August 2, 2023 • 41 mins
This episode is about two women related to John Singer Sargent: Judith Sargent Murray was a writer and an advocate for women’s rights. Emily Sargent was a prolific artist whose work was largely thought to be lost.
Research:
- Cape Ann Slavery & Abolition. “Enslaved persons of record on Cape Ann.” https://capeannslavery.org/enslaved-persons-of-record-on-cape-ann/#
- Cascone, Sarah. “Emily Sargent, Not Just a Sister to John, Was a Serious Painter in Her Own Right. Her Watercolor Landscapes are Finally Entering Museums—and the Spotlight.” Artnet. 2/6/2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/emily-sargent-2215370
- Charteris, Evan. “John Sargent.” New York : C. Scribner's sons. 1927.
- Colby, Vineta. “Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography.” University of Virginia Press. 2003.
- Harris, Sharon M. “Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820).” Legacy , 1994, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1994). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25679133
- Laidler, John. “It’s Emily Sargent’s time for a showcase.” Boston Globe. 5/12/2022. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/05/12/metro/its-emily-sargents-time-showcase/
- McCarthy, Gail. “Sargent watercolors coming to Gloucester.” Gloucester Daily Times. 5/6/2022. https://www.gloucestertimes.com/news/sargent-watercolors-coming-to-gloucester/article_2dd8d922-cc8e-11ec-8187-e763043a7f1f.html
- Michals, Debra. “Judith Sargent Murray.” National Women’s History Museum. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/judith-sargent-murray
- "Murray, Judith Sargent." Shaping of America, 1783-1815 Reference Library, edited by Lawrence W. Baker, et al., vol. 3: Biographies Volume 2, UXL, 2006, pp. 393-400. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3450900081/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=c058aad0. Accessed 10 July 2023.
- Murray, Judith Sargent. “On the Equality of Sexes (Part 1). ” The Massachusetts Magazine, Or, Monthly Museum 1790-03: Vol 2, Issue 3.
- Murray, Judith Sargent. “On the Equality of Sexes (Part 2). ” The Massachusetts Magazine, Or, Monthly Museum 1790-03: Vol 2, Issue 4.
- New England Historical Society. “Judith Sargent Murray, The Forgotten Revolutionary.” https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/judith-sargent-murray-2/
- Public Domain Review. “Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes (1790).” https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/equality-of-the-sexes
- Ruiz, Paloma. “Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes (1790).” Public Domain Review. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/equality-of-the-sexes
- Skemp, Sheila L. “First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female Independence.” University of Pennsylvania Press. 2009.
- Skemp, Sheila L. “Judith Sargent Murray : a brief biography with documents.” Boston : Bedford Books. 1998.
- Skemp, Sheila L. “The Pioneer in Women's Rights Who Was on the Wrong Side of History.” History News Network. http://hnn.us/articles/86355.html
- “A Will of Their Own: Judith Sargent Murray and Women of Achievement in the Early Republic.” https://npg.si.edu/exhibit/murray/#1
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start the episode,
we are going to go to Barcelona in November.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
That's November of twenty twenty three. If you're listening from
the future. This is a trip we have thought about
for a while, since many years ago when we did
some thematically appropriate episodes of the show. This is a
six night trip. We will be staying in central Barcelona.
We've got a lot of fun stuff on the schedule,
(00:47):
including city tours, Caso museums, the Gratafamilia wine tasting, a
tops tasting, Manserat day trip with a tour of the abbey.
All of this is stuff that I'm very much like
looking forward to, and we still have some spaces available.
So if you have been thinking about making a trip,
maybe November of this year is right for you. So
(01:09):
you can go to Defined Destinations dot com. Right on
the front page there's a link to the Barcelona trip,
or you can go to Defined Destinations dot com slash
Barcelona Dash twenty twenty three. Either way, we'll get you there.
I don't know, Holly, do you have anything you want
to add? Listen? I am deeply excited about this. It's
(01:34):
gonna cure my post Halloween doldrums. This is we have
talked about Barcelona for both of our previous trips as
an option, yeah, and then it got sidelined for other choices,
and so it's really it's time, and it's really been
one that we have had in mind for now literally
(01:55):
years and years.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I cannot wait.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Ye so excited, I'm going to eat all all the.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Food that uh so.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Speaking of travel, but much more local to me travel.
A while ago, I learned that one of John Singer
Sergeant's sisters, Emily Sargent, was a prolific artist, but that
her work really hasn't been studied very much. And that's
not just because she was overshadowed by her very famous brother.
(02:26):
She only publicly exhibited her work once during her lifetime.
That was only four pieces, and those pieces were all
copies rather than her original work. People who knew her
described her as an accomplished watercolorist, but her original paintings
just didn't really circulate very far beyond family and friends.
(02:47):
And then after she'd died, people thought that those paintings
had been lost. That continued to be true until more
than four hundred of her paintings were found in an
attic in England just twenty five years ago. So I
was very intrigued by Emily's Sergeant. After learning all of that,
(03:07):
it seemed like though I was not going to be
able to find enough information for a full episode on her.
It's one of those cases where the information surely exists,
but not in places that are kind of centralized and
accessible to me as a researcher. And then earlier this year,
I learned that the Sergeant House Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts
(03:28):
was going to be exhibiting some of her work this summer.
That is where the local travel comes in. I thought,
maybe if I go to this exhibit, I'll be able
to pull together enough information about Emily's Sergeant.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
So I went to Gloucester.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Unfortunately, still did not feel like there would be enough information.
But the Sergeant House Museum was built for another sergeant,
that was Judith Sergeant Murray. Today the museum is focused
primarily on her life and legacy. I really didn't know
much about her before going to this museum, and I
wound up being intrigued by her as well in terms
(04:04):
of her life story and her writing on women's rights,
her influence on the spread of universalism in North America.
So these two women were related. Judith's brother, Winthrop, was
the great great grandfather of John Singer and Emily Sargeant,
and John and Emily also had their own connections to
(04:25):
Sergeant House as it was turned from a private home
into a museum. So I decided today's episode should be
about two sergeants, Judith and Emily. Judith's sergeant was born
in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on May first, seventeen fifty one. Gloucester
is on Cape Ann, ancestral home of the Pawtucket people.
(04:46):
Although early colonial records use a lot of different names
to describe the indigenous people of this area, some of
these are the names of other indigenous peoples or nations,
or of the towns where they were living, or the
name of whoever was holding the role of sachem or
leader at the time the person was writing. This is
one of those things that has made the indigenous history
(05:07):
of this area difficult to document today. Another is that
a number of histories of Cape Ann that were written
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describe it as uninhabited.
This is not true, though Samuel de Champlain described meeting
about two hundred indigenous people on Cape Ann in sixteen
(05:29):
oh six. Other seventeenth century accounts of Cape Ann also
describe indigenous people and include their settlements on maps. Some
of this erasure stems from how long it took for
England to successfully establish a permanent colony on Cape An.
By the time Gloucester was incorporated as part of the
(05:49):
Massachusetts Bay Colony in sixteen forty two, many of the
indigenous people of Cape Anne had died due to violence
or disease, or had left the area to try to
escape those things. So newly arrived colonists imagined that they
were building homes on land that had never been inhabited.
But there were also people who were aware of this
(06:09):
earlier history and intentionally objuscated it in their own accounts. Yeah,
when working on this, I found, specifically the history of
indigenous peoples in Cape And to be more vague and
contradictory than in other parts of Massachusetts and New England.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
More broadly.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
It was very frustrating in terms of the Sergeants. They
first arrived in North America about a century before Judith
was born, and at first they were farmers. That was
a pretty challenging life on cape and thanks to both
the climate and some generally rocky ground, But as the
Gloucester economy shifted toward fishing and shipping, the Sergeants became wealthy.
(06:53):
Judith was the oldest of eight children born to Winthrop,
Sergeant and Judith Saunder's sergeant. Although only four of those
children lived to adulthood by that point, by the time
Judith was born, the Sergent name really carried a lot
of respect and influence. One of Judith's biggest frustrations, and
one that really stayed with her for her whole life,
(07:15):
was that she wasn't given the same education as her brother.
