The Daughters of Job: Property Rights and Women's Lives in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts

Abstract

Sometime in the winter of 1839, Keziah Kendall, a thirty-two-year-old woman living with her two sisters on a dairy farm “not many miles from Cambridge,” heard from her “milkman” that a public lecture would be delivered on the legal rights of women. Kendall “thought [she] would go and learn,” but when she attended she found that she “did not like that lecture much.” The speaker was Simon Greenleaf, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard University, who at the time was delivering lyceum lectures in eastern Massachusetts on the subject of women's rights. Not the least bit intimidated by Greenleaf's stature, Kendall wrote him a candid letter, expressing her disapproval of his talk: “[T]here was nothing in it but what every body knows. … What I wanted to know, was good reasons” for the rules governing the legal rights of women “that I cant account for. I do hope if you are ever to lecture at the Lyceum again, that you will give us some.” Kendall then proceeded to tell Professor Greenleaf the remarkable and poignant story of how her personal experiences had shaped her interest in her own legal rights.