Gloucester and Boston author Judith Sargent Murray may not have been the first writer to make the case for women’s intellectual and emotional equality, but her essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” appeared in the Massachusetts Magazine two years before Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792. In this “continuation” of her argument published in a 1798 collection of her work, Murray insists that women are equal to men in endurance, courage, fortitude, patriotism, influence, energy, eloquence, and loyalty. And, she adds, women “are equally susceptible of every literary acquirement.”