She did have a couple of tutors who taught her
the basics of how to read, and some accounts say
that her parents let her sit in on Winthrop's lessons
as he prepared to go to Harvard. Her later writing
suggest that this wasn't the case, though she described herself
as quote wild and untutored, and expressed the frustration that
(07:38):
she just wasn't allowed to follow along with her brother's
studies with a tutor who was already there. Instead, Judith
did a lot of study on her own in her
family's extensive library. That library was a huge luxury. At
this point. She was an avid reader, including Shakespeare, other
works of classic British literature, philosophy, religious works, and lighter
(08:02):
material as well. She was fond of reading Romance, although
later in her life she seems to have thought she
was kind of wasting her time reading this kind of
work when she was younger. When Judith was about eighteen,
she had her portrait painted by John Singleton Copley, who
was regarded as one of the best portraitists in North America.
(08:22):
She's shown in a drapy, flowing silk dress without a
corset and a blue overdress, holding a basket of roses,
and wearing a turban like hat. This may have been
painted to show off her beauty to potential suitors, or
to celebrate her betrothal to John Stevens, who she married
on October third, seventeen sixty nine. In my opinion, this
(08:44):
painting itself is very beautiful and she looks very beautiful
in it. On the surface, this seemed like a pretty
reasonable match. Stevens was charming and handsome and a successful
merchant and ship captain. Like the Sergeants, the Stevenses had
been in Gloucester for generations and these two families were friends.
(09:05):
But Judith was only eighteen and John was a decade
older than that. Later on, she said she had been
too young to get married and that women should not
get married until they were at least twenty five. Judith
desperately wanted children, but she and John never had any,
and we can really only speculate as to why that was.
(09:27):
John also inherited some financial trouble following the death of
his father, and the couple frequently had trouble making ends meet.
On top of all that, he was away from home
a lot because of his work. This marriage just wasn't
what Judith had hoped that it would be. She was
disappointed on multiple levels. She even speculated that reading those
(09:49):
romances had set her expectations too high. Judith also lives
through a lot of change. In the early years of
her marriage. In seventeen seventy, her father Winthrop would Welsh
theologian James Relli's Union or a Treatise of the consanguinity
and affinity between Christ and his church. Although Relli had
started out as a Methodist minister, this work reflected his
(10:12):
thoughts on universalism. In this context, that's the idea that
through God's love and grace, all of humanity would be saved.
If you listen to our recent episode on Mary Dyer,
you may remember our discussion of Puritanism, which taught that
only a select few people would be saved. One of
Puritanism's successors in New England was Congregationalism, which had a
(10:37):
similar approach to the idea of salvation. Both of these
religious movements were influenced by the sixteenth century teachings of
John Calvin, and while some elements of early Universalism were
still pretty in line with Calvinist thought, this idea of
universal salvation was incredibly radical and controversial. So when the
(11:00):
sergeants started having meetings in their home to talk about
Relly's ideas, at first they were really quiet about it.
Then on November third, seventeen seventy four, John Murray visited
the sergeant home at the Elder Winthrop's invitation. Murray had
originally been a Calvinistic Methodist who vehemently disagreed with Relli,
(11:22):
but he had become a universalist after listening to Rellig's
sermons For himself, Judith had already been inspired by universalist
ideas and she started corresponding with John Murray.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
She wrote a.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Letter to him that said, in part quote, I am
not much accustomed to writing letters, especially to your sex.
But if there be neither male nor female in the
emmanual you promagate, we may surely, and with the strictest propriety,
mingle souls upon paper. This wasn't just something Judith wasn't
accustomed to. It was very unusual for a woman to
(11:57):
start writing to a man who was not her relative,
and it was not seen as proper at all. In
seventeen seventy nine, the sergeants and some of Murray's other
followers split away from Gloucester's first Parish Church and they
established a new congregation that was the Independent Christian Church,
which is recognized as the first universalist congregation in North America.
(12:21):
And this was an enormous deal. Apart from the inherent
controversy surrounding universalism, religion and the church were deeply interconnected
with everything about Gloucester society, and.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
This effectively caused a schism.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
At First Parish Church, so it was a huge social
and religious upheaval. Of course, by seventeen seventy nine, the
colonies were also at war with England, so there was
a lot of other fear, uncertainty, and potential danger going on.
Judith's brother Winthrop had been named an aide de camp
to George Washington. John Murray had for a time served
(13:02):
as chaplain for the Continental Army in Rhode Island, and
Judith's husband John had started working as a privateer, which
was financially lucrative. Judith didn't really approve of privateering from
a moral standpoint, and she had some doubts that a
war could be moral at all. But she generally supported
the revolution, at least in an intellectual sense. She didn't
(13:26):
really get directly or publicly involved beyond like the day
to day experiences of living in coastal New England during
the war.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Like she was there were times like she had to
flee her.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Home because of a suspected incoming British attack, but she
didn't like actively go out to help in a like
physical meaningful way.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
With the revolution.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
We are going to talk about Judith Stevens's life after
the Revolutionary War after we have a sponsor break. Although
Judith Stevens didn't entirely approve of her husband John's privateering,
(14:13):
the money that he earned by doing it did mean
that he could finally afford to have a home built
for them, and that home was finished in seventeen eighty two.
By that point their family had gotten larger. John's sister
had died in seventeen eighty and they took in two
of his nieces, Anna and Mary, and then later one
of Judith's cousins came to live with them as well.
(14:36):
Judith had also started writing, including a seventeen seventy nine
essay called The Sexes on the spiritual and intellectual equality
of men and Women, although she hadn't really started sharing
her work beyond family and friends yet. Judath's first published
work came out the same year as their house was built.
Although it was published anonymously, this was the first Universalist
(15:00):
catechism to be published in the US, and it was
intended for children. She had originally written it to help
explain their beliefs to her husband's nieces. Soon she was
publishing more work, including essays and poetry, much of it
under pseudonyms, although eventually people did connect the dots between
Judith and her various pen names. Judith was ambitious with
(15:24):
her writing. She liked doing it, and she really wanted
to be successful. She also had strong opinions, and her
writing gave her an outlet for those opinions. As the
Revolutionary War ended, she really hoped that she could encourage
the newly established United States to envision itself as a
society in which women and men were seen and treated
(15:47):
as equals. Her first published work on the rights of
women came out in seventeen eighty four. That was desultory
thoughts on the ability of encouraging a degree of self complacency,
especially in female bosoms, that was published under the pen
name Constantia. But she was also driven by financial need.
(16:09):
As the war ended, John's work as a privateer collapsed,
which brought all of his existing financial issues right back
to the surface. Some of this, like the debts he
inherited from his father and the effects of the war
on shipping, was just beyond his control, but he also
made some poor financial decisions and bad investments of his own.
(16:30):
In seventeen eighty six, he fled to the Caribbean, both
to escape his creditors and to try to find a
way to fix his financial situation there. But he didn't
get a chance to do that because he died of
some kind of illness on March eighth, seventeen eighty seven,
without ever returning to the US. Judith was mortified. She
(16:53):
immediately went back to using the name Judith. Sergeant. John
had signed the house over to her father before where
he left the country, and as a widow, she had
some legal protections for the money that she had brought
into the marriage, but she was left without an income
and her late husband's creditors still had to be paid.
She had to sell a lot of her possessions, although
(17:15):
she was able to sell some things to her brother
and he basically loaned them back to her. Beyond the
basic financial stress in all this, Judith's sergeant had been
raised in wealth. She was really proud of being one
of the sergeants of Gloucester. She just thought she deserved more.
(17:36):
She also had to start charging money to a border
who had been staying in their home for free, and
that border was John Murray. And again this was kind
of scandalous. There was a lot of gossip when the
newly widowed Judith's sergeant did not make this unmarried man
move out of her home. Unsurprisingly, there were rumors that
(17:57):
Sergeant and Murray had been having a physical lifefa while
John Stevens was still alive. That does not seem to
be the case, but it does seem as though Murray
had developed feelings for her. Ultimately, she reciprocated those feelings,
and Judith's Sergeant and John Murray married on October sixth,
seventeen eighty eight. This time she kept using sergeant as part.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Of her name.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Julia's second marriage was one of both joy and grief.
