it's hard to say, but you know, who knows? But yeah, but yeah. She laid a six months from now. Yeah. But what could have been the other way to. He lost all the ships. So he ends up taking out loans from basically dozens of people that eventually will end up owing more than five times what his estate was actually worth. And it gets to the point where there's no way that he's going to be able to pay that large sum of money back. There are creditors literally lining up at the door, demanding repayment. So they made the decision in 1784 that they were basically going to blockade themselves into the house. So they closed the front door. We know from her writings that she slept with the key to the front door underneath her pillow. And she basically refused to let anybody in or out because creditors were pounding on the door. Literally, some of them sort of burst into the home at various points, kind of eyeing the pieces of furniture that she had in the home. She wrote to her brother, Winthrop. She was really close with her brother. She's really honest with him. She says, "What's the point of living? What is even the point of caring on with this stupid life that is nothing like it was supposed to be?" She wrote to him at the time and said that she was tired of life and that she basically thought that she had gone through everything that life could offer her. You know, it was sort of tired of her marriage and dealing with the fact that she wasn't a mother and really kind of how depressed she was as a woman. She sits down at her writing desk and she goes, "How did I get here?" We think that she used writing as kind of an outlet for sort of the loneliness. Why am I so helpless in all of this that my finances are 100% my husbands? Yeah. She definitely believes that men and women should have financial independence from one another when they're married and that women should be able to earn wages. So she's sort of, you know, on the vanguard of based on her own experiences, shaping how she feels about not only her experience in American society, but how obviously other women in American society were feeling at the same time. Her husband deeded his house to her father. So when the debt collectors come, they can't take the house. We basically has saved the house for her by emasculating himself and giving it away to her father. All right, that's something, I guess, John. Yeah. He does seem like the kind of steed character really means well, but just fails. Yeah. There he goes. All right, one more chance. One more. This time. He doesn't have anything at this point. He doesn't even have a ship. So he gets onto a ship owned by his father and large windthrop and he sets sail for the Caribbean and he lands in one of the small islands. He buys and sells on credit. She does get a packet of letters about a year after he's left. He's sort of very optimistic about his fortune and the Caribbean and then. And the next letter she received? She finds out from other sources that he had died. Penieless in a Caribbean deaders prison. Ugh. And after 18 years of marriage, what does she got? Wow. She gets out her pen and she writes and writes and writes. 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(gentle music) Do you use writing for therapy? I do, yeah. If I can write it out, it sorts out my brain. Yeah, I figure out what I think by writing it down. Yeah. And every writer needs that quiet space tucked away where they can focus. Room of one's own. Yes, she didn't have anything like that. So she made one. She took the clothes out of her closet. And she put a tiny little desk in there with this amazing little foot warmer underneath. Wow. And from that desk, she would compose some of the most remarkable texts in early American history. In 1790, she will publish an essay known as On the Equality of the Sexes, which is her famous essay on women's rights in the time period. And it becomes the first American, either male or female, to publicly proclaim that many women should be equal. It's huge. Yes, and she should be famous. She should be. Wow. What? How have I not heard of her? See? This is infuriating. It is. It's ridiculous. And she writes that essay in this house in her writing closet. So this is her writing closet. The closet kind of abuts the fireplace. So I'm sure it was probably warm in the winter and then cool in the summer because it has a window that can open. So she would obviously be able to get the sea breezes in the afternoon. She got up at 5am. She believed that if you stayed in bed any longer, you were basically a derelict. And so she had a very full life overseeing her household. But she also spent several hours a day in a writing closet talking about women's issues. On the Equality of the Sexes by Judith Sargent Murray, Massachusetts Magazine, 1790, it is upon mature consideration we adopt the idea that nature is thus partial in her distributions. Is it indeed a fact that she have yielded to one half of the human species so unquestionable a mental superiority? I know that to both sexes elevated understandings and the rivers are common. But suffer me to ask, in what the minds of females are so notoriously deficient or unequal? May not the intellectual powers be ranged under these four heads, imagination, reason, memory, and judgment. Invention is perhaps the most arduous effort of the mind. This branch of imagination has been particularly seated to us. Besides, were we to grant that animal strength proved anything, taking into consideration the accustomed impartiality of nature, we should be induced to imagine that she had invested the female mind with superior strength as an equivalent for the bodily powers of man. But waving this, however, palatable advantage for equality only, we wish to contend. [MUSIC PLAYING] "Women and men are equal," she says, "only separated by