Women and Liberty
Abigail Adams’s letter to her husband in 1776 started a wave of new thinking about women’s involvement in the public sphere and to what extent the concepts of liberty and freedom could apply to women. Women had participated in every facet of the American Revolution. As the new government was beginning to form, women asked to be considered a part of it.
Judith Sargent Murray, an Enlightenment thinker from Massachusetts, wrote extensively on women’s equality and focused on why women deserved access to education and their earnings. She argued that the rhetoric of liberty needed to be applied to gender equality and that women were more than capable of political engagement. In her 1790 essay “On the Equality of the Sexes,” she argued that women deserved spiritual and intellectual equality to men.
—Judith Sargent Murray, arguing in “On the Equality of the Sexes” that women cannot be considered intellectually inferior to men when they have not had the same educational opportunities
A 1770 portrait of Judith Sargent Murray.
Murray and Mercy Otis Warren, another Bostonian intellectual, published pamphlets either anonymously or under a pseudonym that commented on politics, including the ratification of the U.S. Constitution and their visions for the new nation.
New Jersey briefly allowed women the right to suffrage. The 1776 New Jersey constitution provided the vote on “all inhabitants” who met specified property and residence requirements. Because of this wording, women who owned property could vote. It wasn’t until 1807 that lawmakers disenfranchised New Jersey women by amending the state constitution with the words “male” and “White.” But the Revolutionary period allowed women the opportunities to imagine places and spaces of equality.
