Still, she was fortunate with her class status and generous father to learn under eight different tutors and to further her own educational horizons by extensive reading. In similar inquisitive behavior, Murray felt cheated when she observed her brother preparing for Harvard College and studying subjects that she did not have access to as a woman. "In vain did I solicit to share, in those instructions, which were so liberally allowed to him," she wrote in a letter to a friend (Harris 176). This desire to further their education often manifested through reading and researching on their own instead of simply accepting the meagre female education standards of their day is one of the foundational ways in which Murray and Bradstreet began to change the way women were perceived by the culture. Simply by studying subjects usually allowed for men only, they proved that women were capable of equal intellectual footing. .
It's possible that it was that very education that drove the creative desire to write their own publications. The self-awareness Bradstreet had of her ability to write and it's implications for other women manifests at times in her poems, such as in her poem "In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory:" .
Now say, have women worth, or have they none?.
Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone?.
Nay Masculines, you have thus tax'd us long,.
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong. (Bradstreet 44).
These lines betray the subtle sarcasm apparent in several of Bradstreet's poems. She uses a respected political figure as her defense, saying that even though she is dead, she will still be proof in history that women have worth even in stereotypical masculine roles. Similarly, Murray defended Eve posthumously in one of her letters saying, "A laudable ambition fired her soul and a thirst for knowledge impelled the predilection so fatal in it's consequences.
