SOURCE: "'Quitting the Loom and Distaff: Eighteenth Century American Women Dramatists," in Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660-1820, edited by Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, Ohio University Press, 1991, pp. 260-73.

In this excerpt, Schofield analyzes Murray's contributions to eighteenth-century drama, as a playwright, critic, and feminist.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
 Who says my hand a needle better fits,
 A poets [sic] pen all scorn I should thus wrong;
 For such despite they cast on female wits,
 If what I do prove well, it won't advance—
 They'll say it's stolen, or else it was by chance.

—Anne Bradstreet

Quitting the loom and distaff as Judith Sargent Murray put it (1798, 3:192), the decision to wield the pen rather than the pin, has been the concern of women writers from the sixteenth century. Geographic location did not retard such decisions, and the women in...