Elizabeth Oakes Smith: The Puritan as Feminist
p. 109-126
Texte intégral
1Virtually all of the facts of the early life of Elizabeth Oakes Smith — and more importantly, her interpretation of them — can be found in her autobiography, written for the most part (and some of it published) in the twenty-five years or so before her death in 18931. She called it «A Human Life, being the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith,» announcing even in her title the intentions of her work: to give meaning not only to her own life but to the lives of women generally, trusting that «by so doing the sex will be better understood» (3). The autobiography, however, does not clearly reconcile these two aims, for she devotes nearly half of it to her childhood — before her marriage at sixteen — in an effort in part, at least, to comprehend the profoundly contradictory effects of religion in her life generally and upon what she sees as her «public» life, her identity as a writer, lecturer, and pioneering feminist. «My Puritan blood foretells all there would be in me, and perhaps come to me,» she writes (235-36).
2Smith was born 12 August 1806, in North Yarmouth, Maine, to David and Sophia (Blanchard) Prince. In her autobiography, she recounts with affection and some amusement this conjoining of conflicting Puritan and Universalist temperaments. Affection — nostalgia, even — for olden values, times and customs associated with her New England childhood is clear, but at the same time we find an often guilty, yet sometimes celebratory, sense of her own rebellion against what these sentiments would produce in the future of the child, a rebellion crucial to her own sense of her ultimate role as representative woman and, ultimately, to our own understanding. When she writes that her Puritan blood would foretell all, we should ponder the significance of the carefully balanced structure of that assertion: «I was Puritan, blood, bone and soul; by long descent forced to question; by long descent trained to obedience» (230).
3Like so many feminists of her generation, a Puritan heritage imbued her with a profound sense of duty, even martyrdom, that would endure throughout her life. Like them too, though «bred with thoroughly Calvinistic opinions» she would persistently question those «opinions» even as a child: «my Mother would tell me it was an improper way to talk, and bade me be silent,» Smith recalls, adding that she did not think it «was right to keep little girls ignorant» (93-94). Reflecting upon her formally joining the Puritan church at thirteen, she testifies to what W. E. B. Du Bois would later call «double consciousness»2: «I felt that my position was a false one in many ways, that my Puritanic proclivities did not harmonize with the real about me. I was expected to be one thing, and felt I was another. I wanted study, thought, idealism...(228). Many years later, looking back at her career as feminist lecturer and writer in a «new field, designed to reveal woman to herself» (548), she would say with obvious relish, «I was reaping the benefit of stepping outside of my Puritanic bondage. Brought up as I had been, I had so much to renounce, and so much to do, that I almost danced over my freedom» (549).
4Even as a child she tested her physical and spiritual mettle with a vigor reminiscent of the Christian martyrs whose lives she read of in John Foxe’s book (194). In retrospect, it seemed clear to her that holding her fingers to a flame, running needles through her flesh and applying a blister plaster that caused her to faint prepared her for the martyrdom of an early marriage as well as the «cruel slanders» she endured as a feminist (265-66, 202).
5She sought «study, thought, idealism» with Puritanical vigor, albeit again with a sense of the conflicts between the expectations of others and her need for identity, self-worth, and freedom of thought. She began to read at the age of two and pursued a regimen that included not only the popular religious tracts expected of a Puritan child, but also texts far beyond her years: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Foxe’s Lives of the Christian Martyrs, and despite objections of her grandmother more secular books too — Fielding, Richardson, and Defoe. Retrospectively, she would describe this precocity in terms of living two lives in one: that of the «mere common child, and that of the spiritualistic, knowledge-seeking, earnest, conscientious young creature awed by the mystery of life, and concealing, as far as possible, this life from all others, for I was sensitive to ridicule, and often had things said to me that wounded my self-love» (91). Her mother, for example, did not approve of her intellectual preoccupations. «You really look as if you were not bright, sometimes,» she would say (91). So intense was this regimen of reading, thought, and deep dreams that at the age of six, Smith «‘went back,’» forgetting not merely what she had read but how to read.
