Woman and Her Needs.
The First Woman To Join The Lyceum Circuit
Smith, Mrs. E. Oakes. Woman and Her Needs. New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1851.
8vo.; preliminaries heavily foxed; brown cloth; stamped in blind and gilt; spine slightly cocked; extremities frayed and nicked. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this collection of Smith’s New York Tribune suffrage articles and speeches, inspired by a 1851 lecture by Frances Wright and described by one historian as “a plea for the recognition of the abilities of women.” Another notes, “Though advocating political emancipation, the book’s central theme is that women should be free to develop their talents to the fullest.” Smith’s newspaper series earned her a spot on the lyceum lecture circuit, delivering annual lectures on woman’s issues and occasional abolitionist speeches. Bound with a second edition of her novel Shadow Land; or, The Seer (NY: Fowlers and Wells, 1852).
During a precocious childhood of avid reading and writing, Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (1806-1893) conceived a plan to one day run a school for girls. Her aspirations were dashed, however, by her marriage to newspaper editor Seba Smith, at 31 fifteen years her senior. Though she took advantage of every opportunity to write sketches and verse, housework and the rearing of their five sons stole most of her time. When Smith lost their fortune in the panic of 1837, Oakes seized the opportunity to revisit her intellectual endeavors. Hoping to contribute to the family economy, she began to write more aggressively and to publish—first as Mrs. Seba Smith, then as Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and sometimes under the pen names of Oakes Smith and Ernest Helfenstein—in popular women’s periodicals such as the Ladies’ Companion and Godey’s Lady’s Book, as well as in the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham’s American Monthly Magazine. She explored every conceivable genre: instructional stories for children; poetry that earned her the attention of Edgar Allan Poe and others (“The Sinless Child,” in 1843, was especially well-received); historical drama; romance; adventure. Several of her popular novels cover social, moral, and religious issues; “her sentimental story, The Newsboy (1854), seems to have done much to arouse concern in New York over conditions in the slums” (DAB 160-61). Fawn M. Brodie writes,
A minor fixture in New York literary circles, she came to know Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, the landscape artist Thomas Cole, and others. Henry Clay, who met her during this period, found her “irresistibly fascinating.… Seldom has a woman in any age acquired such ascendancy by the mere force of a powerful intellect. Her smile is the play of a sunlit fountain.” (NAW, p. 310)
In the midst of her literary activity, Oakes attended a lecture by Frances Wright in 1851 that inspired the newspaper series collected in this book and spurred her to prepared written examinations of a range of woman’s issues. She began to contribute to Paulina Wright Davis’s feminist journal, Una, wrote pamphlets on marriage and dress reform, and in 1854 published a woman’s rights novel, Bertha and Lily” (NAW, p. 310). Oakes was a charter member of New York’s first woman’s club, Sorosis, and twice in the late ’70s represented North Carolina at the NWSA annual conventions.
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