Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,832

This is the grave of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward.

Born in 1844 in Boston, Mary Gray Phelps, her given name, was renamed after her mother when mom died of “brain fever” in 1852 after giving birth to another child. Evidently, this was her daughter’s desire. I’m trying to get my head around an 8 year old having to live through this and then make that decision. Hard stuff. Her mom was Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps, a prominent writer of fiction. Her father was the well known Congregationalist minister Austin Phelps. He remarried her mother’s sister, who then proceeded to die of tuberculosis. Then she acquired a second stepmother, who lived for awhile. Ah, the 19th century.

Anyway, young Elizabeth received a good education and became a very good writer. She started writing Civil War stories for Harper’s in 1864. They accepted her first story and she kept writing for them. She really specialized in writing children’s books, including a series called Gypsy Breynton, which were designed for Sunday Schools and are about a tomboy who needs a good system of living, allowing for a certain level of moralizing that was common in this era.

Like a lot of these upper class northern reformer types of the period, Phelps fell under the power of the spiritualist grift. She was such a believer in this nonsense that she wrote fiction about it that was quite popular as northerners tried to deal with their siblings not experiencing the “good death” they so often discussed in the overly romanticized fiction they loved in this era. So having communication with the dead was a way to put a salve on your sadness for not only your lost loved ones but also the way they died, without you being able to speak with them. Phelps wrote The Gates Ajar, published in 1868, that pushed this nonsense big time. It was quite popular in the U.S. but even more so in England. It’s about a young girl whose brother was killed in the Civil War and how they would communicate and then realize they would meet again in the afterlife with their same physical forms as they had on Earth. Mark Twain later parodied this and similar works in “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.”

In 1888, Phelps finally married. Her husband was Herbert Dickinson Ward, a writer himself. He was 17 years younger than she, rare enough today but extra rare at the time. They started writing together and published three books in the late 1880s and early 1890s. These were biblical romances, popular at the time.

Now, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was not in great health so she wasn’t politically involved personally in much. But she wrote extensively in favor of reform causes. She was an early advocate of animal rights and wrote a novella titled Loveliness about the issue. She was also involved in the anti-corset movement, which good for her. She wrote in 1874:

Burn up the corsets! … No, nor do you save the whalebones, you will never need whalebones again. Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomens for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun.

Ward was a big supporter of temperance and legal freedom for women within marriage. Her writings on marriage were quite bitter, though they were mostly before she married herself. In this, she was heavily influenced by the early feminist writer and English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose grave I randomly saw while in Italy. She continued to write children’s books, often about poor children and with a pretty sharp sense of the real class inequalities of the time, which a lot of reform authors in other fields mostly avoided because they came from money. She also became a quite well known speaker. She became the first woman to have her own lecture series at Boston University, speaking primarily about the works of George Eliot, just one of many topics with which she had fluency.

Later in life, Ward really doubled down on her support of animal rights. In 1904, she published Trixy, a polemic against medical experimentation on animals. This is an issue that you don’t hear as much about as you did 20 or 30 years ago. I guess I don’t know why. I do know that there is less experimentation on animals as there used to be. Maybe people have also stopped caring about animal rights? I feel like you don’t hear as much about animal rights generally as you used to. It probably doesn’t help that some of the radicals on this issue are fanatical idiots who think that releasing a bunch of captive animals into habitats where they have no protection and they all die anyway is some kind of positive move but everyone else realizes they are morons. Anyway, I certainly respect people who are fighting against torturing animals. Although if I really believed in it instead of just mouthing bullshit, I would stop eating meat. So sure, I’m a hypocrite like almost everyone else in the world. In any case, it seems that Trixy was reprinted in 2019 by Northwestern University Press, so I guess someone reads it.

Overall, Ward produced 57 books over her life. That’s….a lot of books. That included fiction, children’s book, books of essays, and books of her poetry. Impressive. And if no one reads any of it today, well, that’s true of the vast majority of writers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Heck, most of those who are still read aren’t exactly fun to read (hello Theodore Dreiser and William Dean Howells!)

Ward, whose health was never really that good, died in 1911. She was 66 years old.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward is buried in Newton Cemetery, Newton, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other animal rights activists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Harriet Hemenway is in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Caroline Earle White is in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.