She and John Murray were a lot more emotionally and
intellectually compatible than she and John Stevens had been, and
they seemed to have really loved one another. Judith became
instrumental to the spread of Universalism in North America, traveling
with Murray on his speaking tours and helping to edit
(18:45):
his work. She met and became connected to a number
of prominent figures, including John and Abigail Adams, George and
Martha Washington, and Benjamin Franklin and his daughter Sarah Franklin Base.
She enjoyed meeting and corresponding with all these people, sharing
her thoughts on how she hoped the new Republic would
be one of equality between the sexes and freedom and
(19:07):
autonomy for women. But on August fifth, seventeen eighty nine,
Judith and John had a son who they named George,
and George unfortunately died at birth. This would have been
heartbreaking on its own, but the details seemed particularly tragic.
Judas labor was extremely prolonged and difficult, and weeks passed
(19:29):
before she really started to recover physically. In seventeen ninety,
Judas Sergeant Murray published on the Equality of Sexes again
under the pen name Constantia. It ran in the Massachusetts
Magazine over two issues and was prefaced by a poem
she had written. This was revised and expanded from her
(19:49):
earlier essay The Sexes, and it argued that women and
men were equal and that women were being kept from
reaching their full potential by being denied the same educations
and up and other opportunities as men. Judith Sergeant Murray
published this essay two years before Mary Wolstoncraft's Vindication of
the Rights of Women was published in the UK, and
(20:10):
it was four years before that work was published in
full in the United States, and while they have some similarities,
one key difference between these two works is that Wolston
Craft argued for equality in terms of both gender and class,
but Judith Sergeant Murray was focused mainly on the lives
of upper class women being given access to the same
rights as upper class men already had. She didn't really
(20:34):
give any thought to people of other classes at all. Also,
Murray's thoughts on the rights of women were also really
connected to the idea of Republican motherhood. That's the idea
that was very popular in the early Republic that women
should pass the ideals of the new Republic down to
their children. Women had a critical role in raising patriotic, moral,
(20:59):
educated citizens. So while she called very stridently for women
and girls to be treated as the intellectual and spiritual
equals of men, and to be able to support themselves
and to actively participate in politics and society, she was
also connecting all of these rights to a very clear
set of gender roles and to the idea of women
(21:20):
having a particular place in the family and in society.
She also really thought that while women should have their
own autonomy, and agency in their marriages, they should always
put their children first. On August twenty second, seventeen ninety one,
Murray gave birth to a daughter, Julia Maria, who she
(21:40):
absolutely adored. The earlier death of her son, George, combined
with the challenges of becoming a mother at forty to
make her very focused on her own health and that
of her daughter. She stopped traveling with her husband for
a time while she was breastfeeding, and she really devoted
herself to raising her child. She did get back to
(22:00):
writing pretty quickly, often in a tiny room in the
house in Gloucester, which was basically a closet. Murray started
publishing work in the Massachusetts magazine under a male persona
called The Gleaner in seventeen ninety two. A year later,
John was named minister at Boston's Universalist Church and the
family moved from Gloucester to Boston.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Judith hoped this.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
New job would help John earn a bigger income, in
part because she really missed the kind of comfort that
she had been raised in, But it turned out he
wasn't always paid on time, and Boston was just a
lot more expensive to live in than Gloucester. In seventeen
ninety five, after Boston lifted its ban on theatrical productions,
(22:44):
Murray tried her hand at writing plays. In one story,
she sneaked out while her husband was preaching to see
her first play, wearing a disguise, since many people still
considered theater to be a vice. The Medium or a
Happy Tea Party was stated at the Federal Street Theater
in seventeen ninety five, followed by The Traveler Returned a
(23:05):
year later. Neither of these plays was reviewed very well
and neither earned much money, though in seventeen ninety eight
she published The Gleaner, which was a three volume work
of her collected writings, again with the hope of making
money through subscriptions.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Although she had.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Endorsements from people like George Washington and John Adams, this
was again not the runaway financial success that she was
hoping for. Yeah, I think had her hopes not been
as high as they were, I think she probably would
have thought that it had done fine. After that three
volume work came out, Judith really started focusing more on
(23:43):
editing her husband's work on Universalism and on some other
projects instead of continuing on her own writing. For example,
she helped her cousin Judith Saunders and Clementine Beach open
an academy for girls in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in eighteen oh two.
In eighteen oh six, the first Universalist meetinghouse was built
(24:04):
in Gloucester on land that was donated by Winthrop Sergeant.
It still stands today. It is home to the Gloucester
Unitarian Universalist Church, and it's on the National Register of
Historic Places. One more play of Murray's was staged in
eighteen oh eight That was called The African, although its
text seems to have been lost. John Murray had a
(24:26):
stroke in eighteen oh nine and was partially paralyzed, and
after that Judas spent a lot of her time focused
on his care. Then in eighteen twelve, she faced another
potential scandal. On August twenty sixth of that year, her
daughter Julia eloped with a recent Harvard graduate named Adam
Lewis Binghaman. While Judith and John had given their daughter
(24:48):
their blessing, Adam's family, who were planters in Natchez, Mississippi,
apparently hoped that he would marry somebody who would add
to the family's holdings in terms of both land. An
enslaved workforce. Julia and Adam had gotten married in secret
without his family's permission, and Julia was also clearly pregnant
(25:10):
before their marriage was announced. Judith found all of this shocking,
with the added layer that she had published writing that
condemned secret marriages, but her devotion to her daughter seems
to have outweighed any of her other feelings.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
On the matter.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Eventually, Julia's marriage to Adam was formally announced, and their daughter, Charlotte,
was born in eighteen thirteen. Those didn't resolve all the
couple's challenges, though. Adam's family expected him to be back
in Mississippi, but Julia did not really want to leave
Massachusetts or her mother, and Judith didn't want to be
separated from her.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Daughter at all.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Julia wound up staying in Massachusetts for years, but living
on the other side of the country from her husband
was so unusual that she basically stopped social life zing
rather than having to deal with people's judgment about it.
Kind of understand that Judith edited John Murray's letters and
sketches of sermons in eighteen thirteen, but at this point
(26:12):
writing was becoming more difficult for her. She was starting
to lose her eyesight, which made it a lot harder
for her to read and write, especially when she had
to do that by candlelight. John Murray died on September third,
eighteen fifteen. After his death, Judith finished his autobiography that
was Records of the Life of the Reverend John Murray,
(26:33):
written by himself, with a continuation by Missus Judith's sergeant Murray.
She published that in eighteen sixteen, and then at some
point after that she moved to Natchez to be with
her daughter, who the Bangamans had finally convinced to move
there and join her husband. Although Judith's Sergeant Murray wrote
a lot about politics, education, and the rights of women,
(26:56):
she really did not say much about slavery in her
surviving co respondents. In work, she does seem to have
ultimately disagreed with the institution, although some of her most
concrete comments on the subject are more about slavery's damaging
effect on white people who were exposed to it than
about the enslaved people themselves. She also benefited from slavery
(27:19):
for a lot of her life prior to the abolition
of slavery in Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three. Members of
her family had enslaved household staff that included her parents
and her first husband, John Stevens parents. According to tax records,
John and Judith had at least one quote servant for
life in their household. By the time Judith moved to Natchez,
(27:42):
her brother Winthrop was living there also. He had been
named governor of Mississippi Territory and had married a widow
named Mary McIntosh Williams. The Williams estate included at least
one hundred enslaved people, and Judith's correspondents about her brother's
marriage really suggests a sense of pride at how wealthy
(28:03):
and larged the state was, not really any kind of
judgment or horror over slavery. There are a lot of
accounts written in recent years that describe Judas Sergeant Murray
as one of North America's first feminists, and it is
definitely true that she advocated for affluent white women to
have the same rights as affluent white men, especially when
(28:26):
it came to things like education. We already talked about
how her work really didn't extend to women of lower
economic classes, and she did not advocate for enslaved women
or enslaved people more broadly, at all, they really have
no idea what her thoughts are about the fact that
she spent the last years of her life in a
(28:47):
slave state, being cared for and supported by an enslaved workforce.
