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Sarah Josepha Hale

 
Biography: Sarah Josepha Hale
 
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For nearly 50 years Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879) was the editor of America's most influential women's magazine.

Sarah Josepha Buell was born in Newport, N.H. She was educated at home and in October 1813 married David Hale, a lawyer. He encouraged her to write for local newspapers. When he died in 1822, leaving his widow with five children, Mrs. Hale attempted a full-scale literary career. Some early verse was well received, and in 1827 her first novel, Northwood:A Tale of New England, brought her serious critical attention. The Reverend John Laurie Blake was just about to found a monthly magazine for women in Boston, and he offered her the editorship. Accepting, she moved to Boston in 1828 and edited Ladies' Magazine there until 1837.

The magazine was a success, the first of its kind to take an important place in American periodical publication. It featured fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism and was characterized by its attempts both to define and to celebrate the wholesome and tasteful in American life. Hale wrote most of the material for each issue, and every month she pressed her arguments in favor of improved education for women and a role for women in the culture as teachers and moral guides. She rejected, with equal steadiness, the claims of the feminist movement for the right of women to occupy positions of executive authority in the political and business worlds.

In 1837 Louis A. Godey bought out the magazine, changed the name to Godey's Lady's Book, and promoted it to fame with impressive skill. Hale remained as editor, moved to Philadelphia, and for 40 years reigned as the taste maker of the American household. The magazine prided itself on being "a beacon light of refined taste, pure morals, and practical wisdom."

Though she always contributed freely to all departments of the magazine, as the years went by Hale concentrated most of her attention on the sections called "Literary Notices" and "Editor's Table." It was there that she tirelessly managed her campaign to establish standards of taste, delicacy, and decorum for American women.

Among her 36 volumes of essays, fiction, drama, poetry, cookbooks, and giftbooks, Hale published the huge Women's Record:Sketches of Distinguished Women, in at least three editions. Her poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb" first appeared in Poems for Our Children in 1830.

At the age of 90 Hale contributed her last article and retired, the acknowledged arbiter of 19th century American feminine manners and morals.

Further Reading

A scholarly, full-length study of Mrs. Hale is Ruth E. Finley, The Lady of Godey's:Sarah Josepha Hale (1931). Her career is also recounted in Helen Beal Woodward, The Bold Women (1953), and Walter Davenport and James C. Derieux, Ladies, Gentlemen and Editors (1960).

Additional Sources

Rogers, Sherbrooke, Sarah Josepha Hale:a New England pioneer, 1788-1879, Grantham, N.H.:Tompson & Rutter, 1985.

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Sarah Josepha Hale
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(born Oct. 24, 1788, Newport, N.H., U.S. — died April 30, 1879, Philadelphia, Pa.) U.S. writer and editor. Hale turned to writing in 1822 as a widow trying to support her family. She edited the Ladies' Magazine (1828 – 37) and then Godey's Lady's Book (1837 – 77); as the first female magazine editor, she shaped many of the attitudes and ideas of women of the period. Her books include The Ladies' Wreath (1837), a collection of poetry by women that sold widely; and Woman's Record (1853). She is also remembered for her verse "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (1830).

For more information on Sarah Josepha Hale, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Sarah Josepha (Buell) Hale
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Hale, Sarah Josepha (Buell), 1788–1879, American author, editor, and feminist, b. near Newport, N.H. In 1828 she became editor of the Ladies' Magazine, Boston, and in 1837 of Godey's Lady's Book, Philadelphia, where she remained over 40 years. The illustrated Lady's Book strongly influenced fashions and manners of her day. Mrs. Hale cultivated female authors and constantly urged the higher education of women. She also advocated a national Thanksgiving holiday. Her poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb” was published in her Poems for Our Children (1830).

Bibliography

See O. W. Burt, First Woman Editor (1960).

