Judith Sargent Murray

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Judith Sargent Murray very efficiently debunks the the idea that men and women are not equal in their intellect in her essay “Equality of the sexes”. She uses her wit and humor as tools to convey her argument and show how baseless the current beliefs of her time are.

To show that intellect is not exclusive to men and that women can also have intelligence she uses a form of humor where she makes fun of women by highlighting their prowess in activities like gossip and fashion, which are considered morally questionable. Then she goes on to add that both gossip and fashion both require a level of imagination, creativity and memory; which are all a form of intelligence. In turn proving her point that
Women indeed possess intelligence.

Even …show more content…
As Elizabeth Galewski argues in her article, The Strange Case for Women’s Capacity to Reason: Judith Sargent Murray’s Use of Irony in “On the Equality of the Sexes,” “Present-day scholars frequently point to this essay as one of the first instances in which an American woman argued for women's capacity to reason” (Galewski 84). The subject of the text revolved around the way women were treated in society and education. Within the essay, Murray condemns the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men and therefore should not be able to hold positions or status equal to that of a man. She makes the argument that not only are women just as smart, but they also possess just as much aptitude as men do, and it is the educational system which unequally benefits men by granting them access to higher forms of learning while disallowing and discouraging women from broadening their own minds (Murray). Murray believes that while boys are taught from an early age to strive for greatness, girls are stifled and domesticated; pigeon holed into the role of a housewife (Murray). What they were able to learn was limited, unless they had the means and resources to teach themselves, such as the case of Judith Sargent Murray. Murray touched upon a number of reasons as to why women were just as much entitled to anything that a man
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