Even into my fourth decade recovering the work of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, her paradox continues to assert itself: how could such a ubiquitous and popular and to some notorious writer of the nineteenth century have been so firmly forgotten in our cultural history?
In 1978, the very powerful and respectable feminist historian Nina Baym declared Oakes Smith “not a team player” and her essentialist claim for women’s spiritual superiority a political dead-end. I suppose there is something to those claims, and why would scholars of the 2nd wave bother trying to refute them? Baym was a leader in the field, and there were/are all sorts of nineteenth century figures who did not write so much we need to sift through, whose style is more straightforward, whose positions are more clearly cut.
In the writing of anyone who writes as much as Oakes Smith did one is bound to find contradictions, and as I’ve argued, so often was she writing to accommodate--and manipulate—the expectations of paying readers and editors, it does take time to discern what her personal political positions really were. Moreover, those positions developed over time. But even before Oakes Smith joined the woman’s movement and participated in national conventions, her positions had become more progressive than has been acknowledged.
Reading over Woman and Her Needs for the umpteenth time as I proof volume II of her Selected Writings, I was struck by the end of a paragraph in the 10th chapter that I’ve never quoted before—perhaps never quite seen before. Not only does it answer the “team player” question—it responds directly to charges of white feminism’s elitism and exclusion of the voices of women not privileged to have their voices heard in the first wave. While neither Oakes Smith nor first wave white feminism succeeded to the extent we might have hoped, this sort of passage should inspire us to keep reading—and re-reading—texts that at first don’t seem to supply what we need.
Perhaps Oakes Smith was finally not a “team player,” but as I’ve argued elsewhere, much of the reason for that is that she could not afford it. That said, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen white feminist elitism called out by any white feminist in the 1850s as well as it is here:
Beauty and genius are easily emancipated, and hence we find in all ages beautiful and gifted women casting a halo over the dark features of an age, and misleading us into the belief that others were equally free; and these, affluent in homage, intoxicated in adulation, have unconsciously helped to deaden the cry of the many—the bitter cry of the ignorant and the oppressed, whose glory was turned to shame, and whose light had become darkness. It is cruel selfishness to fold our hands in idle contempt for the needs of others, because the Good Father has cast our lines in pleasant places.
Woman and Her Needs, 1851