Oakes Smith began her lecture career in June of 1851 at Hope Chapel, where she spoke on “Dress: Its Social and Aesthetic Relations.”

Only six months later, she had written four new lectures and delivered them in Brooklyn, in Worcester MA, in Portland ME, and on Nantucket Island. Through Wendell Phillips, or else by writing directly to the Lyceum at Concord, she booked a lecture among the Transcendentalists for December 31. Her subject was “Womanhood.”

As Secretary of the Concord Lyceum, Henry David Thoreau was the one who wrote out her contract, which would pay her $15 for the engagement, according to records—somewhat less than other figures had been paid that year. Thoreau also served as host of sorts, escorting her that evening, and even being so gallant as to carry her lecture in his pocket for her as they walked and talked.

The experience was disappointing, according to Thoreau. For some reason, he found Oakes Smith too much of a “lady”—for all her talk of anything new. She wore cologne, and he smelled it on himself back at the house (how emasculating, Dave!), but much worse, he felt himself unable to “deliver” the truth to her (as if it was his to deliver)—rather allowing his sense of gallantry to replace the “higher law” of frankness. Sounds like someone disappointed with his own inability to reject the “forms” of social grace, but you decide:

This night I heard Mrs. S----lecture on womanhood. The most important fact about the lecture was that a woman said it, and in that respect it was suggestive. Went to see her afterward, but the interview added nothing to the previous impression, rather subtracted. She was a woman in the too common sense after all. You had to fire small charges: I did not have a finger in once, for fear of blowing away all her works and so ending the game. You had to substitute courtesy for sense and argument. It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady. I carried her lecture in my pocket wrapped in her handkerchief; my pocket exhales cologne to this moment. The championess of woman’s rights still asks you to be a ladies man.

Did Oakes Smith “ask” Thoreau to be a ladies man? One wonders in what language she did that.

But things go much deeper than this.

What seems much more important about this meeting—and one cannot know that the subject wasn’t broached—only that neither party recorded it—is that here together were two, even at that date, of the very few white people who had attempted to climb Mt. Kahtadin, the highest peak in one of the remotest wilds of the State of Maine. Comparing their accounts of the journey—both running into foul weather—Oakes Smith seems to have made it a bit farther toward the summit, and that climbing in a dress! One wonders, indeed, if the resentment one hears behind Thoreau’s journal record has something to do with this comparison, since Oakes Smith was well known for the occasional sarcastic barb. We’ll never know.

What we do know is that when Oakes Smith wrote to the Concord Lyceum Secretary again in 1855 offering her lecture on Margaret Fuller, Fuller’s Transcendentalist brother declined, indicating that the Lyceum had over-committed itself for the season.

THS