 
Works: Works by Sarah Josepha Buell Hale
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(1788-1879)

1827Northwood: A Tale of New England. One of the earliest American novels to portray everyday life realistically, the book details social customs in New England, contrasts life in the North and the South, and illustrates Hale's belief in the importance of women's domestic role as it affects the politics of the nation. Hale, a widow with five children, had turned to writing to support her family. The success of Northwood would lead her to the editorship of the Boston Ladies' Magazine.
1829Sketches of American Character. Hale's collection focuses on "the morals, manners, and habits of the citizens of our republic."
1830Poems for Our Children. Written at the request of Lowell Mason, an advocate of music education in American public schools, the collection contains Hale's most famous verse, "Mary Had a Little Lamb." This poem, as well as several others, would be reprinted numerous times in anthologies and in William Holmes McGuffey's Eclectic Readers, without credit given to Hale.
1854Women's Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women from 'The Beginning' til a.d. 1850. An important biographical encyclopedia that contains twenty-five hundred entries and strives to exhibit the significance of women in history and literature.

 
Quotes By: Sarah J. Hale
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Quotes:

"Nor need we power or splendor, wide hall or lordly dome; the good, the true, the tender- these form the wealth of home."

 
Wikipedia: Sarah Josepha Hale
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Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Hale, 1831, by James Reid Lambdin
Born October 24, 1788
Newport, New Hampshire
Died April 30, 1879 (aged 90)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Occupation Poet, editor, author

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (October 24, 1788 - April 30, 1879) was an American writer and an influential editor. She is the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb".

Contents

Biography

Hale was born in Newport, New Hampshire to Captain Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell. Her parents believed in equal education for both sexes.[1] Early on in her life, she was educated by her mother and her brother Horatio who taught her what he had learned at Dartmouth; later on, Hale was an autodidact.

While working as a schoolteacher in 1811, her father opened a tavern called The Rising Sun in Newport; she met David Hale the same year.[2] The couple married at The Rising Sun, on October 23, 1813,[2] and had five children: David (1815), Horatio (1817), Frances (1819), Sarah (1820), William (1822).[3] David Hale, a lawyer, died in 1822[4] and, in perpetual mourning, Sarah Josepha Hale wore black for the rest of her life.[1][5]

In 1823, with the monetary support of her (then late) husband's Freemason lodge, she published a collection of her poems entitled The Genius of Oblivion. Her novel, Northwood: A Tale of New England, made her one of the first American women novelists and one of the first of either gender to write a book about slavery.[6] The book, which espoused New England virtues as the model to follow for national prosperity, was immediately successful.[5] The novel not only espoused New England values, but supported the re-Africanization of slaves in the colony of Liberia. It is an argument for Jefferson's apprehension regarding the difficulty the races would encounter (and have encountered) in living together with the specter of slavery between them.

The book garnered praise from Reverend John Blake, who asked Hale to move to Boston to serve as the editor of his journal, Ladies' Magazine.[7] She agreed and, from 1828 until 1836, she served as editor in Boston, though she preferred being called an "editress".[1] Hale hoped the magazine would help in educating women, as she wrote, "not that they may usurp the situation, or encroach on the prerogatives of man; but that each individual may lend her aid to the intellectual and moral character of those within her sphere".[5] Her collection Poems for Our Children, which includes the now-famous "Mary Had a Little Lamb", was published in 1830,[8] though its original title was "Mary's Lamb".[9] The poem was intentionally written for children, an audience for which many women poets of this period were writing.[10] Hale founded the Seaman's Aid Society in 1833 to assist the surviving families of Boston sailors who died at sea.[11]

Louis Antoine Godey of Philadelphia wanted to hire Hale as the editor of his journal Godey's Lady's Book. He bought the Ladies' Magazine, now renamed American Ladies' Magazine and merged it with his journal. In 1837 Hale began working as editor of the expanded Godey's Lady's Book but insisted she edit from Boston while her youngest son, William, attended Harvard College.[12] She remained editor at Godey's for forty years, retiring almost at the age of ninety in 1877.[13] During her tenure at Godey's, several important women contributed poetry and prose to the magazine, including Lydia Sigourney, Caroline Lee Hentz, Elizabeth F. Ellet, and Frances Sargent Osgood.[14] Other notable contributors included Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Washington Irving, James Kirke Paulding, William Gilmore Simms, and Nathaniel Parker Willis.[15] During this time, she became one of the most important and influential arbiters of American taste.[16] In its day, Godey's, with no significant competitors, had an influence unimaginable for any single publication today. The magazine is credited with an ability to influence fashions not only for women's clothes, but also in domestic architecture. Godey's published house plans that were copied by home builders nationwide.

