UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

A Woman’s Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America

Book Jacket: "Elizabeth Murray" by P. Cleary

Patricia Cleary

A woman shopkeeper’s struggle to achieve economic
self-sufficiency in eighteenth-century Boston

"A welcome addition to the literature on women in early America. Murray was an exceptional ordinary woman for her day. . . . Cleary mined Murray's own papers, which included not just correspondence but business records, to get past the veneer of gentility and see the complex woman underneath. Murray worked as a shopkeeper before and during one of her marriages, and Cleary does an excellent job discussing the material culture of the commercial millinery trade between the colonies and England. One of the more 'ordinary' aspects of Murray's life was that despite her wealth and experience as a shopkeeper, she had to petition the court, just like other women, to keep control of her own property after she married a second time. This biography fills in many gaps in the history of Colonial women and does so with an enjoyable writing style."

Choice

"Precisely because Murray breaks ideological and historiographical rules, she commands attention. . . . In this brave book, Cleary manages to knock some of the bricks out of historiographical walls. With luck, the fruits of her and other feminist scholars' labors will soon fill library shelves and force reconsideration of how American entrepreneurship came into being. In that account, Elizabeth Murray will stand alongside Alexander Hamilton, with her surrogate daughters all in a row, as cofounders of the wealthiest empire the world has ever known."

Women's Review of Books

"Scholars of early American history will find much of interest in this rare book-length portrait of an eighteenth-century woman. Cleary tells an engaging story. The quotations from eighteenth-century letters keep us as close as possible to the perspective that Elizabeth Murray had at that time and help us to avoid superimposing a present-day view of the world onto her and her contemporaries. . . . Cleary provides a broader context by bringing in other women's and men's stories where relevant, so we end up with more than one woman's story. Without a heavy theoretical or historiographical overlay, the stories illustrate many of the key issues and experiences of the time, such as immigration, trade and consumption, family and community, and the American Revolution, and thus makes a useful contribution to scholarship on early American history."

American Historical Review

Patricia Cleary is professor of history at California State University, Long Beach.

Biography / Women’s Studies / American History
296 pp., 14 illus., LC 00-030277
$24.95s paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-396-4
February 2003
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