education. And her universalist faith adds another layer to that." She says, "Soles have no gender." And she's been developing her beliefs over all these years and riding to a pen pal. And they've formed this really deep and meaningful connection. She describes it as two souls mingling on paper. Oh. And it's the universalist minister, John Murray. The first one in America that was brought over by her father. Yeah, her story actually reads a lot like a soap opera. It really does, because she's really in this marriage, her first marriage, which she's really disgruntled about. And she really regrets marrying John Stevens. And then John Murray comes to town. He has spent many weeks and months off and on as a border in their house. So while she was still married to her first husband, her future second husband actually lived across the hall for extended periods of time in the 1780s. So John Stevens, her first husband, dies in 1787. And by that point, she's known John Murray for more than 10 years. And they have established his firm friendship by writing letters to each other, exchanging letters over time. And she will talk about in the time period that when her first husband dies, she says her first marriage was never companionable, but she was desolate at the loss of her husband. And so in the aftermath of that, John Murray basically steps forward. And he basically kind of fills that vacuum left by John Stevens. But because of the kind of unusual boarding of the arrangement that they had in the home, there were sort of rumors swirling around glossar that they were having sort of a scandalous relationship in the time period. And it was so uncomfortable that Winthrop, Judith's brother, he writes to her, and basically says, she should not marry John Murray. He basically said, there's no way that I'll let you marry him. And so she's furious at him. And she says, whatever, like, I'm going to go and marry him. I love him. The moment that her prescribed morning period was over, which is 18 months, she and John Murray quietly traveled to Salem and got married, where it wouldn't be public. This is a love match. This is a soul connection. It's also a juicy scandal. Yeah. And they get married in the fall of 1788. And then they come back to glossar, and they live in this house until the mid 1790s. There are portraits of both of them in the house. This is John Murray. It's an engraving done of him. So this is a painting done of Judith, probably when she was in her late 40s or late 50s, and it was also by Gilbert Stewart. At age 38, Judith gets pregnant. Lifelong dream, very high risk. Yeah. And when the day came, all was not well. It sounds like she had preeclampsia. And it was a boy, a big baby, nine or 10 pounds. But he was still born. [SIGHS] Still born son that was born in August of 1788, and she's devastated by that loss. [MUSIC PLAYING] Still, breast weren't really considered. They weren't really mourned in the way that people might mourn them today. And so she talks about the fact that her husband, John Murray, is the only one who basically travels with the body to the cemetery. And she was so weak that for three to four weeks, they weren't really sure if she was going to survive. And John Murray writes a letter saying that she had three nurses and for three to four weeks after the birth. And they weren't really sure if she was going to make it. [MUSIC PLAYING] She actually writes a poem about it. And it's one of the first poems that she publishes as an author. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Lines occasioned by the death of an infant by Judith Sargent Murray. Soft, soft, tread with care, my darling baby sleeps. And innocence, its spotless vigils keeps. Around my cradled boy, the loves attend. And clad in smiles, the dimpling grace has been. While his fair angels talk, so late assigned, assumes the charge of the immortal mind. Hail Guardian Spirit, watch with tender care, and for each opening scene my child prepare. Teach him to suffer. Teach him to enjoy, and all thy heavenly influence employ. Attendant spirits hear my ardent prayer, in paths of rectitude my infant rear. Trust me, his mother shall her efforts join, to shield and guide her utmost powers combined. It was thus I planned my future hours to spend, with my soft hopes maternal joys to blend, but agonized nature, trembling size, and my young sufferer in the struggle dies. Thy funeral nail, with melancholy sound, born on the heavy gale, diffusing round. To the absorbing grave I must resign all of my first born child that air was mine, and though no solemn train of mourners bend, or on thy herse with tearful woe attend, too insignificant thy being viewed, to be but by thy father's steps pursued. Slowly she recovered, and a year later she's pregnant again. I'm sure she went into that with so much traction. She's 40 years old, surely staring death straight in the face. But Julia Mariah was born, mother and daughter safe and well. Can you believe it? Yeah, never ends like that. Yay! And Julia Mariah ends up being the only living child of Judith and Don Marn. And there's a copy of a portrait done by Gilbert Stewart of Julia Mariah. And now she's got her colonial domestic scene at an age when many other colonial mothers were becoming grandmothers. She's raising her first baby, and she's writing writing writing. Well over like a hundred essays in her lifetime, and when she lived in this house, we know from her diaries that she liked to practice new material and friends and family when they came to visit. So she would often sort of set up in the best parlor downstairs and create a captive audience of our friends and family when they came to visit. So she would try out, you know, like her new play, you know, like the traveler or some of her poetry. And in 1787, she published her Magnum Opus, The Gleaner. It's