Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Wellesley College (Seven Sisters), 106 Central St, Wellesley, MA 02481
Bandon Hill Cemetery, Plough Ln, Wallington SM6 8JQ, United Kingdom
Elizabeth Kimball Kendall (April 7, 1855 - May 21, 1952) was born on April 7, 1855, in Middlebury, Vermont, to Lucretia Hasseltine Kendall and Reuben Safford Kendall. Her
father served as a U.S. consul and minister in Europe, leading the family to live abroad during her youth.
Kendall received much of her early education in Germany and France. She later studied history at Oxford University between 1885 and 1887. Demonstrating a strong multi-disciplinary drive, she earned a law degree (LL.B.) from Boston University in 1892 and a Master of Arts (M.A.) from Radcliffe College in 1899.
Kendall joined Wellesley College in 1879 as an instructor, teaching French, German, history, and political science.
She became an associate professor in 1892 and was promoted to full professor and head of the History Department in 1902. She also taught Wellesley's sole political science course and constitutional law during her tenure.
She co-authored three prominent history textbooks with fellow Wellesley faculty member Katharine Coman: The Growth of the English Nation (1894), A History of England for High Schools and Academies (1899), A Short History of England for School Use (1901). She also compiled the Source-Book of English History (1900).
Kendall was an avid traveler. Her extensive journeys across Europe, India, and China culminated in her 1913 book, A Wayfarer in China: Impressions of a Trip Across West China and Mongolia, earning her fellowship in the Royal Geographical Society.
She retired from Wellesley in 1920 as professor emeritus (with a faculty chair established in her name) and subsequently spent six years teaching at Yenching University in Beijing. In August of 1951, she sailed from New York on aboard the Queen Mary to visit her only living relative, Helen Clark, the wife of her late nephew Roderic Kendall Clark. At the time she was believed to the oldest passenger to ever cross the Atlantic unattended. She passed away in England on May 21, 1952. Her Ashes were dispersed over grave No. G249 at Bandon Hill Cemetery.
During the period between 1900 and 1910, Wellesley College—like many turn-of-the-century women's colleges—served as an incubator for a pioneering generation of professional women, forming a unique space in early LGBTQ and women's history:
Historical and architectural analyses of early women's colleges note that these campuses functioned as unconventional "queer" spaces relative to the strict social and gender norms of the era. They were populated by highly educated women who lived independently, built professional careers, and formed deep, lifelong emotional and domestic bonds with one another.
Kendall's closest academic collaborator, Katharine Coman, was part of the prominent Wellesley faculty circle that included poet and educator Katharine Lee Bates. Coman and Bates lived together in a celebrated long-term "Boston marriage"—a socially accepted term for committed, domestic partnerships between women during that era.
While figures like Kendall and her contemporaries generally maintained strict discretion regarding their private lives in alignment with Victorian and Edwardian standards of respectability, their private correspondence, shared households, and professional solidarity mapped out alternative domestic arrangements. These networks provided the foundational community structures that contemporary historians recognize as vital precursors to modern lesbian and queer history.
References:
 In Adamless Eden: The Community of Women Faculty at Wellesley by Patricia Ann Palmieri |
Other references:
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