Various correspondents and written records suggest that Judas Sergeant Murray
hoped to return to Massach who Sits one day. But
she died in Natchez, Mississippi, on July sixth, eighteen twenty,
at the age of sixty nine. She was buried in
the Binghaman family Cemetery. There's still more to discover about
(29:12):
her biography. In nineteen eighty four, Unitarian Universalist minister Gordon
Gibson found her letter books, containing her copies of thousands
of letters. He found that in Natchez, the historian who
has done the most work with these so far is
Sheila L. Skemp, who published Judas Sergeant Murray, a Brief
Biography with Documents in nineteen ninety eight, and First Lady
(29:35):
of Letters Judas Sergeant Murray in the Struggle for Female
Independence in two thousand and nine. After a quick sponsor break,
we will talk about her distant niece, Emily Sargent. Emily
Sargant was born in Rome on January twenty ninth, eighteen
(29:59):
fifty seven, so a little more than one hundred years
after the birth of Judith Sergeant.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Murray.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Emily's brother, John Singer Sergeant had been born in Florence
the year before. Their father, Fitzwilliam Sergeant, had been born
in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and their mother, Mary, was from Philadelphia.
Mary was described as a cultured woman, vivacious and restless,
who had convinced Fitzwilliam to give up his surgical practice
so they could live in Europe. One factor in this
(30:26):
may have been the death of their first child in infancy. Afterward,
Mary was understandably worried about her own health and that
of her children. The Sergeants had kind of a wandering
life around Europe, moving to warmer places in the winter
and cooler places in the summer, living mostly off of
money Fitzwilliam had saved from his surgical practice and some
(30:48):
money that Mary had inherited. Yeah, this wasn't a huge inheritance,
but it was enough to allow them to do this.
They also weren't the only family living this way. The
Sergeants also came up in our episode on Writer Violet Paget,
also known as Vernon Lee. The Pagets had a really
similar lifestyle to the Sergeants, finding it more affordable to
(31:10):
drift around Europe than to maintain a permanent home somewhere.
The sergeants and the Pagets became close friends, and Emily Sergeant,
and Vernon Lee visited each other regularly throughout their lives.
The third surviving sergeant child was born in eighteen seventy,
when Emily and John were already teenagers. That child was
named after Violet Paget, who was also their godmother. Emily's
(31:35):
sergeant experienced a serious spinal injury or possibly a spinal
disease when she was about four years old. While she
was recovering, doctors told her parents to keep her totally immobile.
This included restraining her at night so she couldn't move
around in her sleep. This made the effects of the
injury worse, and for the rest of her life, Emily
(31:57):
dealt with pain, mobility issues, and a spinal curvature that
affected her posture. Emily and her brother were very close
for their whole lives, since they were only about a
year apart, and they lived this wandering existence While they
were growing up, they were each other's closest friends and playmates.
They also made plenty of other friends over the course
(32:18):
of their lives, and overall, the Sergeants really had a
reputation of always going out of their way to help
and support the people that they loved when they needed it.
As they grew up and John Singer Sargent started developing
a reputation for himself as an artist, Emily became known
for being very sweet tempered and charming, and for acting
(32:38):
as host for her brother's parties, dinners, and other gatherings.
Unlike her brother, Emily never formally studied art. She learned
by copying the works of other artists and through practice.
She started really devoting herself to art after the death
of their father in eighteen eighty nine, doing a lot
of her workout doors hauling or supplies from place to
(32:59):
place in a pram. She did a lot of her
original work in watercolor, painting the people and places they
encountered in their travels. Yeah The exhibit at the Sergeant
House Museum described it almost as like a journal in watercolor.
After spending more than thirty years moving from place to place,
Emily had her first permanent home starting in the early
(33:22):
eighteen nineties. This was a flat in the Chelsea neighborhood
of London, close to her brother's studio, and their mother
lived there with her as well until her death in
nineteen oh six. After that point, Emily lived on her own,
still close to her brother. While living in Chelsea, Emily
became friends with her neighbor Henry James, who keeps coming
(33:44):
up in episodes that included helping to care for him
after he had a stroke. I feel like we should
just start acknowledging that there has to be Henry James
episode at some point to tie all of these threads together.
Neither Emily nor John Singer Sergeant ever married or had children,
but they both doated on their sister Violet's children. Violet's
(34:05):
daughter Rose Marie was one of John's favorite models and
is sometimes described as his muse. In nineteen fourteen, at
the start of World War One, Emily's sergeant was in
northern France and her family was worried for her safety
until she was able to return to London. Meanwhile, John
Singer Sergeant wound up trapped in Austria for a while.
(34:26):
He was described as kind of heedless of the potential
dangers of remaining there as the war was starting. Rose
Marie's husband was killed in action in nineteen fourteen, and
that was just a year into their marriage. The whole
family was heartbroken over this, and then rose Marie herself
was also killed. She was attending services at the Church
(34:47):
of Saint Gervais and Paris, and that was struck by
a German bombardment on March twenty ninth, nineteen eighteen, which
was Good Friday. After the war, Emily and John Singer, sergeants,
spent some time in the US, where they became friends
with past podcast subject is a Ella Stewart Gardner. Gardener
was unwell and the sergeants often used her seats at
(35:09):
concerts in the theater. While they were in the US,
John helped transform Judith Sergeant Murray's former home in Gloucester
into a museum. At that point, the home had been
through a series of other private owners.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
The Met Museum.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Had been seeking architectural elements for its collection, and one
of the pieces the Met was interested in was Sergeant
House's central staircase. This is a beautiful handmade staircase with
these spiraling ballusters and two different alternating designs. Residents of
Gloucester and others who were connected to this home in
(35:48):
some way. Jadat didn't really like the idea of losing
the staircase or potentially losing the house that it was
part of, so a group of local residents started raising
money to try to preserve it. John Singer Sergeant helped
to contribute funds and also to restore the hall, including
sourcing and donating wallpaper for some of the rooms. The
(36:09):
Sergeant House Museum opened in nineteen nineteen, and John and
Emily visited it after it opened. Their names are in
the guest book. John Singer Sergeant died in nineteen twenty five,
and afterward Emily went to live with her sister Violet
Ormond in Tunisia. She later also donated some of her
brother's work to the Sergeant House Museum, including his portraits
(36:30):
of their father and mother. Emily also donated three of
her own watercolors to the museum, and Violet Ormonds donated
one of Emily's watercolors in nineteen twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
As we said.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Earlier, Emily Sargant and Vernon Lee each visited each other
regularly throughout their lives. The last of those visits was
for a week in nineteen thirty two. That was about
three years before Vernon Lee's death. Emily Sargant died on
May twenty second, nineteen thirty six, at the age of
seventy nine. Her cause of death is described as an accident.
(37:03):
According to one report, a bicyclist ran into her while
she was walking. She was buried alongside her brother at
Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, England. As we said earlier, after
her death, Emily's artwork was presumed to be lost until
more than four hundred of her paintings were discovered in
an attic of a Sergeant family home in England in
(37:25):
nineteen ninety eight. Over the last few years, the Sergeant
family has donated many of these works to museums. Paintings
from Emily's collection have gone to the Sergeant House Museum,
the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, d c. The Tate Gallery in London, and
(37:47):
the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University.
The museum receiving the largest number of these paintings was
the Boston MFA with forty one and Sergeant House, which
is the smallest of all these museums and has only
open seasonally, received the.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Smallest number at fifteen.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
I think in the future there will be an MFA
exhibit that maybe we'll have some more information on Emily.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
And we mentioned.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Earlier that there was more research that could still be
done about Judith Sergeant Murray, and the same is true
about Emily Sargeant. There is a lot that can be
learned about her from a lot of the same sources
that have been used to research her brother, but as
of now, there is not, at least to Tracy's knowledge
and research, a full biography of her at all.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
I feel like this, uh, even at a third of
today's episode is like kind of a sketchy overview of
everything I could find out? Right. Do you have a
listener mail for us? I do.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
It's the correction.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
This is from Hallie. Hallie wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy
love the podcast and all the work you do. Been
listening since twenty nineteen and Unearthed is always a favorite.
I learned so much from the podcast and so many
anecdotes I tell friends are from the podcast that I
always end up promoting it just so you know. In
today's episode, you referenced Anu the Museum of the Jewish
(39:11):
People in Tel Aviv, and you pronounced it wrong. It's
confusing that it's all uppercase, but it's not an acronym.