During this time, Hale wrote many novels and poems, publishing nearly fifty volumes of work by the end of her life. She also edited several issues of the annual gift book The Opal beginning in the 1840s.

Hale retired from editorial duties in 1877 at the age of 89. The same year, Thomas Edison spoke the opening lines of "Mary's Lamb": the first ever recorded on his newly-invented phonograph.[17] Hale died at her home, 1413 Locust Street in Philadelphia, on April 30, 1879.[18] She is buried in a simple grave in the Laurel Hill Cemetery, Ridge Ave., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[19]

Beliefs

Grave of Sarah Josepha Hale in Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Hale, as a successful and popular editor, was respected as an arbiter of taste for middle-class women in matters of fashion, cooking, literature, and morality.[1] In her work, however, she was reinforcing stereotypical gender roles, specifically domestic roles for women,[5] and celebrated the "separate sphere" for women while casually trying to expand on it.[1] For example, she believed that women shaped the morals of society, and pushed for women to write morally uplifting novels. She wrote that "while the ocean of political life is heaving and raging with the storm of partisan passions among the men of America... [women as] the true conservators of peace and good-will, should be careful to cultivate every gentle feeling".[20] She did not support women's suffrage and instead believed in the "secret, silent influence of women" to sway men voters.[21]

Hale was an advocate for education. She supported play and physical education as important learning experiences for children. She wrote in 1829 that "Physical health and its attendant cheerfulness promote a happy tone of moral feeling, and they are quite indispensable to successful intellectual effort."[22] More specifically, she was an early advocate of women's education, particularly higher education for women,[23] she helped in the founding of Vassar College.[1] Her championship of education for women began with her editorship of the Ladies' Magazine and continued until she retired. She wrote no fewer than seventeen articles and editorials devoted to the subject of women's education, and is credited with helping make the founding of an all-women's college acceptable to a public unaccustomed to the idea.[24] Her efforts in promoting women's education were rewarded in 1860 when the Baltimore Female College awarded her a medal "for distinguished services in the cause of female education".[25] As an editor, she created a section headed "Employment for Women" beginning in 1852 discussing women's attempts to enter the workforce.[11] She also published the works of Catharine Beecher, Emma Willard and other early advocates of education for women.

Hale was also a strong advocate of the American nation and union. In the 1820s and 1830s, a time when other American magazines merely compiled and reprinted articles from British periodicals, Hale was among the leaders of a group of American editors who insisted on publishing American writers. In practical terms, this meant that she sometimes personally wrote half of the material published in the Ladies' Magazine. In later years, it meant that she particularly liked to publish fiction with American themes, the frontier, and historical fiction set during the American Revolution. Hale adamantly opposed slavery, but she was equally devoted to the Union. She campaigned in her pages for a unified American culture and nation, frequently running stories in which southerners and northerners fought together against the British, or in which a southerner and a northerner fell in love and married.

Legacy

1863 letter from Hale to Lincoln discussing Thanksgiving

Hale is credited as the individual most responsible for making Thanksgiving a national holiday in the United States; it had previously been celebrated only in New England.[26] Each state scheduled its own holiday, some as early as October and others as late as January; it was largely unknown in the American South. Her advocacy for the national holiday began in 1846 and lasted 17 years before it was successful.[27] In support of the proposed national holiday, she wrote letters to five Presidents of the United States -- to Zachary Taylor, to Millard Filmore, to Franklin Pierce, to James Buchanan and to Abraham Lincoln. Her initial letters failed to persuade; but the letter she wrote to Lincoln did convince him to support legislation establishing a national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863.[28] The new national holiday was considered a unifying day after the stress of the American Civil War.[29] Prior to the addition of Thanksgiving, the only national holidays celebrated in the United States were Washington's Birthday and Independence Day.[6]

Hale also advocated for the preservation of George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation, both as symbols of patriotism that both the Northern and Southern United States could all support.[30] She also helped raise money in Boston for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument[13] When construction stalled, Hale asked her readers to donate a dollar each and also organized a week-long craft fair at Quincy Market. The fair sold handmade jewelry, quilts, baskets, jams, jellies, cakes, pies, and autographed letters from George Washington, James Madison, and the Marquis de Lafayette.[31]

Liberty Ship #1538 (1943-1972) was named in her honor.

