Text about the EOS LOG and what it is etc.

The EOS Log

Before biography, there are “logs”—masses of data documenting the events involving or bearing on the subject of a biography that must be read, related, collocated, interpreted, and reinterpreted with every account of the subject’s life. (The Poe Log, edited by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, is a well-known example). The uncovering of the context of every event in that subject’s life helps us better understand the event and its meaning for the subject in her time; each data point in the log helps us understand, arguably, every other one.

Conversely, as any viewer of the EOS Log will see, a lack of context makes it very difficult to even reliably guess at the meaning, for EOS, of even some of the most significant events in her life. In the 1850s, Oakes Smith wrote 1000s of words on the marriage relation for women in the United States, and later in the 1880s, she reflected at length on her own marriage in her manuscript autobiography, but one look at dearth of entries around 1823, when she was married to Seba Smith, shows that we have much to discover before we can understand the event of her marriage in its time, for those involved. In 1850 or 1885, Oakes Smith remembered or reconnected the events of her early life with what followed, but without more contemporaneous details, we cannot hope to fully understand the event of her marriage itself—especially in light of the extended correspondence between Oakes Smith and her husband in the 1830s that does not seem to square with her memory of those years in the 1880s.

The EOS Log today is thus a woefully incomplete document. Recently, scholars and students have managed to discover a fair number of events surrounding Oakes Smith’s turn to feminism in the early 1850s, along with her lecture career that followed. Jonathan White’s remarkably researched biography of Oakes Smith’s son Appleton, along with the work of other scholars in the 1980s and Oakes Smith’s diary of that period, give us a good idea of her life during the Civil War. But there are whole decades of her life about which we know next to nothing—persons with whom she corresponded whose relation to her or her family remain completely hazy. Making the Log public at this stage offers researchers better datapoints than can be gleaned from a quick read of the “Chronology” in this section of the website, and likely more detail than any biographical document ever published on Elizabeth Oakes Smith (just use the search button upper right to find any word or date in any record), but this is also an invitation for those discovering new events to share them with the Oakes Smith Society so they can be incorporated into the larger picture. It will take the contributions of a crowd to arrive at a point where a full biography of EOS becomes possible.

Use this form to contribute to the EOS Log.

Detailed instructions are provided on the form. The challenge of this or any such project is the feeling that small details don’t amount to much—the mention of EOS in a letter by another well-known (or lesser known) figure; an EOS poem published in Portland whether in 1829 or 1889; the inclusion of Oakes Smith’s name in a seemingly unrelated newspaper editorial; but any of these might bring new light on what we already know.