It's a word, so it's pronounced like anu and Hebrew
Anu means us or we. It's one of my favorite
museums since it showcases the diversity of Jewish life when
so many Jewish museums are about the Holocaust and Jewish death,
(39:33):
which are very important as well. If you're ever in
Tel Aviv, you should definitely visit, or if you're in DC,
you should come to the Capital Jewish Museum. Best Hallie,
thank you so much for this correction. Hallie, you are
exactly right. I was thrown by the fact that that
is presented in all capital letters, so I thought that
it was an acronym and not a word. I have
(39:57):
not been to Tel Aviv at all, not been to
the Capitol Jewish Museum, but a couple of museums that
I have been to that I wanted to just kind
of shout out to if folks are near those areas
and interested. There's the Whitesman National Museum of Jewish History
in Philadelphia, which has inspired a couple of episodes of
(40:18):
the show, and that one looks specifically at like the
Jewish American experience. And then there's the Breeman Museum of
Jewish Culture and History which is in Atlanta, which we
have interviewed someone from there on the show, and I've
also visited that one. I think Holly you maybe have
as well. So thank you so much for that correction.
(40:41):
I'm sorry for messing that up. If you would like
to send us a note about this or any other podcast,
where it history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're
all over social media and miss some History, which is
where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. And
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio and
wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
(41:09):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start the episode,
we are going to go to Barcelona in November.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
I'm so excited.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
That's November of twenty twenty three. If you're listening from
the future. This is a trip we have thought about
for a while, since many years ago when we did
some thematically appropriate episodes of the show. This is a
six night trip. We will be staying in central Barcelona.
We've got a lot of fun stuff on the schedule,
(00:47):
including city tours, Caso museums, the Gratafamilia wine tasting, a
tops tasting, Manserat day trip with a tour of the abbey.
All of this is stuff that I'm very much like
looking forward to, and we still have some spaces available.
So if you have been thinking about making a trip,
maybe November of this year is right for you. So
(01:09):
you can go to Defined Destinations dot com. Right on
the front page there's a link to the Barcelona trip,
or you can go to Defined Destinations dot com slash
Barcelona Dash twenty twenty three. Either way, we'll get you there.
I don't know, Holly, do you have anything you want
to add? Listen? I am deeply excited about this. It's
(01:34):
gonna cure my post Halloween doldrums. This is we have
talked about Barcelona for both of our previous trips as
an option, yeah, and then it got sidelined for other choices,
and so it's really it's time, and it's really been
one that we have had in mind for now literally
(01:55):
years and years.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
I cannot wait.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Ye so excited, I'm going to eat all all the.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Food that uh so.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Speaking of travel, but much more local to me travel.
A while ago, I learned that one of John Singer
Sergeant's sisters, Emily Sargent, was a prolific artist, but that
her work really hasn't been studied very much. And that's
not just because she was overshadowed by her very famous brother.
(02:26):
She only publicly exhibited her work once during her lifetime.
That was only four pieces, and those pieces were all
copies rather than her original work. People who knew her
described her as an accomplished watercolorist, but her original paintings
just didn't really circulate very far beyond family and friends.
(02:47):
And then after she'd died, people thought that those paintings
had been lost. That continued to be true until more
than four hundred of her paintings were found in an
attic in England just twenty five years ago. So I
was very intrigued by Emily's Sergeant. After learning all of that,
(03:07):
it seemed like though I was not going to be
able to find enough information for a full episode on her.
It's one of those cases where the information surely exists,
but not in places that are kind of centralized and
accessible to me as a researcher. And then earlier this year,
I learned that the Sergeant House Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts
(03:28):
was going to be exhibiting some of her work this summer.
That is where the local travel comes in. I thought,
maybe if I go to this exhibit, I'll be able
to pull together enough information about Emily's Sergeant.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
So I went to Gloucester.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Unfortunately, still did not feel like there would be enough information.
But the Sergeant House Museum was built for another sergeant,
that was Judith Sergeant Murray. Today the museum is focused
primarily on her life and legacy. I really didn't know
much about her before going to this museum, and I
wound up being intrigued by her as well in terms
(04:04):
of her life story and her writing on women's rights,
her influence on the spread of universalism in North America.
So these two women were related. Judith's brother, Winthrop, was
the great great grandfather of John Singer and Emily Sargeant,
and John and Emily also had their own connections to
(04:25):
Sergeant House as it was turned from a private home
into a museum. So I decided today's episode should be
about two sergeants, Judith and Emily. Judith's sergeant was born
in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on May first, seventeen fifty one. Gloucester
is on Cape Ann, ancestral home of the Pawtucket people.
(04:46):
Although early colonial records use a lot of different names
to describe the indigenous people of this area, some of
these are the names of other indigenous peoples or nations,
or of the towns where they were living, or the
name of whoever was holding the role of sachem or
leader at the time the person was writing. This is
one of those things that has made the indigenous history
(05:07):
of this area difficult to document today. Another is that
a number of histories of Cape Ann that were written
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries describe it as uninhabited.
This is not true, though Samuel de Champlain described meeting
about two hundred indigenous people on Cape Ann in sixteen
(05:29):
oh six. Other seventeenth century accounts of Cape Ann also
describe indigenous people and include their settlements on maps. Some
of this erasure stems from how long it took for
England to successfully establish a permanent colony on Cape An.
By the time Gloucester was incorporated as part of the
(05:49):
Massachusetts Bay Colony in sixteen forty two, many of the
indigenous people of Cape Anne had died due to violence
or disease, or had left the area to try to
escape those things. So newly arrived colonists imagined that they
were building homes on land that had never been inhabited.
But there were also people who were aware of this
(06:09):
earlier history and intentionally objuscated it in their own accounts. Yeah,
when working on this, I found, specifically the history of
indigenous peoples in Cape And to be more vague and
contradictory than in other parts of Massachusetts and New England.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
More broadly.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
It was very frustrating in terms of the Sergeants. They
first arrived in North America about a century before Judith
was born, and at first they were farmers. That was
a pretty challenging life on cape and thanks to both
the climate and some generally rocky ground, But as the
Gloucester economy shifted toward fishing and shipping, the Sergeants became wealthy.
(06:53):
Judith was the oldest of eight children born to Winthrop,
Sergeant and Judith Saunder's sergeant. Although only four of those
children lived to adulthood by that point, by the time
Judith was born, the Sergent name really carried a lot
of respect and influence. One of Judith's biggest frustrations, and
one that really stayed with her for her whole life,
(07:15):
was that she wasn't given the same education as her brother.
She did have a couple of tutors who taught her
the basics of how to read, and some accounts say
that her parents let her sit in on Winthrop's lessons
as he prepared to go to Harvard. Her later writing
suggest that this wasn't the case, though she described herself
as quote wild and untutored, and expressed the frustration that
(07:38):
she just wasn't allowed to follow along with her brother's
studies with a tutor who was already there. Instead, Judith
did a lot of study on her own in her
family's extensive library. That library was a huge luxury. At
this point. She was an avid reader, including Shakespeare, other
works of classic British literature, philosophy, religious works, and lighter
(08:02):
material as well. She was fond of reading Romance, although
later in her life she seems to have thought she
was kind of wasting her time reading this kind of
work when she was younger. When Judith was about eighteen,
she had her portrait painted by John Singleton Copley, who
was regarded as one of the best portraitists in North America.
(08:22):
She's shown in a drapy, flowing silk dress without a
corset and a blue overdress, holding a basket of roses,
and wearing a turban like hat. This may have been
painted to show off her beauty to potential suitors, or
to celebrate her betrothal to John Stevens, who she married
on October third, seventeen sixty nine. In my opinion, this
(08:44):
painting itself is very beautiful and she looks very beautiful
in it. On the surface, this seemed like a pretty
reasonable match. Stevens was charming and handsome and a successful
merchant and ship captain. Like the Sergeants, the Stevenses had
been in Gloucester for generations and these two families were friends.
(09:05):
But Judith was only eighteen and John was a decade
older than that. Later on, she said she had been
too young to get married and that women should not
get married until they were at least twenty five. Judith
desperately wanted children, but she and John never had any,
and we can really only speculate as to why that was.
