Judith Sargent Murray published the early and influential essay "On the Equality of the Sexes" in 1790, blaming poor standards in female education as the root of women’s problems. However, scandals surrounding the personal lives of English contemporaries Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft pushed feminist authorship into private correspondence from the 1790s through the early decades of the nineteenth century. Feminist essays from John Neal in the 1820s filled an intellectual gap between Murray and her pre-Seneca Falls Convention successors like Sarah Moore Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Fuller. As a male writer insulated from many common forms of attack against female feminist thinkers, Neal’s advocacy was crucial to bringing the field back into the American mainstream.