Sarah Josepha Hale

American writer and journalist

• Born: October 24, 1788
• Birthplace: Newport, New Hampshire
• Died: April 30, 1879
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The author of poetry, novels, plays, and cookbooks, as well as an important history of women, Hale is best known as the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most popular magazine in the United States before the Civil War. She encouraged and supported women writers and advocated improved opportunities for women’s education and work.

Early Life

Born Sarah Josepha Buell on a New Hampshire farm, Sarah Josepha Hale was one of four children of Gordon and Martha Whittlesey Buell. Though opportunities for formal schooling for girls were limited at she was growing up, she received a good education at home and later credited her mother with inspiring her love of literature. Despite limited access to books, Buell read widely during her youth. By the time she was fifteen, for example, she had read all of William Shakespeare’s works. Other favorites included the Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684), and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Buell also benefited from tutoring by her brother Horatio, who attended Dartmouth College. During Horatio’s summer vacations at home, the two studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, English grammar, rhetoric, geography, and literature. Hale drew on her strong education when, at the age of eighteen, she opened a private school for children. She continued to teach until 1813, when she married David Hale, a lawyer in Newport.

During her marriage, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale continued her education. As she later recalled, she and her husband spent two hours each evening reading current literature and studying topics ranging from composition and French to science. During this period, Hale also worked on her own writing, publishing a few poems in local magazines.

Hale’s life changed considerably when, in 1822, shortly before the birth of their fifth child, her husband died suddenly. Concerned with providing for her family, Hale turned first to the millinery business, but she soon focused on becoming an author. Her first volume of poetry, The Oblivion of Genius and Other Original Poems , appeared in 1823. After winning several literary prizes and becoming a regular contributor to magazines and gift annuals, Hale published her first novel, Northwood: A Tale of New England , in 1827. Though highlighting New England character traits, as the subtitle suggests, the novel focused on the contrasts between the North and South, including issues of race relations and slavery.

Life’s Work

Soon after the publication of Northwood, Sarah Josepha Hale, at the age of thirty-nine, launched what to a great extent would become her life’s work as a magazine editor. When a new periodical, the Ladies’ Magazine , first appeared in January of 1828, Hale edited it from her home in Newport, but within a few months she moved to Boston, where the magazine was published. Though the Ladies’ Magazine was not the first periodical intended for American women or edited by an American woman, it did differ considerably from earlier efforts, which often focused on fashion. Hale’s Ladies’ Magazine included fashion plates during part of its nine-year existence, but it was much more intellectual than previous women’s magazines had been. Sketches of famous women were common features, and Hale’s editorial columns often addressed issues of social reform, such as property rights for married women and the importance of women’s education.

Publishing both poetry and fiction, the magazine also had a significant literary component, and Hale’s support of American authors is particularly noteworthy. Whereas other magazine editors relied on anonymous material and reprinted British literature (generally without permission), Hale’s magazine featured American authors, and she repeatedly encouraged her readers to recognize authorship as a legitimate profession. Therefore, she favored original submissions rather than reprints, encouraged attribution of authors, and supported the idea that authors should be paid for their work.

Throughout her editorship of the Ladies’ Magazine, Hale continued her efforts as an author. Her own writings appeared frequently in the magazine, and some of them were published separately in book form. Her Sketches of American Character (1829) and Traits of American Life (1835) first appeared in the Ladies’ Magazine. During this time, Hale also published two poetry collections, including Poems for Our Children (1830), which contained the poem “Mary’s Lamb” (now famous as “Mary Had a Little Lamb”).

Hale’s career took an important turn in 1837, when after nine years of managing the Ladies’ Magazine, Hale accepted a new position as editor of Louis Godey’s Lady’s Book , which Godey had founded in 1830 in Philadelphia. For the first several years, Hale edited the magazine from her home in Boston, but in 1841 she moved to Philadelphia. Even before the move, however, Hale carefully reformed the magazine, which initially lacked the intellectual and literary focus Hale had developed in the Ladies’ Magazine. With Hale as editor, however, the Lady’s Book (now often referred to by its later name, Godey’s Lady’s Book) became an important literary magazine for women. Though the magazine continued to publish the so-called “embellishments” for which Louis Godey had become famous (engravings, fashion plates, and so forth), Hale continued her earlier positions supporting American writers and improved opportunities for women’s work and education. This combination of Godey’s “embellishments” and Hale’s literary and educational essays proved popular. By 1860, the magazine boasted 150,000 subscribers, making it the most popular U.S. magazine of its day.

With such a large audience, Hale was able to exert considerable influence on a number of social issues. Some of these, such as her efforts to preserve the Bunker Hill Monument and Mount Vernon, demonstrate her strong patriotic impulses. Many more of Hale’s editorial campaigns were related to her belief in the power of what she and many of her contemporaries called “woman’s sphere.” Believing that women were innately more moral than men, Hale voiced strong support of women’s charitable organizations, such as the Seaman’s Aid Society, which tried to improve the lives of Boston’s seamen and their families by founding schools, a library, a boardinghouse, and a clothing shop.