(09:27):
John also inherited some financial trouble following the death of
his father, and the couple frequently had trouble making ends meet.
On top of all that, he was away from home
a lot because of his work. This marriage just wasn't
what Judith had hoped that it would be. She was
disappointed on multiple levels. She even speculated that reading those
(09:49):
romances had set her expectations too high. Judith also lives
through a lot of change. In the early years of
her marriage. In seventeen seventy, her father Winthrop would Welsh
theologian James Relli's Union or a Treatise of the consanguinity
and affinity between Christ and his church. Although Relli had
started out as a Methodist minister, this work reflected his
(10:12):
thoughts on universalism. In this context, that's the idea that
through God's love and grace, all of humanity would be saved.
If you listen to our recent episode on Mary Dyer,
you may remember our discussion of Puritanism, which taught that
only a select few people would be saved. One of
Puritanism's successors in New England was Congregationalism, which had a
(10:37):
similar approach to the idea of salvation. Both of these
religious movements were influenced by the sixteenth century teachings of
John Calvin, and while some elements of early Universalism were
still pretty in line with Calvinist thought, this idea of
universal salvation was incredibly radical and controversial. So when the
(11:00):
sergeants started having meetings in their home to talk about
Relly's ideas, at first they were really quiet about it.
Then on November third, seventeen seventy four, John Murray visited
the sergeant home at the Elder Winthrop's invitation. Murray had
originally been a Calvinistic Methodist who vehemently disagreed with Relli,
(11:22):
but he had become a universalist after listening to Rellig's
sermons For himself, Judith had already been inspired by universalist
ideas and she started corresponding with John Murray.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
She wrote a.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
Letter to him that said, in part quote, I am
not much accustomed to writing letters, especially to your sex.
But if there be neither male nor female in the
emmanual you promagate, we may surely, and with the strictest propriety,
mingle souls upon paper. This wasn't just something Judith wasn't
accustomed to. It was very unusual for a woman to
(11:57):
start writing to a man who was not her relative,
and it was not seen as proper at all. In
seventeen seventy nine, the sergeants and some of Murray's other
followers split away from Gloucester's first Parish Church and they
established a new congregation that was the Independent Christian Church,
which is recognized as the first universalist congregation in North America.
(12:21):
And this was an enormous deal. Apart from the inherent
controversy surrounding universalism, religion and the church were deeply interconnected
with everything about Gloucester society, and.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
This effectively caused a schism.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
At First Parish Church, so it was a huge social
and religious upheaval. Of course, by seventeen seventy nine, the
colonies were also at war with England, so there was
a lot of other fear, uncertainty, and potential danger going on.
Judith's brother Winthrop had been named an aide de camp
to George Washington. John Murray had for a time served
(13:02):
as chaplain for the Continental Army in Rhode Island, and
Judith's husband John had started working as a privateer, which
was financially lucrative. Judith didn't really approve of privateering from
a moral standpoint, and she had some doubts that a
war could be moral at all. But she generally supported
the revolution, at least in an intellectual sense. She didn't
(13:26):
really get directly or publicly involved beyond like the day
to day experiences of living in coastal New England during
the war.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Like she was there were times like she had to
flee her.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Home because of a suspected incoming British attack, but she
didn't like actively go out to help in a like
physical meaningful way.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
With the revolution.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
We are going to talk about Judith Stevens's life after
the Revolutionary War after we have a sponsor break. Although
Judith Stevens didn't entirely approve of her husband John's privateering,
(14:13):
the money that he earned by doing it did mean
that he could finally afford to have a home built
for them, and that home was finished in seventeen eighty two.
By that point their family had gotten larger. John's sister
had died in seventeen eighty and they took in two
of his nieces, Anna and Mary, and then later one
of Judith's cousins came to live with them as well.
(14:36):
Judith had also started writing, including a seventeen seventy nine
essay called The Sexes on the spiritual and intellectual equality
of men and Women, although she hadn't really started sharing
her work beyond family and friends yet. Judath's first published
work came out the same year as their house was built.
Although it was published anonymously, this was the first Universalist
(15:00):
catechism to be published in the US, and it was
intended for children. She had originally written it to help
explain their beliefs to her husband's nieces. Soon she was
publishing more work, including essays and poetry, much of it
under pseudonyms, although eventually people did connect the dots between
Judith and her various pen names. Judith was ambitious with
(15:24):
her writing. She liked doing it, and she really wanted
to be successful. She also had strong opinions, and her
writing gave her an outlet for those opinions. As the
Revolutionary War ended, she really hoped that she could encourage
the newly established United States to envision itself as a
society in which women and men were seen and treated
(15:47):
as equals. Her first published work on the rights of
women came out in seventeen eighty four. That was desultory
thoughts on the ability of encouraging a degree of self complacency,
especially in female bosoms, that was published under the pen
name Constantia. But she was also driven by financial need.
(16:09):
As the war ended, John's work as a privateer collapsed,
which brought all of his existing financial issues right back
to the surface. Some of this, like the debts he
inherited from his father and the effects of the war
on shipping, was just beyond his control, but he also
made some poor financial decisions and bad investments of his own.
(16:30):
In seventeen eighty six, he fled to the Caribbean, both
to escape his creditors and to try to find a
way to fix his financial situation there. But he didn't
get a chance to do that because he died of
some kind of illness on March eighth, seventeen eighty seven,
without ever returning to the US. Judith was mortified. She
(16:53):
immediately went back to using the name Judith. Sergeant. John
had signed the house over to her father before where
he left the country, and as a widow, she had
some legal protections for the money that she had brought
into the marriage, but she was left without an income
and her late husband's creditors still had to be paid.
She had to sell a lot of her possessions, although
(17:15):
she was able to sell some things to her brother
and he basically loaned them back to her. Beyond the
basic financial stress in all this, Judith's sergeant had been
raised in wealth. She was really proud of being one
of the sergeants of Gloucester. She just thought she deserved more.
(17:36):
She also had to start charging money to a border
who had been staying in their home for free, and
that border was John Murray. And again this was kind
of scandalous. There was a lot of gossip when the
newly widowed Judith's sergeant did not make this unmarried man
move out of her home. Unsurprisingly, there were rumors that
(17:57):
Sergeant and Murray had been having a physical lifefa while
John Stevens was still alive. That does not seem to
be the case, but it does seem as though Murray
had developed feelings for her. Ultimately, she reciprocated those feelings,
and Judith's Sergeant and John Murray married on October sixth,
seventeen eighty eight. This time she kept using sergeant as part.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
Of her name.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Julia's second marriage was one of both joy and grief.
She and John Murray were a lot more emotionally and
intellectually compatible than she and John Stevens had been, and
they seemed to have really loved one another. Judith became
instrumental to the spread of Universalism in North America, traveling
with Murray on his speaking tours and helping to edit
(18:45):
his work. She met and became connected to a number
of prominent figures, including John and Abigail Adams, George and
Martha Washington, and Benjamin Franklin and his daughter Sarah Franklin Base.
She enjoyed meeting and corresponding with all these people, sharing
her thoughts on how she hoped the new Republic would
be one of equality between the sexes and freedom and
(19:07):
autonomy for women. But on August fifth, seventeen eighty nine,
Judith and John had a son who they named George,
and George unfortunately died at birth. This would have been
heartbreaking on its own, but the details seemed particularly tragic.
Judas labor was extremely prolonged and difficult, and weeks passed
(19:29):
before she really started to recover physically. In seventeen ninety,
Judas Sergeant Murray published on the Equality of Sexes again
under the pen name Constantia. It ran in the Massachusetts
Magazine over two issues and was prefaced by a poem
she had written. This was revised and expanded from her
(19:49):
earlier essay The Sexes, and it argued that women and
men were equal and that women were being kept from
reaching their full potential by being denied the same educations
and up and other opportunities as men. Judith Sergeant Murray
published this essay two years before Mary Wolstoncraft's Vindication of
the Rights of Women was published in the UK, and
(20:10):
it was four years before that work was published in
full in the United States, and while they have some similarities,
one key difference between these two works is that Wolston
Craft argued for equality in terms of both gender and class,
but Judith Sergeant Murray was focused mainly on the lives
of upper class women being given access to the same
rights as upper class men already had. She didn't really
(20:34):
give any thought to people of other classes at all. Also,
Murray's thoughts on the rights of women were also really
connected to the idea of Republican motherhood. That's the idea
that was very popular in the early Republic that women
should pass the ideals of the new Republic down to
their children. Women had a critical role in raising patriotic, moral,
(20:59):
educated citizens. So while she called very stridently for women
and girls to be treated as the intellectual and spiritual
equals of men, and to be able to support themselves
and to actively participate in politics and society, she was
also connecting all of these rights to a very clear
set of gender roles and to the idea of women
(21:20):
having a particular place in the family and in society.
