The Grimké sisters’ abolitionist lecture tour of New England sparked an enormous outcry from ministers and social conservatives, who questioned the propriety of women assuming public roles and demanding civic equality. In an 1839 lyceum lecture titled “The Legal Rights of Women,” Simon Greenleaf, Royall Professor of Law at Harvard College, defended legal and customary restrictions on women’s lives. Replying to Greenleaf, Keziah Kendall — possibly a fictional person created by a women’s rights advocate — sent him the following letter, which two historians recently found among his papers.
KEZIAH KENDALL
My name is Keziah Kendall. I live not many miles from Cambridge, on a farm with two sisters, one older, one younger than myself. I am thirty two. Our parents and only brother are dead — we have a good estate — comfortable house — nice barn, garden, orchard &c and money in the bank besides. … Under these circumstances the whole responsibility of our property, not less than twenty five thousand dollars rest upon me. …
Well — our milkman brought word when he came from market that you were a going to lecture on the legal rights of women, and so I thought I would go and learn. Now I hope you wont think me bold when I say, I did not like that lecture much … [because] there was nothing in it but what every body knows. …
What I wanted to know, was good reasons for some of those laws that I cant account for. … One Lyceum lecture that I heard in C[ambridge] stated that the Americans went to war with the British, because they were taxed without being represented in Parliament. Now we [women] are taxed every year to the full amount of every dollar we possess — town, county, state taxes — taxes for land, for movable [property], for money and all. Now I don’t want to [become a legislative] representative [or] … a “constable or a sheriff,” but I have no voice about public improvements, and I don’t see the justice of being taxed any more than the “revolutionary heroes” did.
Nor do I think we are treated as Christian women ought to be, according to the Bible rule of doing to others as you would others should do unto you. I am told (not by you) that if a woman dies a week after she’s married that her husband takes all her personal property and the use of [all of] her real estate as long as he lives — if a man dies his wife can have her thirds [use of only one-third of the estate] — this does not come up to the Gospel rule. …
Another thing … women have joined the Antislavery societies, and why? Women are kept for slaves as well as [black] men — it is a common cause, deny the justice of it, who can! To be sure I do not wish to go about lecturing like the Misses Grimkie, but I have not the knowledge they have, and I verily believe that if I had been brought up among slaves as they were … and felt a call from humanity to speak, I should run the venture of your displeasure, and that of a good many others like you.
SOURCE : Dianne Avery and Alfred S. Konefsky, “The Daughters of Job: Property Rights and Women’s Lives in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts,” Law and History Review 10 (Fall 1992): 323–356. Copyright © 1992 American Society for Legal History. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.