On the relatively nondescript home that served as both prison and liberation for Judith Sargent.
I’ve often thought that to be far ahead of one’s time, especially when it
comes to one’s own rights and freedoms, likely feels both confining and
liberating—a combination of recognizing things which one is frustratingly denied
and yet seeing a broader and more open world beyond them. Certainly we can feel
both sides to that coin in “On
the Equality of the Sexes” (1790), the poem and essay written by Gloucester’s
own Judith Sargent Murray. Like her
close contemporary (English) feminist Mary Wollstonecraft,
Murray was extremely intelligent, and she ironically but crucially opens “Equality”
with an argument for why people are not
equal—for why, indeed, certain minds are far more destined for greatness than
others. Seeing herself in that light (as she seems to have, and deservedly so)
would, again, have likely made Murray feel both good and bad—like part of a Talented Tenth of sorts, but
one arbitrarily held back due solely to the biological accident of gender.
The (at the time; over the
next century the waterfront was significantly shifted) waterfront Gloucester home built in 1782
for Sargent and her first husband, Captain John Stevens, served first as a
direct remainder of such arbitrary and frustrating limitations. Stevens was at the
time enjoying a brief period of prosperity as a local merchant, but his
fortunes would shortly and permanently decline (thanks in part to the
Revolution and in part to his own shortcomings as a businessman); by 1785
Stevens was so deeply in debt that the house was turned into a debtor’s prison,
one in which both Stevens and Judith (who was of course literally married to
his debt and legally powerless to control her own finances in any way) were
held as collateral for those debts. A year later Stevens fled the city and
tried to start fresh in the West Indies, but he ended up similarly indebted and
imprisoned there, and died in prison. It was during these same years that
Judith began to write her articles and essays (under the
pseudonym “Constantia”), and such efforts reflect quite literally the only
way that she could escape the prison into which her husband’s failures had cast
her.
Yet the same period, and the same house, also contained a man who would, on
multiple levels, help Judith achieve a far freer and happier existence. John
and Judith were among America’s earliest supporters of Unitarian Universalism, the
controversial new religion that represented a direct challenge to New England’s
ruling Puritanism; they expressed that support by, among other things,
providing a home for John
Murray, the founder of the religion’s American church and its most
prominent preacher. Murray and Judith developed a close friendship and
relationship, and by the time of her husband’s death it was clearly something
more; a few years later they were married and began a new life together, in the
same Gloucester home. Judith’s final years were marked by a series of
tragedies, culminating in the 1820 deaths of Judith, her daughter, and her
grandson; but for the thirty years prior to those tragedies she had lived in a
home and marriage—and philosophy—that were far closer to the social, political,
and human ideals she espoused in her writings. Gloucester’s Sargent House
contains and --interprets all those sides to her life—and also includes some
paintings and pictures donated by her most famous descendent, John
Singer Sargent!
Next Gloucester story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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