6Above all, her mother could not endorse the direction that her daughter’s precocity led her. Upon hearing Elizabeth’s proposal that she board with a professor at Bowdoin College, learn the lessons of the young men, and then «keep a great school for girls,» her mother replied flatly, «No daughter of mine is going to be a school-ma’am» (230). Elizabeth knew full well that her mother had something more traditional in mind—an early marriage. She would later tell her daughter that she feared unless she married young, she should not marry at all; «she saw then nothing in life for a girl but to enter into these bonds,» Smith wrote (232). Thus on 6 March 1823, at sixteen, she married Seba Smith, a Bowdoin-educated Portland newspaper editor with literary aspirations, whom she would describe in retrospect as bald, bespectacled and, at thirty-one, nearly twice her age (251).3
7As Smith remembered the moment in later life, she was «no more fit for such a life than a child; » nevertheless, with the Puritanical sense of duty that she had learned as a child, she set to work running a household that included printers, apprentices, and soon six sons (four of whom would live to adulthood), as well as a husband that she described in her autobiography as «exacting,» «essentially a bachelor» (266). What she saw as the tragic consequences of an early marriage provided a unique dimension to her feminist writings of the 1850s. Indeed, as she later recalled, it was her experience as a young wife and mother that made her «a believer and advocate for the doctrine [of Woman Suffrage] long before I became so publicly, for I could not smother aspiration nor could I be made a mere household woman» (268). She could not know it, of course, but these aspirations took the form of actions consistent with those of future contemporary feminists taking their first steps out of their culturally prescribed sphere. She shifted her allegiance to a more liberal, Unitarian, congregation, for example, and participated actively in the many reform and charitable organizations, including «anti-slavery societies, Dorcas societies, and other charitable enterprises in which the women of Portland were pre-eminent» (487). More significantly, she contributed regularly to Portland papers including the Eastern Argus, edited by her husband in the early 1820s, and to the newspaper he published and edited beginning in 1829, the Daily Courier, his weekly Family Reader, and later, the Downingville Gazette.
8Letters to her husband in the 1830s offer a fascinating, because immediate and intimate, insight into her life and character at the time that the later, reflective autobiographical writings do not — chatty, loving letters of an already accomplished woman, one with a good-humored, wittily ironic, if nascent, feminist consciousness. In 1833, with her husband in Boston (their first separation in ten years), she took charge of the Courier and Family Reader in Portland, dealing effectively with male contributors. Cognizant of her abilities, but equally aware of the social prescriptions that made such a position improper, Smith at one point wryly admits that she hates «to feel so much responsibility» in the editor’s chair, «superadded to so much ignorance, inexperience etc., and the more grievous offense of wearing petticoats.»4 A letter written the next day indicates a wife comfortably confiding in her husband, a marriage that fulfils: she misses telling all she thinks, and she urges him to return because «my brain will run over if you don’t come home and let me empty my budget.»5 Apart again in 1837, she writes to her Seba that she was «obliged, without any preparation,» to address a meeting of the Maternal Association, typically a male duty. Her conclusions reveal a woman fully aware of the implications of the challenge and absolutely undaunted by it: «I doubt whether any of the «lords of creation» ever had a more attentive audience, and that too for nearly an hour.»6
9Their life changed dramatically, however, with bankruptcy in 1837, and 1839 found the family in New York City, husband and wife struggling to make a living with the only saleable skill they both had, writing. In an 1842 letter to Rufus Griswold, Seba Smith admitted: «his pen was no longer a crutch but merely a staff» nevertheless, «since Mrs. Smith and myself have each a staff, if we walk together I hope that we may keep from falling. »7 To contribute more effectively to her family’s support, Smith began publishing her work both in her own name and under several pseudonyms — her initials, «Oakes Smith,» and «Ernest Helfenstein» — so that two of her works could appear in the same magazine. In need of income, and wary of the reading public’s distaste for women who presumed to trespass into professional life, at this stage at least, Smith was careful to veil herself behind not only pseudonyms but also publishers and editors whose agencies supplied a «public» image that allowed her to maintain a properly «private» feminine character in the public eye. In truth, however, by projection or by proxy, Smith was beginning to secure a public position equal to that of her husband.
