The democratic ferment of the 1790s inspired renewed discussion about women’s rights. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published in England her extraordinary pamphlet, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Inspired by Paine’s Rights of Man, she asserted that the “rights of humanity” should not be “confined to the male line.” Wollstonecraft did not directly challenge traditional gender roles. Her call for greater access to education and to paid employment for women rested on the idea that this would enable single women to support themselves and married women to perform more capably as wives and mothers. But she did “drop a hint,” as she put it, that women “ought to have representation” in government. Within two years, American editions of Wollstonecraft’s work had appeared, along with pamphlets defending and attacking her arguments. A short-lived women’s rights magazine was published in 1795 in New York City.
The expansion of the public sphere offered new opportunities to women. Increasing numbers began expressing their thoughts in print. Hannah Adams of Massachusetts became the first American woman to support herself as an author, publishing works on religious history and the history of New England. Other women took part in political discussions, read newspapers, and listened to orations, even though outside of New Jersey none could vote. In 1792, Sarah W. Morton of Boston published The African Chief, a lengthy poem recounting the enslavement of an African.
Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneering work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in a 1797 portrait.
This sampler was made by Peggy Castleman, a student in Frederick County, Virginia, in 1802. It includes an American eagle, a symbol of patriotism, along with more conventional decorations and domestic imagery. Women as well as men shared in the enthusiasm for early American nationalism.
Judith Sargent Murray, one of the era’s most accomplished American women, wrote essays for the Massachusetts Magazine under the pen name “The Gleaner.” Murray’s father, a prosperous Massachusetts merchant, had taken an enlightened view of his daughter’s education. Although Judith could not attend college because of her sex, she studied alongside her brother with a tutor preparing the young man for admission to Harvard. In her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes,” written in 1779 and published in 1790, Murray insisted that women had as much right as men to exercise all their talents and should be allowed equal educational opportunities to enable them to do so. Women’s apparent mental inferiority to men, she insisted, simply reflected the fact that they had been denied “the opportunity of acquiring knowledge.” “The idea of the incapability of women,” she maintained, was “totally inadmissable in this enlightened age.”