Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, born Mary Gray Phelps, (August 31, 1844 – January 28, 1911) was an American author and an early advocate of clothing reform for women, urging them to burn their corsets.

Read more about Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward:  Biography, Works

Famous quotes containing the words elizabeth stuart, elizabeth, stuart, phelps and/or ward:

    The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.
    Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)

    ... woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself ... we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man ...
    —National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, ch. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1886)

    ... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.
    —Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)

    ... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.
    —Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)

    Books treating of etiquette ... are often written by dancing-masters and Turveydrops and others knowing little of the customs of the best society of any land.
    —Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)