Elizabeth Oakes Smith (née Prince; August 12, 1806 – November 16, 1893) 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 the franchise and higher education.

Despite her wishes to attend college like her male cousins, however, she was married in 1823[1] at the age of sixteen to a thirty-year-old magazine editor and later humorist, Seba Smith, best known for his “Jack Downing” series.

After briefly removing to Charleston, South Carolina, Smith and her husband moved their family to New York City in 1838 and began to pursue tandem literary careers.

These lakes and rivers, including the east and west branches of the Penobscot, are beautiful indeed, but solitary images, with not a vestige of civilization, and the prevailing impression from Mt.

The unbroken sweep of forest lies low, and the irregularities so hidden in space, that the idea of trees is lost and looks like a smooth lawn with varied and striking shades of greenness."

Smith was not a member of the select group at the Seneca Falls Convention assembled to discuss the rights of women in 1848, but by that time she had for some years written occasionally on the subject of woman's social, political and economic situation.

In September of that year, she was nominated by a select committee to serve as President of the National Women's Rights Convention in Syracuse but was rejected for that position when she and her friend Paulina Wright Davis arrived in dresses which exposed the neck and arms.

She circulated a prospectus for a feminist journal, The Egeria, and collected several subscriptions, but she abandoned the idea when fellow activist Paulina Wright Davis began The Una in February 1853.

Given the difficulties of their publishing ventures, Smith and her family's removal to Patchogue after only four years in their New York City residence seems to indicate a kind of social retrenchment, but the political upheaval of the American Civil War may have played an equal role.

With Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus in effect, he was quickly jailed and later convicted, and the entire family was placed in a compromised political and social position.

With the nation's attention focused on the war and issues of slavery, her popularity and prominence in the cultural conversation were challenged, but in 1865 she began a series of "autobiographic notes" in Beadle's Monthly Magazine, later continued in the 1880s in The Home Journal.

Smith was a prolific letter-writer whose correspondents include Elizabeth Bogart, Augustus W. Corliss, Sallie Holley, and Sarah Helen Whitman.