The Sagamore of Saco

Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith

Elizabeth Oakes Smith was an American poet, fiction writer, editor, lecturer, and women's rights activist whose career spanned six decades, from the 1830s to the 1880s. Most well-known at the start of her professional career for poems such as "A Corpse Going to a Ball", which appeared in The Neapolitan in 1841, and "The Sinless Child", which appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1842, her reputation today rests on her feminist writings, including Woman and Her Needs, a series of essays published in the New-York Tribune between 1850 and 1851 that argued for women's spiritual and intellectual capacities as well as women's equal rights to political and economic opportunities, including