Although Hale believed that the domestic space was part of women’s sphere, she did not wish to confine women within the home. Quite the contrary, Hale encouraged women to extend their influence as widely as possible. Thus, for example, Hale voiced strong support for the founding of Vassar College (the first U.S. college for women), campaigned for women’s medical colleges, and repeatedly called for women to take professional positions as teachers and with the post office.

Hale also took a particular interest in issues of women’s health, arguing, for example, for women’s physical education and denouncing tight corsets as unhealthy (a charge that was later fully substantiated). Though the Lady’s Book sometimes prided itself on avoiding political topics, many of Hale’s editorial campaigns had significant political implications. Her long-standing efforts to establish Thanksgiving as a national holiday, for example, were based on her belief during the antebellum period that if a nation shared a meal together once a year, it would be less likely to engage in civil war. Though Hale’s ultimate goal of preventing civil war was, of course, unsuccessful, she did manage to persuade President Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Throughout her editorship of the Lady’s Book, Hale continued to publish her own work. In addition to contributing material to the Lady’s Book, she published a number of poetry volumes and several short novels, and following the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, she issued a revised edition of Northwood. Hale also wrote a number of popular cookbooks. Hale’s efforts as a writer were well regarded by her peers, and she was featured in many of the gift annuals and literary anthologies published before the Civil War. One of Hale’s most ambitious projects as a writer was her 1853 Woman’s Record: Or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women from “The Beginning” till A.D. 1850 . This nine-hundred-page work presents biographical essays on more than two hundred women, with brief mentions of more than two thousand others.

After five decades as a magazine editor, Hale published her last column with the Lady’s Book in December, 1877. She died on April 30, 1879, at the age of ninety and was buried in Philadelphia.

Significance

Though she was not the first woman magazine editor, Sarah Josepha Hale enjoyed a longer and more influential career than had any American woman before her. During her fifty-year editorial career, Hale made significant contributions to American literature and to women’s issues. She published or reviewed the work of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville. As editor of a popular women’s magazine, Hale was able to support women writers, many of whom, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Sigourney, published their work in her magazines.

Through her editorial columns, Hale was also able to support other issues related to women. Although she did not advocate women’s voting rights, she was a strong spokeswoman for property rights for married women, improved women’s education, and increased opportunities for women’s wage-earning work. Ultimately, one of Hale’s most lasting contributions may have been in encouraging other women to pursue careers in publishing and periodicals. By proving that a women’s literary magazine could be the nation’s most popular periodical and by demonstrating that a woman could manage such a magazine, Hale undoubtedly helped to pave the way for later women editors, authors, and journalists.

Bibliography

Bardes, Barbara A., and Susanne Gossett. “Sarah J. Hale, Selective Promoter of Her Sex.” In A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture, edited by Susan Albertine. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. A literary analysis of Hale’s treatment of women in her book Woman’s Record.

Entrikin, Isabelle Webb. Sarah Josepha Hale and “Godey’s Lady’s Book.” Lancaster, Pa.: Lancaster Press, 1946. A published dissertation, this work provides a good overview of Hale’s editorial career and includes a bibliography of Hale’s published works.

Finley, Ruth E. The Lady of Godey’s: Sarah Josepha Hale. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1931. The first full-length biography of Hale, this work provides a good overview of Hale’s life, including her work as an author and editor and her support of issues such as national union and women’s education.

Hoffman, Nicole Tonkovich. “Legacy Profile: Sarah Josepha Hale.” Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers 7, no. 2 (Fall, 1990): 47-55. This short sketch of Hale’s life and career includes a selected bibliography as well as an excerpt from one of Hale’s editorials.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, 1741-1850. Vol. 1. New York: D. Appleton, 1930. Though subsequent studies show less bias against sentimental literature than evident here, this pivotal work includes a detailed sketch of Godey’s Lady’s Book and valuable information about the periodical industry.

Okker, Patricia. Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. In addition to identifying more than six hundred women who edited periodicals in the nineteenth century, this work provides a thorough analysis of Hale’s editorial career, focusing specifically on her literary significance.

Rogers, Sherbrooke. Sarah Josepha Hale: A New England Pioneer, 1788-1879. Grantham, N.H.: Tompson & Rutter, 1985. Though it presents little new information, this biography is particularly suited to older adolescents.

Tonkovich, Nicole. Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. Examination of four nineteenth century women writers and how they altered women’s traditional roles in the home, school, and community. Tonkovich describes how the writers paradoxically prescribed domesticity for other women while they pursued careers outside the home.