Chapters from a Life (1896)

AUTHOR: Ward, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

KEYWORDS: Abolition, animal welfare, animals, experimentation, social reform, Temperance, vivisection, women's rights

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

In her memoir, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward recounts her literary career and her involvement in several social reform movements, including anti-vivisection. Ward introduces both her own and her family's long-standing interest in social reform, including her grandfather's involvement with the underground railroad (6). She voices her support for women's rights, particularly with respect to independence and the decision not to marry, as well as suffrage (29-20, 60, 79-80, 147), and she makes a case for Temperance by telling the story of a young fisherman who murdered a fellow fisherman while under the influence of alcohol (201-206). This occurrence, she writes, triggered her support of “the work done by the women of America for the salvation of men endangered or ruined by the liquor habit” (207). Phelps then goes on to relate several anecdotes related to her Temperance work. Based on her experience of insomnia, Phelps also warns of the use of and “dependence upon narcotics” (239).

She writes of her friendship with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and recounts attending lectures by Ralph Waldo Emerson. A guest at her family house in Andover, he apparently proclaimed “Bronson Alcott the greatest mind of our day,” even “the greatest since Plato” (45). Of course, she also reminisces about one of the most famous former inhabitants of Andover, Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom she calls “the foremost woman of America” (138). Noting that the town “was a heavily masculine place,” she maintains that “Mrs. Stowe's fame was clearly a fact so apart from the traditions and from the ideals, that Andover was puzzled by it” (133). In keeping with her penchant for dogs, Ward emphasizes that “there were always dogs” at Stowe's house, that “in some form, dog-life with its gracious reaction on the gentleness and kindness of family life abounded in her house” (134). She also mentions her own “little dog” – “the only masculine member of the household” during her years at Gloucester – named “Daniel Deronda” (196, 197).

Ward also recalls meeting the “distinguished abolitionist” Lydia Maria Child in Boston. She writes:

It is well known that Mrs. Child sacrificed the prospect of a brilliant literary future to her convictions in the movement for freeing the American slaves. It is not so well known that she had all her life expended such means as she had in private charities, denying herself every luxury and many common comforts, in order to compass the power to relieve or to prevent suffering (182-183).

Among her own efforts at social reform Ward lists the enfranchisement of women, dress reform, Temperance, the abolition of slavery, homeopathy, and animal welfare and anti-vivisection (250-252). Of the latter, she writes: 

I believe that the urgent protest against vivisection which marks our immediate day, and the whole plea for lessening the miseries of animals as endured at the hands of men, constitute the "next" great moral question, which is to be put to the intelligent conscience, and that only the educated conscience can properly reply to it (251). 

Fittingly, then, at the end of the book, Phelps makes a forceful plea for socially and morally engaged literature.