| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Elizabeth Murray: A Woman's Pursuit of Independence in Eighteenth-Century America. By Patricia Cleary. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. xiv, 279 pp. $29.95, ISBN 1-55849-263-1.)

This clearly written biography of an ordinary and yet extraordinary woman of the eighteenth century adds to our sparse offerings of female stories in early America. Elizabeth Murray was a shopkeeper; she lived in a female world that was her emotional mainstay; and she negotiated the Atlantic world at a time of great turmoil and uncertain loyalties. Her life course was unusual in that she was widowed and remarried three times and remained childless. She also had enough money after her second marriage to guarantee her economic independence. Her biography is overdue. 1

Elizabeth Murray was first and foremost a shopkeeper. The obvious satisfaction she got from her position and the economic independence that it symbolized became something that she felt obliged to share. Even when she no longer had a shop she helped finance other "she merchants" and trained her nieces in the necessary skills. Patricia Cleary paints an alluring picture of Murray's female world of sellers and buyers. She even suggests that shopping for women may have been equivalent to tavern going for men, an opportunity to socialize and share news. . . .

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