10With the publication of «The Sinless Child,» published in the Southern Literary Messenger early in 1842, Smith began to satisfy that elusive quality Poe described as «both the critical and the popular taste.»8 Widely reprinted in journals and newspapers, the poem not only brought fifty dollars, but also the more valuable quantity of a literary reputation that would enable Smith to place her work in her choice of journals for the rest of the decade at competitive rates. By 1845, she had positioned herself socially and professionally at the center of New York literary life — what Poe deemed «The Literati» — publishing (still under various names) poetry, prose, fiction and drama at a torrid pace. Between 1842 and 1848 she produced two novels, two volumes of poetry, three volumes of children’s stories9, and countless poems, stories and articles for Graham’s Magazine, Godey’s Ladies Book, Snowden’s Ladies Companion, Sartain’s Magazine — to name a few journals. While contributing in various capacities to her husband’s literary magazine, The Rover (1844-1846), Smith also wrote for over two dozen giftbooks, edited two volumes of The Mayflower (1846-47), adding at least one play, produced in 1850. In a letter dated 28 Mardi, 1848, Lydia Sigourney, one of the country’s best-known and prolific poets, told Smith, «I marvel at the energy and rapidity with which you complete your intellectual performances... Please let me know... on how many literary labors you are at present engaged; and how you find time for them — and for material and social intercourse.»10
11As Sigourney’s letter and others of the period testify, by 1849 Smith had become a celebrity11, and for a time she enjoyed the freedom and distinction her literary labors had earned. Yet even in her triumph, as she recalls in her autobiography, she remained «haunted by the old visions of my childhood when I was to do some great work for the good of souls in the world, and hence was more out of place in... gay circles than my friends realized. Literature did not content me» (497). «Nothing of what I have felt, nothing of my real self, my whole self, has appeared in my writings,» she confessed in a letter to Sigourney, who, reading easily between the lines, promptly cautioned Smith against any radical — that is to say, feminist — thoughts.12
12Yet Sigourney and others were too late. Although far from Seneca Falls in 1848, Smith was not only aware of the incipient feminist movement, but preparing to contribute to it:
While I was thus engaged, one of the most toilsome of the sex, I was greatly indignant at the abuse heaped upon a few resolute women, who were meeting together earnest in their discussions of the rights pertaining to women as a part of the body politic. I had no uncertain opinions upon these subjects, which had been the theme of discourse in my parlors for many years... [T]hat touch of radicalism, always coursing through the veins of a Puritan, would no longer be repressed. (543-44)
13Smith’s shift from writing stories for gilt gift books to writing feminist arguments for the minuscule fonts of the daily New York Tribune required only a change in register. Borrowing from her own sense of martyrdom that informs «The Sinless Child» who dies to save in 1842, Smith had woven the same theme into The Salamander in 1848, where we find not a young girl, but an Angel who has left the spiritual realm to save the material world, and whose return to the realm of the spiritual requires painful martyrdom in a baptism of fire. True, this self-sacrificing figure — representing «woman» on at least one level of Smith’s allegory — can hardly be seen as «radical. » What was radical was Smith’s choice at the height of her professional success to drop the veil supplied by her profession, and by the male literary agents through whom she had been more or less passively presented to the public in her fiction. As the full sub-title of the novel — A Legend for Christmas, Found Amongst the Papers of the Late Ernest Helfenstein — reveals, by 1848 Smith had decided that it was time for «Ernest Helfenstein» to die, and time for her to step forth as «Elizabeth Oakes Smith,» who would write and speak earnestly of her experiences and needs as well as those of other women in ante-bellum America.
14Having resolved to throw her energies into this new field, Smith was still apprehensive about its inherent politics, no doubt aware of the risks involved in losing a belletristic reputation that had ensured her a steady income. Overcoming these reservations, in October 1850, she attended the First National Suffrage Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, serving on the Education Committee13 and was inspired by the overall spirit of solidarity and mutual support she had witnessed. On her return to New York she began to publish a series of papers in the Tribune, where the merits and purposes of the Convention were being hotly debated.