a three volume collection of essays. And it was published by subscription. Her subscribers were the likes of George Washington, John Adams, Robert Treet Payne. Wow. Oh, have we not heard of that? I know. It's so angry. [Music] There's this thread throughout of historical women. She goes through the whole history of the world, and she pulls out all these examples of powerful historical women, and they courageously come to the rescue and they they save their people. Wow. But it's really interesting and significant to note that it's not like Wonder Woman 1787. And it's not what's her name podcast. It's not feminism in our modern sense. She also kind of framed a lot of her ideas around women in a very traditional way, living in New England in sort of this traditional world that she grew up in, where she was, you know, the child of merchants and sea captains and part of the elite of her society that, you know, she definitely believed in traditional values. I mean, she was a federalist. She believed in sort of a hierarchical society and things like that. So it's kind of interesting that she challenged women's equality and women's issues in her time, even though she definitely had sort of a traditional mindset as well. All of Judith Swimman, they emerge from the domestic sphere. They courageously bravely save the day and then they go back to their domestic sphere. Right. Yeah, they're like saved you. All right. I get back in the kitchen now. Only an extreme times are right. Talk upon. Yeah. So she's not shaking down the whole patriarchy. But that's how you get George Washington and John Adams to read it. Yeah. Because you like, you can't tear down the whole system or even if you call for that, nobody will listen, but you can take the next step. And she certainly sees the next step that's the way forward. Like the case she is making is women should be educated so that they can be capable of saving the day when it's necessary. And it's especially appropriate in colonial America because they just fought the Revolutionary War and all the men were gone. Yeah. And all the women had to save the day. Yeah. She's like, look, before example. Yeah. So here's the thing. It's amazing. So she wrote on the equality of the sexes two years before Wolston Crafts' vindication of the rights of women. Yeah. Two years before now. Right. And it's really funny too because she, Judith was thinking about the vindication of her rights of women when she published the Gleaner because Mary Wolston Craft, her vindication of the rights of women was obviously an international bestseller. So it was right on both sides of the Atlantic world. And it's interesting because Judith was definitely thinking about the Gleaner and that perspective. So she actually assumed that the Gleaner would actually make her as well known as Mary Wolston Craft and not only that, but it would actually help financially support her family. She expected to be as famous as Wolston Craft. Yeah. And so she puts only equality of the sexes out there and then she puts this three volume, the Gleaner out there and the world was like, okay, cool. Wow. But she's pretty undeterred. She's resilient. She goes, okay, I will get these ideas out there. I will get these ideas to the people in the real spirit of the Enlightenment. I will write plays. She says, hmm. Yeah. Robert Treetpane reviewed her on the opening night of one of her plays called the medium and he panned it. And then she got really riled up about it and she actually wrote back to him. And then she asked to remain anonymous and then he turned around and published her letters in his magazine and then so people knew that it was Judith and then she responded again. And so there was this huge sort of feud with Robert Treetpane in 1795 around her first, the performance of her play. I knew I never liked him. And it got so bad that at one point when they were living Judith and John Murray had moved to Boston by then and apparently he saw Judith and John Murray outside of their home one day and they have like a bit of a scuffle. And like, oh yeah, oh yeah. And John Murray is like, you'll be my wife alone. And he sort of threatened physical violence to John Murray that basically, like because of his feud, he was saying that something bad might happen to John Murray. So, so you know, John Murray was much more even killed than Judith and so he didn't think anything of it. And so a few days later, John Murray went out on the town and and it was getting really late. It was like after midnight and John Murray still had returned home and so she started getting really upset. And she was worried that the Robert Treetpane had done something dire to her husband, which is a little crazy. But she ended up heading out the door and she really thought that she was going to see his lifeless body like somewhere around Boston, the streets of Boston. And then John Murray just nonchalantly came around, came down the street and he was sort of perplexed as to why Judith was so upset about about those issues. Judith's Sergeant Murray was the most public female voice during the American Revolution. And here's another really interesting connection. She knew Abigail Adams quite well. It's interesting because nowadays Abigail Adams is famous for her one line, remember the ladies. Yeah. She wrote in a personal letter to one guy to her husband. You know, she's not declaring it to the world. Yeah. Whereas Judith Sergeant Murray is over there like publishing all of this stuff boldly declaring it and somehow she just slipped through the cracks. See, there's the exact example. Abigail Adams, we can celebrate as a nation because she just asked her husband. She wasn't making a scene, right? It's the exact thing that she's trying to fix that she has to navigate. Yeah. Wow. So what were the forces at work in her life that