As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a "new era in female history," yet published some of her own writings under a man's name in hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas. In addition to her literary endeavors Murray was...