15Entitled Woman and Her Needs, this series of papers constitutes Smith’s first major contribution to the early feminist movement.14 What distinguished them from other feminist works of Smith’s day was not the issues they addressed — the extent of woman’s «sphere,» property law, women’s education and professional opportunities — but Smith’s position in the debate over women’s rights and her rhetorical approach to that debate. Because Smith was already widely known, yet «unattached» to volatile social issues such as abolition that had silenced or distanced precursors such as Angelina Grimké and Lydia Maria Child, she brought a large audience with her. And if many of Smith’s arguments sounded familiar to the Boston elite who had attended Margaret Fuller’s «conversations» in the 1840s, they were not yet familiar — much less acceptable — to a much larger and varied group making up the readership of Greeley’s Tribune in 1850. Given this varied audience, Smith conceived her task differently than Fuller had in challenging readers of The Great Lawsuit (1843) «to meet me on my own ground.» More of a rhetorician than Fuller, Smith first sought a common ground — a set of terms and values her audience had already agreed upon — and then set out to revise the meaning of those values through argument.
16Accordingly, in Woman and Her Needs Smith chose the institution of marriage as common ground, arguing in defense of its sanctity. Characteristically, however, Smith moved quickly from such a bland and easily acceptable position to more radical implications, hoping to take her readers with her. The sanctity of marriage had to be defended, she argued, because it has been debased, and its debasement begins early, in education: «while the boy is steadily and severely taxed» and «properly taught the dignity of labor in all its manifold shapes of thought, invention, or manual effort» «girls are trained... to be dependent, [to] gain a position by marriage, or have none» (41-42). Prepared for no other station in life, a woman without fortune (again Smith addressed «the majority”) too often does not marry but «is taken» in marriage, «not for her intrinsic worthiness, her own beauty and genius» but as a species of exchange or barter by which she becomes «the reflex glory of another» or in worse cases, a recipient of all her husband’s «meanness, debasement, and disgrace» (49).
17Typically, as her radical position rose to the surface of her argument — or when her description of «woman’s» sufferings began to sound too much like autobiography — Smith took a step backwards, granting that she had moved beyond the «common ground» her audience might recognize, but simultaneously refusing to give up that ground as «common. » Admitting that many are content to view the marriage relation «as a commercial relation or one of social convenience only,» she claimed not to attack «existing relations,» but only asked that «humanity [be] courageously truthful in its vocabulary» — that if marriage is seen as a commercial relation, then «the marriage contract [should] be put on the same base with other contracts» (57). In asking her audience to grant this point, Smith was asking for it all. Reminding them of their common legal authority, Blackstone, she pointed out that «the very nature of a contract presupposes equality» (53). Thus, even in its basest material form, the marriage contract implied the necessity of improving women’s «bargaining» position: only when the element of «compulsion» in such a contract was removed by allowing woman the right to own property, the right to labor for her own wages, and the education or training that would allow her to find employment, would her «holiest attributes» become a «free-will offering» (45); only from such equality can the relations between the sexes «take place under circumstances of true dignity» (44). The strength of the argument was its very obviousness; in later works she would wryly remark that in fact she was only reminding men of what they already knew, «helping our Brothers to consistency.»15
18Over the next decade, Smith would contribute dozens of articles and letters on feminist subjects to the Tribune, but she easily became frustrated with Horace Greeley’s editorial policies, which limited the kind of dialogue she and other feminists considered high on the list of woman’s needs. To move beyond these limits, Smith took the dramatic step in 1851 of speaking in public to mixed audiences, becoming one of the first women in the country to lecture on the Lyceum circuit. In one sense this second career, lucrative as well as satisfying, meant genuine independence, sending her each year as far as Illinois and Kentucky. Like other women activists, however, she quickly discovered that her family — not to mention the public — were hardly ready to do without her presence «at home. » A letter from Chicago reveals her frustrations with the conflicting demands of her work and family:
I am greatly disappointed that I did not have letters from the boys. If I do not find letters at Buffalo, I shall be obliged to [throw] up other engagements and return, for I have not the strength to labor for no purpose. If my children are idle and wasting what have I earned? 16
19Smith never published her lectures, but manuscript copies and published reviews show that she employed in them many of the same rhetorical strategies, and often some of the same language, of her published writings. Lyceum participants who attended Smith’s lecture on «The Dignity of Labor» for example, were entertained momentarily with a discourse on commerce typical of the era, only to find the ground shift quickly to the dignity of women’s labor, the necessity of fair wages for women laborers, and the need for woman suffrage to ensure that those women who earned money and owned property were represented in the government that taxed their income. Likewise, audiences attending «Our Humanity» heard not only of woman’s potentially «humanizing» influence on an increasingly materialistic world, but also of «equal rights and privileges to all without distinction of sex.»17
