On The Equality Of The Sexes By Judith Sargent Mraye Analysis

In the period of the literary works of Collection 5, inequality between genders developed into a serious and controversial issue. Although the authors of this age generally wrote to persuade their audience to view women and their role in the world in a new light, no one had managed to influence me as much as Judith Sargent Murray in her essay titled “On the Equality of the Sexes.” For the most part, the author attempts to communicate that women are not intellectually inferior to men by nature, but are instead given disadvantages that drastically limit their educational opportunities with effective usage of rhetoric such as ethos, pathos, and logos. The essay is predominated by oustanding logos, although excellent examples of pathos and ethos …show more content…
She uses a mythos reference to God and effectual pathos in the powerful verbs "animates, enlivens, and invigorates" to further her point when stating that women are equal to men. Another example of Murray’s effectual pathos is when she references how women are viewed as “notoriously deficient, or unequal.” Exposing the way women are viewed as horrible through a skillful use of language easily painted the subject of gender inequality in a new light when published in 1790. Likewise, describing women as “confined and limited” paints a picture into the reader’s heads of women as caged into a cell where they cannot unlock their latent intellectual abilities that could match those of …show more content…
While pathos and ethos are related to emotion and ethics, logos appeals entirely to the reader’s sense of logic through claims of fact and arguments. There are many examples of impactful logos, but the ones that stood out to me the most usually involved the usage of rhetorical questions. The most prevalent example of this lies in the second paragraph after the poem portion of the essay in which the author states, “Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years old, is more sage than that of a female's of the same age?” In the context of this sentence, Murray states that boys, from birth, are given more opportunities and subjects to learn. Essentially, she states that women do not possess inferior intelligence, but instead, they are granted inferior learning opportunities. They are set up as housewives, not scientists or mathmeticians. The sentence that sold this argument to me was as follows: "What can she do?" Not only is this an example of logos in which the author claims that women are given a hopeless situation, but it is also an example of pathos in which the audience feels compassion or sympathy. Arguments such as these were what defined this essay as the most persuasive to