A photograph of Kate Sanborn taken during her tenure at Smith College. She inspired young women through her dynamic lectures and enthusiasm for English literature.

While the expectation for women to marry and become the caretaker of the household, Kate Sanborn was an example of a successful, unmarried woman with a flourishing career outside the home. A professor of English literature at numerous women’s colleges, Sanborn emphasized her own individuality through her dynamic lectures and passionate approach to teaching. A pupil once noted of Sanborn’s classes, “To me she was most inspiring. She not only made her subject interesting, but she related it to many other subjects...Her enthusiasm, her keen sense of humor, her unexpected turns of expression, and her freedom from conventional methods of teaching did much to unlock my reserved New England temperament.” [1] In her lessons, Sanborn fostered a space where young women had the opportunity to freely express themselves. Though many of her students would still marry once graduating, Sanborn prepared these young women to embody the strength of the “New Woman” while realizing the agency they had over their own lives.

Weary of the formal dress, dinners, and dancing that plagued her life among New York City elites, Kate Sanborn deserted her apartment to find solitude in the Massachusetts countryside and singlehandedly manage a farm for the first time. She wrote Adopting an Abandoned Farm (1891) to inspire other women that it was possible to do the same. 

Adopting an Abandoned Farm (1891)

Whether one reads Kate Sanborn’s Adopting an Abandoned Farm as a detailed description of a midlife crisis or an impassioned statement on women’s equality, the series of humorous autobiographical essays recounts Sanborn’s decision to farm as her hobby. Unmarried, middle-aged, and bored with her routine life as a public intellectual, Sanborn left the hustle-and-bustle of New York City to pursue a newfound interest: poultry farming. Published in 1891 at the forefront of the Progressive Era, Adopting an Abandoned Farm portrays Sanborn’s independent spirit as she embarks on atypical tasks for a single woman. Despite the rise of the “New Woman” at the end of the nineteenth century which shifted traditional gender roles and allowed more women to enter the workforce, farming fell outside of the professional norm for an educated upper-middle class woman like Sanborn who frequently brushed elbows with New York City elites.[1] Opposing the views of the time period, Sanborn affirms that, “men are making handsome incomes from this business—women can do the same.”[2] This emphasis on women’s ability to embrace a typically male-pursuit runs throughout the essays hidden by Sanborn’s self-deprecating sense of humor. Through such implications, Adopting an Abandoned Farm was much more than a source of entertainment. Rather, the essays represented Sanborn’s devotion to empowering young women over the course of her life.