20Tall, confident, and often speaking ex tempore, Smith made an imposing figure on the lecture platform, disarming her mostly male audiences, and setting an example that brought her hundreds of letters from women across the country. Reviews were largely favorable, often testifying to changes in public opinion. After a lecture in East Greenwich, Connecticut, an editor reported, «now that the lectures have come off, and two others with it, we believe the current has entirely turned» while another admitted,
However much we may differ from this lady, we are ever willing to concede that she is as true as intellectual, and is destined to exert great influence on the popular mind in behalf of the sex of which she has constituted herself and without egotism, the mouthpiece. 18
21Smith’s lecture career brought her squarely into the center of American social reform. Largely abandoning the pages of Godey and Graham, she lectured and corresponded with Emerson, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Gerrit Smith. These associations have led modem feminists to see Smith more as a male-identified figure than a sister in the movement, yet Smith was clearly at home in feminist circles as well, from the most moderate to the most radical. Inspired by Fanny Wright, whose lecture she had attended soon after her arrival in New York City in 1839, she extended and adapted the arguments of Margaret Fuller, and became a household name at the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Her tone and demeanor led some observers to describe her as «one of the most moderate of the feminist reformers»19 but as a letter from Lucretia Mott confirms, Smith’s reputation in more conservative circles was a welcome addition to the movement:
It is gratifying as well as encouraging that the Author of «Woman and her Needs» feels constrained to lift up her voice also in behalf of her sex. Even tho’ not ultra, may that voice wax louder and louder, until every obstacle to woman’s entire enfranchisement shall be removed out of the way. 20
22Smith’s attempt to work across a wide political spectrum can be seen more clearly in the mass of writing she continued to publish even while on the lecture circuit. On one level, her articles on divorce and reports on Women’s Rights Conventions continued to appear in the Tribune, and she made plans to launch a specifically feminist journal, The Egeria, pronouncing boldly in her prospectus that «the period has arrived when the woman intellect must have some exponent, more courageous, sincere and devoted than the ordinary newspapers of the day have hitherto been able to afford.»21 At the same time, however, she was reaching out to a wider readership in two journals she edited with her husband during the 1850s, The Weekly Budget, and The United States Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly, publishing articles on the book trade, the pernicious effects of fashion, private insane hospitals, public education, and women physicians. As usual, she measured her readers carefully, printing not only numerous biographical portraits of notable men and women of the age, but also a series of character portraits that introduced genteel readers to the working men and women of New York. On a third level, Smith continued to produce, and maintained a following for, her fiction, publishing three social reform novels between 1852 and 1854.22 Although no full bibliography of Smith’s work has been written, even a brief look at the volume of her writing in the 1850s — let alone the itinerary of her lecture tours — indicates that such a pace could not be maintained. Thus, in the winter of 1857, at the height of her career, Smith suffered a physical breakdown that left her bed-ridden for six months. Even when her health returned, however, domestic crises over the next decade would greatly reduce her public activities.
23In 1859, the family sold their home and publishing company in New York City and moved to rural Patchogue, Long Island, where they purchased and remodelled a three-story mansion they named «The Willows. » Living in relative luxury in a home furnished with a billiard room and an aviary, Smith also found herself living in relative isolation, «as cut off from the world as [she] had been in 1823,» the year of her marriage.23 She inaugurated a lyceum program at a Patchogue theater and lectured periodically on woman suffrage, spiritualism, and temperance. These attempts to continue her reform efforts were largely rejected by local residents.24 Certainly her radical opinions made her a local pariah, but even more damaging were reports of her eldest son’s arrest and indictment in December 1861 for brokering shipments of arms to the Confederate States. Her attempts to have her son publicly exonerated over the next decade both drained her energy and clearly damaged her reputation. By the end of the 1860s her husband and two of her sons were dead, her eldest son in exile, and her work «in the world» left unfinished. «I must pass from this sphere of life half my true best self unawakened,» she wrote in her diary in March 1865, «or rather — with an ineffable stirring, that trembled into silence again.»25 At this point in her life, it could only have been a complete aversion to such «silence» — to being silenced as she had been as a «good» Puritan child — that drove Smith both inward and onward.
