Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, Volume II: Feminist Journalism and Public Activism, 1850-1854

Volume II documents a nineteenth-century literary celebrity's decision to commit herself to the cause of woman's rights. The first volume of this series revealed a feminist sensibility in the subtexts of Elizabeth Oakes Smith's early poetry, fiction, and memoir. Volume II traces the sharp turn in her career at mid-century: a multidimensional effort involving newspaper editorial, a lecture career extending as far as Louisville and Chicago, and throughout these efforts, an attempt to garner the support to inaugurate the first journal owned and edited by women dedicated to the cause of woman's empowerment. Featured are fully annotated editions of two of Oakes Smith's treatises published in the early 1850s (Woman and Her Needs and Hints on Dress and Beauty), along with her most popular lecture, The Dignity of Labor. Correspondence collected and edited here for the first time between Oakes Smith and Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Horace Greeley, and other reform leaders of the period regarding her projected journal, the The Egeria, reveal the economic challenges faced by radical leaders in the Antebellum period. See more