During the early part of the nineteenth century, when the modern Middle Eastern corporation was born, it was born masculine. The male members of the newly formed corporations named them to reflect their own family lineages. The companies usually carried the name of the oldest son or closest heir to the family fortune, such as Bustrus and Sons. or Debbas and Nephews. However, behind the scenes, women, in particular widows, held shares in the companies. They traded and managed them and bought and sold them in times of drought or locusts. This paper focuses on these female shareholders. It argues that the females lost shares in the company as the company became increasing divorced from its members – that is, as the company became an abstraction that is depersonalized and dehumanized. Specifically, my paper uses the papers of female members of family companies in the Levant to show how they thought about their own holdings. I show how the Ottoman system of land tenure and shareholding provided a space for these women to be agentic subjects in business dealings, both when they were widowed and often as part of the household. This is in sharp counter distinction to companies in Europe at the time, which were gendered male and made up of men. Through these female holders, I show the gradual, and non-linear process of the formation of the modern limited liability company as a model for business. I draw on their voices to show how they were both complicit in and resistant to the abstraction of the company that crystalized during World War I. Through their papers, I examine the violence that is endemic to the creation of the object company as an entity both made-up of members and existing on its own outside of their kinship relations.