24Tragedy, economic travails, a sense of a loss of professional and Personal worth, and above all the need to find an identity within the context of those exigencies mark Smith’s last years. The happiest period was surely in 1877 and 1878, when she served as pastor of an Independent Church in Canastota, New York. «Her sermons there were humanistic in nature, rather than strictly Biblical» Wynola Richards writes, for a time giving new meaning to Smith’s life: «instead of the previous unhappiness, her letters and diary for 1877 revealed a busy, happy, contented person.»26 Smith herself wrote, «I have had a most pleasant summer — met everywhere with a kind appreciation and personal love.»27 Tragedy struck again, however, on July 4, 1879, when four of her granddaughters drowned in a boating accident.
25In poems and «reminiscences» published in the 1870s, Smith’s weariness with the ideological inertia of her audiences is evident. She continued her work on behalf of woman’s suffrage, however, attending National Woman Suffrage Association conventions in Rochester in 1878, and in January 1879, addressing the Convention of Woman Suffragists in Washington, D.C., on «Biology and Women’s Rights. » It was «very well received by the audience,» she wrote in her journal, «not as well by the Platform.»28 At local levels, she felt her efforts were equally unavailing. One of only six women who attended an 1886 suffragist meeting in Greensboro, North Carolina, that the newspapers reported as a «literary meeting,» she observed bitterly: «To write books and poems is not what is wanted. Literature is always accepted — progress is not — and is little accepted in the South.»29 Later in the month, Susan B. Anthony’s invitation to the Women’s Suffrage Convention in Washington did not arrive in time for her to attend — which she may have seen as no accident. Certainly she felt something of an anachronism in these years: recalling William Ellery Channing in her 1890 diary, she wrote of him as the «van guard of Unitarianism — I of Women Suffrage — witness my Lecture so many, many times given, my Woman and Her Needs — I am less a Poet than I might have been because I recognized a great truth of my sex, and had to express it...» and now at eighty four, «the women persist in keeping me in the back ground.»30
26Throughout all of these years and the trials they posed, her autobiography in its various forms provided an outlet for an ongoing search for identity and worth. A series of «Autobiographic Notes» in Beadle’s Monthly in 1867 and another in Baldwin’s Monthly in the 1870s offered vignettes of people she had known — Edgar Allan Poe, Sarah Helen Whitman, Rufus Griswold, Nathaniel P. Willis. Smith’s purpose, again, had dual intentions: providing insight for readers into what was beginning to be recognized as the first era of American literary independence and defining her significant role in that era. With a new series titled «The Puritan Child, Being an Autobiography» beginning in the Phrenological Journal in June 1881, however, Smith’s recollections became much more personal, as she returned to the period of her life that she felt was most formative and about which she was most ambivalent. Significantly, at this point she began to put together the formally complete autobiography, «A Human Life,» which would occupy her virtually to the end of that life.
27The struggle, if not the compelling need, to do this can be seen in her diary for 1887, remarkable for its detailed, day-to-day reflections, but more for her profound sense of a life coming to an end and her passionate need to render that life in a meaningful way. The entry for 29 April 1887 seems most telling:
I feel something like shame when I am writing on my autobiography, so much less do I find myself than the promise of my childhood. I have written this out with some care, and in solemn truth. I wonder if a modest woman would even dare to write out the multitudinous thoughts, disappointments, and sense of debasement which one experiences in her marriage relation? I have known women to talk indecently and freely in this matter. They were simply disgusting to me. Utter silence is the law. 31
28In the face of everything else happening to her — in contrast to everything that she had accomplished — she sought still to understand what she saw as her most profound concerns in defining her life and presenting it to the public: the troubled and still-troubling conjoining of child-hood and marriage.