She also really thought that while women should have their
own autonomy, and agency in their marriages, they should always
put their children first. On August twenty second, seventeen ninety one,
Murray gave birth to a daughter, Julia Maria, who she
(21:40):
absolutely adored. The earlier death of her son, George, combined
with the challenges of becoming a mother at forty to
make her very focused on her own health and that
of her daughter. She stopped traveling with her husband for
a time while she was breastfeeding, and she really devoted
herself to raising her child. She did get back to
(22:00):
writing pretty quickly, often in a tiny room in the
house in Gloucester, which was basically a closet. Murray started
publishing work in the Massachusetts magazine under a male persona
called The Gleaner in seventeen ninety two. A year later,
John was named minister at Boston's Universalist Church and the
family moved from Gloucester to Boston.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Judith hoped this.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
New job would help John earn a bigger income, in
part because she really missed the kind of comfort that
she had been raised in, But it turned out he
wasn't always paid on time, and Boston was just a
lot more expensive to live in than Gloucester. In seventeen
ninety five, after Boston lifted its ban on theatrical productions,
(22:44):
Murray tried her hand at writing plays. In one story,
she sneaked out while her husband was preaching to see
her first play, wearing a disguise, since many people still
considered theater to be a vice. The Medium or a
Happy Tea Party was stated at the Federal Street Theater
in seventeen ninety five, followed by The Traveler Returned a
(23:05):
year later. Neither of these plays was reviewed very well
and neither earned much money, though in seventeen ninety eight
she published The Gleaner, which was a three volume work
of her collected writings, again with the hope of making
money through subscriptions.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Although she had.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Endorsements from people like George Washington and John Adams, this
was again not the runaway financial success that she was
hoping for. Yeah, I think had her hopes not been
as high as they were, I think she probably would
have thought that it had done fine. After that three
volume work came out, Judith really started focusing more on
(23:43):
editing her husband's work on Universalism and on some other
projects instead of continuing on her own writing. For example,
she helped her cousin Judith Saunders and Clementine Beach open
an academy for girls in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in eighteen oh two.
In eighteen oh six, the first Universalist meetinghouse was built
(24:04):
in Gloucester on land that was donated by Winthrop Sergeant.
It still stands today. It is home to the Gloucester
Unitarian Universalist Church, and it's on the National Register of
Historic Places. One more play of Murray's was staged in
eighteen oh eight That was called The African, although its
text seems to have been lost. John Murray had a
(24:26):
stroke in eighteen oh nine and was partially paralyzed, and
after that Judas spent a lot of her time focused
on his care. Then in eighteen twelve, she faced another
potential scandal. On August twenty sixth of that year, her
daughter Julia eloped with a recent Harvard graduate named Adam
Lewis Binghaman. While Judith and John had given their daughter
(24:48):
their blessing, Adam's family, who were planters in Natchez, Mississippi,
apparently hoped that he would marry somebody who would add
to the family's holdings in terms of both land. An
enslaved workforce. Julia and Adam had gotten married in secret
without his family's permission, and Julia was also clearly pregnant
(25:10):
before their marriage was announced. Judith found all of this shocking,
with the added layer that she had published writing that
condemned secret marriages, but her devotion to her daughter seems
to have outweighed any of her other feelings.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
On the matter.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Eventually, Julia's marriage to Adam was formally announced, and their daughter, Charlotte,
was born in eighteen thirteen. Those didn't resolve all the
couple's challenges, though. Adam's family expected him to be back
in Mississippi, but Julia did not really want to leave
Massachusetts or her mother, and Judith didn't want to be
separated from her.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
Daughter at all.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Julia wound up staying in Massachusetts for years, but living
on the other side of the country from her husband
was so unusual that she basically stopped social life zing
rather than having to deal with people's judgment about it.
Kind of understand that Judith edited John Murray's letters and
sketches of sermons in eighteen thirteen, but at this point
(26:12):
writing was becoming more difficult for her. She was starting
to lose her eyesight, which made it a lot harder
for her to read and write, especially when she had
to do that by candlelight. John Murray died on September third,
eighteen fifteen. After his death, Judith finished his autobiography that
was Records of the Life of the Reverend John Murray,
(26:33):
written by himself, with a continuation by Missus Judith's sergeant Murray.
She published that in eighteen sixteen, and then at some
point after that she moved to Natchez to be with
her daughter, who the Bangamans had finally convinced to move
there and join her husband. Although Judith's Sergeant Murray wrote
a lot about politics, education, and the rights of women,
(26:56):
she really did not say much about slavery in her
surviving co respondents. In work, she does seem to have
ultimately disagreed with the institution, although some of her most
concrete comments on the subject are more about slavery's damaging
effect on white people who were exposed to it than
about the enslaved people themselves. She also benefited from slavery
(27:19):
for a lot of her life prior to the abolition
of slavery in Massachusetts in seventeen eighty three. Members of
her family had enslaved household staff that included her parents
and her first husband, John Stevens parents. According to tax records,
John and Judith had at least one quote servant for
life in their household. By the time Judith moved to Natchez,
(27:42):
her brother Winthrop was living there also. He had been
named governor of Mississippi Territory and had married a widow
named Mary McIntosh Williams. The Williams estate included at least
one hundred enslaved people, and Judith's correspondents about her brother's
marriage really suggests a sense of pride at how wealthy
(28:03):
and larged the state was, not really any kind of
judgment or horror over slavery. There are a lot of
accounts written in recent years that describe Judas Sergeant Murray
as one of North America's first feminists, and it is
definitely true that she advocated for affluent white women to
have the same rights as affluent white men, especially when
(28:26):
it came to things like education. We already talked about
how her work really didn't extend to women of lower
economic classes, and she did not advocate for enslaved women
or enslaved people more broadly, at all, they really have
no idea what her thoughts are about the fact that
she spent the last years of her life in a
(28:47):
slave state, being cared for and supported by an enslaved workforce.
Various correspondents and written records suggest that Judas Sergeant Murray
hoped to return to Massach who Sits one day. But
she died in Natchez, Mississippi, on July sixth, eighteen twenty,
at the age of sixty nine. She was buried in
the Binghaman family Cemetery. There's still more to discover about
(29:12):
her biography. In nineteen eighty four, Unitarian Universalist minister Gordon
Gibson found her letter books, containing her copies of thousands
of letters. He found that in Natchez, the historian who
has done the most work with these so far is
Sheila L. Skemp, who published Judas Sergeant Murray, a Brief
Biography with Documents in nineteen ninety eight, and First Lady
(29:35):
of Letters Judas Sergeant Murray in the Struggle for Female
Independence in two thousand and nine. After a quick sponsor break,
we will talk about her distant niece, Emily Sargent. Emily
Sargant was born in Rome on January twenty ninth, eighteen
(29:59):
fifty seven, so a little more than one hundred years
after the birth of Judith Sergeant.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Murray.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Emily's brother, John Singer Sergeant had been born in Florence
the year before. Their father, Fitzwilliam Sergeant, had been born
in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and their mother, Mary, was from Philadelphia.
Mary was described as a cultured woman, vivacious and restless,
who had convinced Fitzwilliam to give up his surgical practice
so they could live in Europe. One factor in this
(30:26):
may have been the death of their first child in infancy. Afterward,
Mary was understandably worried about her own health and that
of her children. The Sergeants had kind of a wandering
life around Europe, moving to warmer places in the winter
and cooler places in the summer, living mostly off of
money Fitzwilliam had saved from his surgical practice and some
(30:48):
money that Mary had inherited. Yeah, this wasn't a huge inheritance,
but it was enough to allow them to do this.
