Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith Inman

Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith Inman (July 7, 1726 – May 25, 1785) was a shopkeeper, teacher, and philanthropist in Boston, Massachusetts before, during, and after the American Revolution. Murray spent much of her adult life teaching her nieces and female friends the importance of personal financial autonomy through shopkeeping and other traditionally female domestic duties. Additionally, Elizabeth allowed her female students to board with her, to supplement her income.

When Elizabeth visited her brother John's family in Norwich, England, she decided to take his daughter Mary Murray (nicknamed Polly) under her wing, teaching her all that she herself had learned as a shopkeeper in Boston. She immediately set upon sending Polly to Boston to make connections in the commercial world and boarding with her merchant friends, the Cumings sisters. They would teach her all she needed to know about shopkeeping and running a business for herself. Additionally, Elizabeth sent her young nephew Jack to voyage with his sister across the Atlantic to Boston, in hopes of his becoming an apprentice for a successful merchant cousin in Rhode Island. Despite the unrest growing in Boston and many of her friends becoming attacked for importing British goods, Elizabeth decided to send Polly and Jack to Boston, anyway. To Elizabeth's surprise, when the Cumings sisters were publicly reviled in the press, their business turned even more successful, because of their insistence on " 'Striving in an honest way to Git there Bread'." Thus, women were finding themselves thrust into a world in which their decisions to purchase goods had become fraught with political meaning.

Returning to Boston in April 1771 with her new charge Jackie, Elizabeth found Boston much calmer than when she had left a year and a half earlier. She decided to remarry for a third time to fellow shopkeeper Ralph Inman, who would help improve her finances, which she realized were not in good order upon her return to Boston. She and Ralph signed a prenuptial agreement that allowed her to keep her wealth and continue to help young women get started in business. Unfortunately, she quickly learned that this marriage was not a good match, emotionally. Boston's turmoil with the British began to flare up again, and she removed to Cambridge with her niece Dolly to oversee her and her husband's estate, despite the fact that most women were leaving the area altogether. Her husband and her brother remained in Boston, now occupied and closed off by the British, under General Thomas Gage. Elizabeth wrote her husband repeatedly, even after rebel troops had kept her prisoner in her own house, but Ralph did not respond to her entreaties for him to join her in Cambridge. She stayed on in Cambridge, without her husband's protection, "overseeing crops, financial matters, and business decisions," all the while feeling abandoned by Ralph. When Ralph did contact his wife that he needed money, he urged her to come to Boston to join him, something she refused to do. When she insisted on defying her husband's wishes, Ralph made plans to sail to Great Britain without her, thereby separating from her indefinitely. Elizabeth decided that her brother James' daughter Betsy should stay with her and learn more shopkeeping, despite the Revolution taking place in Boston. She finally went to Boston to assist her niece Anne Murray, who was working in a Boston shop. When she realized Anne was unhappy with shopkeeping and wished to get married and leave America, Elizabeth did all she could to help solidify the union. Ralph was arrested before he could leave Boston and his property was seized by rebel forces in 1776.

She was later castigated in the press for befriending a Scottish officer taken prisoner in Boston named Archibald Campbell, perhaps related to her first husband. She sent him various items in prison to assuage the pain of his imprisonment, such as books, rum, coffee, and sugar. She continued this relationship, despite smears on her name that associated her with political activity and prostitution.

When the war drew to a close and her brother James died, many of Elizabeth's nieces and nephews came to live with her and Ralph in Cambridge or nearby. The war had destroyed her and her husband's finances, but they decided to stay with one another. Elizabeth continued to urge her kin to come to Boston to take up shopkeeping, until she fell ill in the spring of 1785. Prior to her death, she drew up a new will that bequeathed much of what was left of her estate to her family, particularly her nieces and family friends.

Death and afterward Elizabeth Murray Campbell Smith Inman died on May 25, 1785, with Polly and Betsy at her side. She was buried in a tomb alongside her second husband, James Smith, at the cemetery in King's Chapel in Boston. Her husband, Ralph Inman, received relatively little of her fortune, causing a great deal of stress for Elizabeth's nieces and the rest of her family in disputing her will.