29Later that year, the death of Appleton (her oldest, most accomplished, and probably her favorite son) nearly prostrated her. Alone, depressed, struggling with the need to create a public identity that would at the same time reconcile with her private sense of self, she could still find a simple, but profound affirmation of life that transcended all: «Only one son left» she wrote in 1889, who tries to «keep her in life and hope» but «he cannot know, nobody can — how I cling to this world with all its trials. How beautiful it is!»32
30Smith’s sense of isolation in her last years was ideological as well as Personal. Outliving almost two generations of her immediate family, she had also lived through and finally outlived a way of thinking inherited from her Puritan forebears. To the rising generation of feminists — and later, to many in the dawning Progressive Era — Smith’s lack of tolerance for material gains at the expense of continued spiritual striving was impractical, if not offensive. Taken out of a context in which the future of the community and the future of the self are inextricably bound, her inwardness, her enduring sense of selflessness, seemed counter-productive. In our own day, however, as feminist critics and historians work to recover the social, political and ideological contexts out of which modem feminism emerged, the written legacy of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, as a record of private experience and public activism, stands as a resource of enormous potential. A testament to the complex pressures weighing upon nineteenth-century American women, her autobiographical writings, journals, and correspondence are unparalleled, and her numberless essays and lectures offer excellent insight into the understanding of women’s issues in the «popular» American mind of her day.
31Surely, though, Smith’s work is for our own day as well, for her writing continues to beckon with the imperative she used as a motto — «Onward. » In the end, her work will be done only when her «obvious» arguments are made even more obvious to our own culture — so obvious that we forget that they are, in fact, «arguments» at all.
Notes de bas de page
1 The manuscript autobiography of six hundred pages is part of the Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, owned by The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses. A highly selective and edited version of the manuscript was published by Mary Alice Wyman, Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Lewiston, Maine: Lewiston Journal, 1924). See also Wyman’s Two American Pioneers, Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith (New York: Columbia UP, 1926).
2 In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Du Bois describes the experience of an African-American as «a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. » W.E.B. Du Bois, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986) 364.
3 Seba Smith is remembered — and was best known in his own day — as the creator of the cracker-barrel philosopher Jack Downing, who may have been the most popular character in nineteenth-century American literature. See Cameron Nickels, New England Humor (Knoxville: Tennessee UP, 1993) 155-85; and Daniel Royot, L’Humour Américain: Des Puritains Aux Yankees (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1980) 249-73.
4 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, letter to Seba Smith, 15 November 1833, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
5 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, letter to Seba Smith, 16 November 1833, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
6 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, letter to Seba Smith, 30 May 1837, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
7 Seba Smith, letter to Rufus Griswold, 11 August 1842, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library.
8 On the surface the poem provided a model of female innocence and purity highly approved of by cultural custodians such as Griswold; for this reason modem feminist critics such as Emily Stipes Watts have dismissed it as finally «unreal» and «self-indulgent. » See The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (Austin: U Texas P, 1977). At a slightly deeper level—which becomes clear on a closer examination of Smith’s correspondence in the 1830s and 40s—the poem is autobiographical, allegorizing the tale of her own mission (traceable to her childhood) to infuse the material world, now led by lost and fallen men, with spiritual truths that might save it from its present degradation.
9 The Western Captive appeared in two «extras» (numbers 25-28) in Park Benjamin’s «mammoth» weekly, The New World in 1842; The Salamander: A Legend for Christmas, Found Amongst the Papers of the Late Ernest Helfenstein was published in 1848 by George Putnam, and illustrated by F. O. Darley. Beginning with an 1851 edition, The Salamander bore the title Hugo, A Legend of Rockland Lake.
The Sinless Child and Other Poems by Mrs. Seba Smith, ed. John Keese (1843), and The Poetical Writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, ed. Rufus Griswold (1845). Although the title of this second work seems to signal a cumulative literary career even as it literally entitles her own identity as the creator of it, its half title, Poems by Mrs. Seba Smith, recalls Smith’s double-consciousness.
