Alfred S. Konefsky

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

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 womens rights. Not the least bit intimidated by Greenleafs 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.

The Legal Profession: From the Revolution to the Civil War

The American legal profession matured and came to prominence during the century prior to the Civil War. The profession had entered the Revolutionary era in a somewhat ambiguous state, enjoying increasing social power and political leadership, but subject to withering criticism and suspicion. Its political influence was clear: twenty-five of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were trained in law; so were thirty-one of the fifty-five members of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia; so were ten of the First Congress’s twenty-five senators and seventeen of its sixty-five representatives. And yet, just three weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Timothy Dwight – Calvinist, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, soon to be staunch Federalist, tutor at Yale College and, within several decades, its president – delivered a commencement address in New Haven full of foreboding, particularly for those among the graduates who would choose the legal profession. What would await them? Little but “{t}hat meanness, that infernal knavery, which multiplies needless litigations, which retards the operation of justice, which, from court to court, upon the most trifling pretences, postpones trial to glean the last emptyings of a client’s pocket, for unjust fees of everlasting attendance, which artfully twists the meaning of law to the side we espouse, which seizes unwarrantable advantages from the prepossessions, ignorance, interests and prejudices of a jury, you will shun rather than death or infamy.” Dwight prayed that, notwithstanding, “{y}our reasonings will be ever fair and open; your constructions of law candid, your endeavors to procure equitable decisions unremitted.”

The Voice of Willard Hurst

Though I corresponded with Willard Hurst over the last twenty-five years, I met him only once. Hurst did not often attend events or meetings outside of Madison, but in 1971 he appeared at a legal history conference at the Harvard Law School to herald the renaissance in the field of American legal history, a renewal in many ways directly traceable to Hursts own work and influence. I had just graduated from law school and was beginning my apprenticeship as a legal historian. With great trepidation I walked up to him to introduce myself at a reception on the first day of the conference. I was surprised when he seemed to recognize my name (I think a list of conference participants may have been circulated in advance), but even more astonished when he said, “Lets go find a quiet corner, I want to talk to you about your father.” My father, Samuel J. Konefsky, had died less than a year before, and Hursts brief conversation with me was the first of the many kindnesses of his that I experienced.