They also weren't the only family living this way. The
Sergeants also came up in our episode on Writer Violet Paget,
also known as Vernon Lee. The Pagets had a really
similar lifestyle to the Sergeants, finding it more affordable to
(31:10):
drift around Europe than to maintain a permanent home somewhere.
The sergeants and the Pagets became close friends, and Emily Sergeant,
and Vernon Lee visited each other regularly throughout their lives.
The third surviving sergeant child was born in eighteen seventy,
when Emily and John were already teenagers. That child was
named after Violet Paget, who was also their godmother. Emily's
(31:35):
sergeant experienced a serious spinal injury or possibly a spinal
disease when she was about four years old. While she
was recovering, doctors told her parents to keep her totally immobile.
This included restraining her at night so she couldn't move
around in her sleep. This made the effects of the
injury worse, and for the rest of her life, Emily
(31:57):
dealt with pain, mobility issues, and a spinal curvature that
affected her posture. Emily and her brother were very close
for their whole lives, since they were only about a
year apart, and they lived this wandering existence While they
were growing up, they were each other's closest friends and playmates.
They also made plenty of other friends over the course
(32:18):
of their lives, and overall, the Sergeants really had a
reputation of always going out of their way to help
and support the people that they loved when they needed it.
As they grew up and John Singer Sargent started developing
a reputation for himself as an artist, Emily became known
for being very sweet tempered and charming, and for acting
(32:38):
as host for her brother's parties, dinners, and other gatherings.
Unlike her brother, Emily never formally studied art. She learned
by copying the works of other artists and through practice.
She started really devoting herself to art after the death
of their father in eighteen eighty nine, doing a lot
of her workout doors hauling or supplies from place to
(32:59):
place in a pram. She did a lot of her
original work in watercolor, painting the people and places they
encountered in their travels. Yeah The exhibit at the Sergeant
House Museum described it almost as like a journal in watercolor.
After spending more than thirty years moving from place to place,
Emily had her first permanent home starting in the early
(33:22):
eighteen nineties. This was a flat in the Chelsea neighborhood
of London, close to her brother's studio, and their mother
lived there with her as well until her death in
nineteen oh six. After that point, Emily lived on her own,
still close to her brother. While living in Chelsea, Emily
became friends with her neighbor Henry James, who keeps coming
(33:44):
up in episodes that included helping to care for him
after he had a stroke. I feel like we should
just start acknowledging that there has to be Henry James
episode at some point to tie all of these threads together.
Neither Emily nor John Singer Sergeant ever married or had children,
but they both doated on their sister Violet's children. Violet's
(34:05):
daughter Rose Marie was one of John's favorite models and
is sometimes described as his muse. In nineteen fourteen, at
the start of World War One, Emily's sergeant was in
northern France and her family was worried for her safety
until she was able to return to London. Meanwhile, John
Singer Sergeant wound up trapped in Austria for a while.
(34:26):
He was described as kind of heedless of the potential
dangers of remaining there as the war was starting. Rose
Marie's husband was killed in action in nineteen fourteen, and
that was just a year into their marriage. The whole
family was heartbroken over this, and then rose Marie herself
was also killed. She was attending services at the Church
(34:47):
of Saint Gervais and Paris, and that was struck by
a German bombardment on March twenty ninth, nineteen eighteen, which
was Good Friday. After the war, Emily and John Singer, sergeants,
spent some time in the US, where they became friends
with past podcast subject is a Ella Stewart Gardner. Gardener
was unwell and the sergeants often used her seats at
(35:09):
concerts in the theater. While they were in the US,
John helped transform Judith Sergeant Murray's former home in Gloucester
into a museum. At that point, the home had been
through a series of other private owners.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
The Met Museum.
Speaker 1 (35:26):
Had been seeking architectural elements for its collection, and one
of the pieces the Met was interested in was Sergeant
House's central staircase. This is a beautiful handmade staircase with
these spiraling ballusters and two different alternating designs. Residents of
Gloucester and others who were connected to this home in
(35:48):
some way. Jadat didn't really like the idea of losing
the staircase or potentially losing the house that it was
part of, so a group of local residents started raising
money to try to preserve it. John Singer Sergeant helped
to contribute funds and also to restore the hall, including
sourcing and donating wallpaper for some of the rooms. The
(36:09):
Sergeant House Museum opened in nineteen nineteen, and John and
Emily visited it after it opened. Their names are in
the guest book. John Singer Sergeant died in nineteen twenty five,
and afterward Emily went to live with her sister Violet
Ormond in Tunisia. She later also donated some of her
brother's work to the Sergeant House Museum, including his portraits
(36:30):
of their father and mother. Emily also donated three of
her own watercolors to the museum, and Violet Ormonds donated
one of Emily's watercolors in nineteen twenty eight.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
As we said.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Earlier, Emily Sargant and Vernon Lee each visited each other
regularly throughout their lives. The last of those visits was
for a week in nineteen thirty two. That was about
three years before Vernon Lee's death. Emily Sargant died on
May twenty second, nineteen thirty six, at the age of
seventy nine. Her cause of death is described as an accident.
(37:03):
According to one report, a bicyclist ran into her while
she was walking. She was buried alongside her brother at
Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, England. As we said earlier, after
her death, Emily's artwork was presumed to be lost until
more than four hundred of her paintings were discovered in
an attic of a Sergeant family home in England in
(37:25):
nineteen ninety eight. Over the last few years, the Sergeant
family has donated many of these works to museums. Paintings
from Emily's collection have gone to the Sergeant House Museum,
the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art
in Washington, d c. The Tate Gallery in London, and
(37:47):
the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University.
The museum receiving the largest number of these paintings was
the Boston MFA with forty one and Sergeant House, which
is the smallest of all these museums and has only
open seasonally, received the.
Speaker 2 (38:04):
Smallest number at fifteen.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
I think in the future there will be an MFA
exhibit that maybe we'll have some more information on Emily.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
And we mentioned.
Speaker 1 (38:15):
Earlier that there was more research that could still be
done about Judith Sergeant Murray, and the same is true
about Emily Sargeant. There is a lot that can be
learned about her from a lot of the same sources
that have been used to research her brother, but as
of now, there is not, at least to Tracy's knowledge
and research, a full biography of her at all.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
I feel like this, uh, even at a third of
today's episode is like kind of a sketchy overview of
everything I could find out? Right. Do you have a
listener mail for us? I do.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
It's the correction.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
This is from Hallie. Hallie wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy
love the podcast and all the work you do. Been
listening since twenty nineteen and Unearthed is always a favorite.
I learned so much from the podcast and so many
anecdotes I tell friends are from the podcast that I
always end up promoting it just so you know. In
today's episode, you referenced Anu the Museum of the Jewish
(39:11):
People in Tel Aviv, and you pronounced it wrong. It's
confusing that it's all uppercase, but it's not an acronym.
It's a word, so it's pronounced like anu and Hebrew
Anu means us or we. It's one of my favorite
museums since it showcases the diversity of Jewish life when
so many Jewish museums are about the Holocaust and Jewish death,
(39:33):
which are very important as well. If you're ever in
Tel Aviv, you should definitely visit, or if you're in DC,
you should come to the Capital Jewish Museum. Best Hallie,
thank you so much for this correction. Hallie, you are
exactly right. I was thrown by the fact that that
is presented in all capital letters, so I thought that
it was an acronym and not a word. I have
(39:57):
not been to Tel Aviv at all, not been to
the Capitol Jewish Museum, but a couple of museums that
I have been to that I wanted to just kind
of shout out to if folks are near those areas
and interested. There's the Whitesman National Museum of Jewish History
in Philadelphia, which has inspired a couple of episodes of
(40:18):
the show, and that one looks specifically at like the
Jewish American experience. And then there's the Breeman Museum of
Jewish Culture and History which is in Atlanta, which we
have interviewed someone from there on the show, and I've
also visited that one. I think Holly you maybe have
as well. So thank you so much for that correction.
(40:41):
I'm sorry for messing that up. If you would like
to send us a note about this or any other podcast,
where it history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're
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(41:09):
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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