Judith Sargent Murray
Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1751, Judith Sargent Murray was a poet and essayist who strongly supported the American Revolution as a young woman.  After the death of her first husband, she married the Rev. John Murray, and helped him establish the Universalist religion in the United States.  Her writings on women's position in society were far ahead of the times.   She had completed the manuscript of "On Equality of the Sexes" during the years of the Revolution (1779); it was, however, not published until 1790.   She died in 1820. 
>> To find out more about how her ideas foreshadowed Betty Friedan's 1963 work The Feminine Mystique: http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/march99/murray3.html