See The True Child (1845), The Moss Cup (1846), and The Dandelion (1846), which were each half-titled Stories Not for Good Children, Nor Bad Children, But for Real Children.
10 Lydia Sigourney, letter to Elizabeth Oakes Smith, 1 May 1848, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
11 In a letter to Smith dated 24 September 1849, for example, Elizabeth Bogart marvels at her friend’s new-found fame, quoting enthusiastically from a gossip column in the New York Home Journal detailing Smith’s vacation in Maine with New York friends; Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. It is important to note that in some feminist histories, this reputation alone has endured; late in the century, Susan B. Anthony’s biographer Ida Husted would refer to Smith as «a fashionable lady from Boston.”
12 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, letter to Lydia Sigourney, 3 October 1849, Watkinson Library, Trinity College.
13 In light of Smith’s career-move at this time, lines quoted from Frederick Douglass’s speech at the convention in The New York Tribune are apt: «Women may write books of poetry, travels, &c., and they will be read with avidity. Let them strike out in some other paths where they are not now allowed to go. If there is some kind of business from which they are excluded, let some heroic Woman enter upon that business, as some of these noble Women have entered upon the practice of medicine’” New York Tribune, 16 October 1850: 6.
14 Smith’s ten articles appeared originally in The New York Tribune on 21 and 30 November, and 11 December 1850; 23 January, 4 and 21 March, 24 April, 15 May, 8 and 19 June 1851. After some revision, the essays appeared in book form in late 1851, published in New York by Fowler and Wells, and reprinted in Women in America: From Colonial Times to the 20th Century (New York: Arno Press, 1974). References in parentheses are to this facsimile edition.
15 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, «The Dignity of Labor» ms. lecture, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, 16.
16 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, letter to Seba Smith, 14 June 1852, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
17 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, «Our Humanity,» MS lecture, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, 39.
18 Scrapbook, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. The powerful potential of Smith’s lectures are equally visible in negative reviews. In Riddle’s Family Journal, 23 December 1824, for example, a conservative editor complained that Smith’s lectures are «calculated to do harm»; like Fanny Fern’s recent book, they will get lots of «ordinary» folk complaining that they have been ill used.”
19 L.S.M., review, «Woman and Her Needs» DeBow’s Southern and Western Review 13 (September 1852): 269.
20 Lucretia Mott, letter to Elizabeth Oakes Smith, 23 February 1852, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library.
21 Smith curtailed her plans for The Egeria in early 1853, when she discovered that Paulina Wright Davis was about to launch a similar venture in The Una. Disappointed that Davis, whom she considered a friend, had thus supplanted both her intellectual and monetary investments in The Egeria without contacting her personally, Smith somewhat reluctantly transferred subscriptions for her own journal to Davis’s, and became a supporter and contributor to The Una.
22 Shadowland, or the Seer (1852); Bertha and Lily (1854); and The Newsboy (1854). The most successful of these in Smith’s time was The Newsboy, which went through several printings in 1854 alone. The semi-autobiographical Bertha and Lily was more popular among reformers than in family circles, the former praising the virtue and wisdom of a single mother.
23 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, diary, March 1865, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library.
24 Current residents recount the story of a crowd following Smith out of the Patchogue theater after a temperance lecture, threatening to stone her house. See Jane S. Gombieski, «100 Years Ago, Feminist Spoke in this Legislative District,» Three Village Herald, 29 September 1993: 11-12.
25 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, diary, March 1865, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library.
26 Wynola L. Richards, «A Review of the Life and Writings of Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Feminist, Author, and Lecturer, 1806-1893,» diss., Ball State University, 1981, 61.
27 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, letter to Augusta Oakes Smith, 29 November 1878, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
28 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, scrapbook, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library.
29 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, diary, 5 January 1887, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
30 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, journal, 27 March 1890, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, New York Public Library.
31 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, diary, 29 April 1887, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers (#38-707), Manuscripts Division, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library.
32 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, diary, 16 June 1889, Elizabeth Oakes Smith Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library. Her youngest son, Alvin Oaksmith, died in 1902.
Auteurs
James Madison University.
Northeastern Illinois University.
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