A prestigious literary prize, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award is named for her.[32]

She was further honored as the fourth in a series of historical bobblehead dolls created by the New Hampshire Historical Society and sold in their museum store in Concord, New Hampshire.[33]

Selected works

  • The Genius of Oblivion; and Other Original Poems (1823)
  • Northwood (1827)
  • Traits of American Life (1835)
  • The Good Housekeeper (1841)
  • Northwood, or, Life North and South (revised, 1852)
  • Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton's Experiments (1853)
  • Women's Record: or Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from Creation to A.D. 1654 (1853)
  • Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society (1868)
  • Flora's Interpreter; or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 608. ISBN 978-0-19-507894-7
  2. ^ a b Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 25. ISBN 9780762740024
  3. ^ Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 26–27. ISBN 9780762740024
  4. ^ Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977: 332. 10-ISBN 0-394-40532-3
  5. ^ a b c d Rose, Anne C. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981: 24. ISBN 0-300-02587-4
  6. ^ a b Smith, Andrew F. The Turkey: An American Story. University of Illinois Press, 2006: 74. ISBN 9780252031632
  7. ^ Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 27–28. ISBN 9780762740024
  8. ^ Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, Inc., 1981: 283. ISBN 086576008X
  9. ^ Wilson, Susan. Literary Trail of Greater Boston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000: 24. ISBN 0-618-05013-2
  10. ^ Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1978: 94. ISBN 0-292-76540-2
  11. ^ a b O'Connor, Thomas H. Civil War Boston: Home Front amd Battlefield. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997: 8. ISBN 1-55553-318-3
  12. ^ Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 29–30. ISBN 9780762740024
  13. ^ a b Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson. (1906) The Literary History of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co.: 230.
  14. ^ Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. Cambridge, MA: Published by Harvard University Press, 1930: 584.
  15. ^ Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson. The Literary History of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co., 1906: 231.
  16. ^ Douglas, p. 94.
  17. ^ Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 35. ISBN 9780762740024
  18. ^ Ehrlich, Eugene and Gorton Carruth. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982: 205. ISBN 0195031865
  19. ^ Findagrave web site
  20. ^ Riley, Glenda. Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825–1915. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1984: 8. ISBN 0826307809
  21. ^ Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 33. ISBN 9780762740024
  22. ^ Park, Roberta J. "Embodied Selves: The Rise and Development of Concern for Physical Education, Active Games and Recreation for American Women, 1776–1865", Sport in America: From Wicked Amusement to National Obsession, David Kenneth Wiggins, editor. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 1995: 80. ISBN 0873225201
  23. ^ Von Mehren, Joan. The Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994: 166. ISBN 1-55849-015-9
  24. ^ Vassar Female College and Sarah Josepha Hale - Vassar College Encyclopedia
  25. ^ Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 31. ISBN 9780762740024
  26. ^ Appelbaum, Diana Karter. Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History. New York, Facts on File, 1984
  27. ^ Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years Over A Hot Stove: A History Of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, And Remembrances. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004: 118. ISBN 9780393326277
  28. ^ Wilson, Susan. Literary Trail of Greater Boston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 200: 23. ISBN 0-618-05013-2
  29. ^ Schenone, Laura. A Thousand Years Over A Hot Stove: A History Of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, And Remembrances. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004: 119. ISBN 9780393326277
  30. ^ Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007: 609. ISBN 978-0-19-507894-7
  31. ^ Parker, Gail Underwood. More Than Petticoats: Remarkable New Hampshire Women. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot, 2009: 24. ISBN 9780762740024
  32. ^ Sarah Josepha Hale Award, Richards Free Library
  33. ^ NH Historical Society

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Biography. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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