Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Hale (born Oct. 24, 1788, Newport, N.H., U.S.—died April 30, 1879, Philadelphia, Pa.) was an American writer who, as the first female editor of a magazine, shaped many of the attitudes and thoughts of women of her period.

Sarah Josepha Buell married David Hale in 1813, and with him she had five children. Left in financial straits by her husband’s death in 1822, she embarked on a literary career. Her poems were printed over the signature Cornelia in local journals and were gathered in The Genius of Oblivion (1823). A novel, Northwood, a Tale of New England (1827), brought her an offer to go to Boston as editor of a new publication, the Ladies’ Magazine (from 1834 the American Ladies’ Magazine), which she accepted in 1828.

As editor, Hale wrote most of the material for each issue herself—literary criticism, sketches of American life, essays, and poetry. Editorially and personally she supported patriotic and humanitarian organizations, notably the Boston Ladies’ Peace Society and the Seaman’s Aid Society, which she founded in 1833. She advocated education for women and opportunities for women to teach, although she always remained apart from formal feminist movements. She also advised her readers to shun “unfeminine” involvement in public affairs. The greater access to education—particularly higher education—that men possessed, she argued, prepared them for leadership roles that women could not assume, because there were few educational opportunities for women at the time. She also published during this period Poems for Our Children (1830), containing her single most famous piece, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and in 1834–36 edited the Juvenile Miscellany magazine for children.

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In 1837 Louis A. Godey took over the American Ladies’ Magazine and established Hale as editor of his Lady’s Book, soon known as Godey’s Lady’s Book, which he had established seven years earlier in Philadelphia. She moved to that city in 1841. With Godey she made the Lady’s Book into the most influential and widely circulated women’s magazine published in the country up to that time (by 1860 its circulation was reputedly 150,000). Hale did much to encourage original work by American writers; among those published in the Lady’s Book were Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. She also continued to call for female education in the liberal arts and for more women teachers, and hers was among the most persuasive voices that encouraged the founding of Vassar College.

In later years Hale liberalized her outlook so far as to approve women doctors, if only to treat those ailments of women that she felt were otherwise better endured than examined by male physicians. She was also active in promoting child welfare, and she published a number of books, including cookbooks, poetry, and prose. Her major achievement was the Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of Distinguished Women, issued in 1853, 1869, and 1876; in the course of this ambitious project she completed some 36 volumes of profiles of women, tracing their influence through history on social organization and literature. She retired from Godey’s Lady’s Book in December 1877 at the age of 89.