came together to make the perfect storm to produce her? It seems like she had to first experience her crappy husband, 13 years, and Unitarian Universalism and this is totally transcendent notion of souls and ideas. Yeah. And years of infertility and the American Revolution. All those came together to produce in Judith Sargent Murray, enough cognitive dissonance for her to break it all down and break it open. But also, I bet if you asked her, what is your life about Judith Sargent Murray? I think it really might have been motherhood all along. Well, she's in a writing closet thinking about feminist issues. She was also desperate to have a child when she lived here as well. And so I always think about that when I go around the house trying to make her real to visitors who come here. But yeah, she was definitely a feminist, but she was also a real person who struggled with everyday issues that people still face today. I remember thinking that I just had a baby recently. And I remember that you did 42. And I remember thinking if she had the courage to try to have a child at 40 because she wanted to fill a lifetime dream of that, then I'm going to try to do that too. And I remember thinking that I've always appreciated her as a feminist. But one of the things that made her just more real to me was the parallels in my life with motherhood and her parallels with late motherhood as well. And the irony of her life is that if she married Jan, 18 years old to John Stevens, if she had started having five or six children at the age of 18, then her professional career trajectory might have changed too because if she had had five kids under the age of eight or something, then she probably wouldn't have had a lot of time to go into her writing closet and write about these issues that she was really reflecting on in the time. So it's interesting because the fact that she was childless for so long gave her an outlet to write about women's issues that she might not otherwise have had as well. So that's something to consider too. Her home wasn't preserved because of her. Because as we know, nobody cared. It was the family home of a much later relative, John Singer Sargent. Oh! painted some of the wallpaper in the house and preserved it because of that. So we're house became a museum. Yes. So they restored the home in the 19 teens to Sargent descendents purchased the home and that's how it became a museum. So there was a period of restoration and they opened as a museum in 1919. But they didn't end up telling due to story until like the 1990s because her letterbooks and all the things that she wrote about were essentially lost. She believed that her letterbooks were important enough that even though she eventually leaves Massachusetts in the tail end of her life, the last two to three years of her life, she ended up going to Mississippi that she believed that, you know, posterity would be interested in what she had to say about women's issues in the time period. And then they were after her death. They were basically put into a trunk, put into an attic and they weren't rediscovered until the late 1980s or late 1990s. Some more than 164 years after her death. Yeah, she died in 1820 in a yellow fever epidemic. Yeah. She was putting her thoughts out into the world every way she could and she saw her place at the birth of a new nation and she was saying, hey, if we're going to go for this whole liberty and equality thing, I have some really important ideas. And though I don't think that the founding fathers busted out the gleaner while they were hammering out the Constitution. She did have a meaningful impact, a profound impact in the long run because states began opening ladies colleges. One of the first ones was right there in Massachusetts and she supported it. Women got that education right out of the gate. And from my perspective, it's no coincidence that 20 years later, that generation of girls, those young girls who went to school, they're mobilizing for the vote, which was something she probably never thought possible. She's just so interesting as a person because you really don't think of American women as a really publicly willing to sort of reclaim these issues in the time period. I mean, Abigail Adams wrote privately to her husband, like, remember the ladies, right? But it's, you know, and she really thought that she was actually going to be famous in her lifetime once again. I mean, she really had this desire to be famous in her lifetime for these issues that she was raising and to, you know, be a best-selling author for her writing. And so she's willing to sort of say these things that makes her very unusual in the time period. Cool. Thank you, Judith. Thank you, Judith. Way to go. I'm going to go read that now. [Music] Special thanks to Jen Turner and the Sargent House Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. If you want to learn more about Judith Sargent, Marie, head to our website, what's her name podcast.com, where I've collected all kinds of essays for you and essays about the essays. You can also find a lot of photos from my trip to the house. Thank you for this episode was composed and performed by the advent chamber orchestra, the US Army Field Band, JS Bach and Vivaldi, Kevin MacLeod, Doug Maxwell, Amulets, Aaron Kenney, and our theme song was composed by Daniel Foster Smith. We have a few more spots on our trip to the Yucatan Peninsula this September. So if you're wanting to join us for that, head to our website and click on tours ASAP. Special thanks to my student assistants on site, Emily Stoll, Branson E listen, Destiny Gill, Cindy Jones, Christina Summers, and Caleb Slama. You can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook where we post all kinds of additional content each week. Thank you so much for donating. Thanks for listening.