presentation

I’m Sarah Hale, Editress of Godey’s Lady’s Book. Thank you for inviting me here today. I have not been this far South and am enjoying this visit.¹ As you know, I live in Philadelphia, where I edit the Lady’s Book. I was left a widow in 1822; Mr. Hale and I are originally from New Hampshire. I published a volume of poetry and my novel Northwood and took in sewing but I needed to do much more to house and educate my five children, who ranged in age of newborn up to 7 years. We moved to Boston in 1828, where I edited the American Ladies Magazine. I insisted that we publish only American authors rather than English reprints, and I carried that policy to the Lady’s Book, when I started editing it in 1837. The Ladies Magazine had proved successful and attracted the attention of Mr. Louis Godey, who asked that I move my family to Philadelphia and edit his Lady’s Book. He is a true gentleman publisher who shows such pride in the Lady’s Book. Soon after starting his venture, he determined that it would be an American publication. He pays well for native authors, often exceeding the prices paid in England for authorship. I applaud the care he takes to achieve excellence; every year he introduces a new “feature of beauty” or an “attractive novelty.” I have provided pages from our recent 1851 magazines…if you look in the middle of the booklet, you will see one of his ads, often placed in the Lady’s Book. He began adding steel plate engravings; now each issue contains four or more, plus a fashion plate, by first-rate artists expressly for the Book. If you are amazed at our price of 25 cents, we achieve this by high circulation. It is not easy, of course, to deliver issues on time, given poor road conditions and unreliable delivery, but Mr. Godey is committed to timely arrival and has earned the gratitude of his readers. Before we go into tea, please look at some of my favorite illustrations on display here and in the other room. Please look at the wonderful tints, the bright blue of the “welcome” engraving, the elaborate design of the Italian villa, and the illustrations we often have of women reading. Bring your booklets please.

You have at your table an early example of my own poetry, “Mary’s Lamb.” I am often asked to read it, as it has become a favorite. It was commissioned as a lyric for a children’s song. It is useful because it shows new writers the standard poetic form: present a problem, describe the situation, and conclude the problem, with a moral message. [read] We publish many writers with much more sophisticated writing. This year, we published a wonderful poem by the popular American romantic writer, Park Benjamin. Unlike my poem, it is wonderfully complex and emotional, evoking the moment of mourning that we experience all too often. It is in your booklet. [read]

As I have written in my editorial column, not everyone can become an author! It requires hard work and talent. Please send me your work but be prepared for a letter of advice. If you are published, you will appear in a magazine that, as you know, has published Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet Lydia Sigourney and Lydie Maria Child, herself an editress as well as an authoress, and the famous Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I urge all of you to continue your education so that your mind is lively and you are ready to engage with your family and with our society, and you are able to oversee the education of your children. My own mother taught us. Then, when my brother Horatio went to Dartmouth College, I followed his studies of Greek, Latin, rhetoric, geography, and philosophy. We would work during his summers at home. When I taught young children in my New Hampshire home town—I had a “Dame School” for a few years—I emphasized reading, writing, and mathematics, even some Latin, for the girls as well as the boys. I do not believe in an “ornamental” education focused on sewing skills and dancing as was and still is the popular notion of a girl’s education.

When I married, my husband and I spent two hours nightly reading, writing, learning French and reciting poetry. This type of “companionate education” is important for ourselves and our marriages. I started writing to amuse my husband and children. He helped me learn to avoid floral phrasing in my writing and use my “own voice” rather than imitate English styles. The grapes on the table are my reminder of our life together. You see, my husband saved my life with what we used to call the “grape cure.” I was so ill during my third pregnancy and was sure I would die as so many of us do. My sister had just died a few years previous. Mr. Hale came home one day and stated that I would not die. We left our children with their aunt and spent six weeks driving through the mountains, eating wild grapes.

Writing is a moral art but also a very practical matter for many of us. For many women, we might be left, as I was, a widow and then what resources do we have? Our education and skills serve us best. When I started the Seaman’s Aid Society in Boston, women who were left with children as their husbands went to sea were dangerously impoverished. We helped them sell clothes for the sailors (our prices were much better than the local trade) and then set up boarding homes for sailors on leave. These enterprises improved their lot substantially.

We must recognize how much good we can do for our society and how we have the abilities to influence others. When I tried to raise money through my magazine to fund the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, I was discouraged. As women, we do not have the financial advantages of the men, who had not been able to raise the necessary funds to complete the project. But through the Ladies magazine, I asked women to send in other types of contributions—their special jams, needlework, laces, and other products of their own hands. Our Boston Fair, where we sold all these donations, raised over $30,000 and the monument was completed.

I believe strongly that it is the duty of every republican mother to raise educated children who can contribute to the good of this country, so I strived to give all of them every advantage that I could. I am very proud that I sent both of my daughters to the female seminary. We may soon have a college for women; I am supporting Mr. Vassar in his current scheme for “Vassar Female College and hope that he is successful. My younger daughter Sarah runs a boarding and day school for young ladies and my older daughter Ann married Dr. Hunter. My eldest, David, was a lieutenant and served in the Seminole war. He died while on border patrol in

Canada

. You may have heard of my other son, Horatio Hale, who joined Captain Wilkes’s expedition to the Antarctic and who continues to research and write about languages of Western tribes. William might succeed in turning my hair grey—he is in Texas settling legal claims of the old Spanish Dons. He loves the challenge. He’s been captured by bandits, nearly ate ground glass in his breakfast meal once, and narrowly avoided poisoned wine (his servant died instead). He tells me, of course, that he is doing “just fine.”

But let me return to my topic: the magazine. Of course, my editorial principles emphasize children’s rights in health and education and women’s health and education and advancement. We labor to provide women “a beacon-light of refined taste, pure morals, and practical wisdom” and to “carry onward and upward the spirit of moral and intellectual excellence in our sex, till their influence shall bless as well as beautify civil society.”

As readers, you know that we educate women on morality in many ways. Look in the booklet at the illustration we published called “Take Care of Yourself.” This picture tells a story….

Our magazine strives to be practical and educate women on all matters, public and domestic. My receipts strive to follow “domestic science” and are more exact than other receipts, which tell you to add ‘pinches’ or as ‘much as you need.’ Look at the Sponge-Cake Pudding receipt. I tell you to add 2 tbsps of sugar and a pint of milk. And tell you how to boil the pudding exactly. In other ways, I strive to include the latest news on discoveries and inventions (including the new sewing machine, which I know will save women countless hours of work). We include plans for housing, cottage furniture, laces and embroidery. I include enough information on fashion so that women may copy our illustrations (we have recently started a mail-order service). And I add advice as well. Look on the last page of the booklet…

I would like to leave you with a few thoughts, four principles that I hold both personally and editorially:

1. Attain an education and use it!

2. Exercise for health: walk two miles daily, swim or ride horse-back, do daily calisthenics.

3. Enter into the public sphere! Use your education and knowledge to help others and improve our young Republic.

4. Raise your children well, educate your boys and girls, and they will make great contributions to our country.

I want to make a few remarks as myself about Sarah Hale. Her birth date in 1788 marks her not as a Victorian but as a woman of the Republic, and she was intensely patriotic. When she looked around Boston for ways to serve her community, she was drawn to the unfinished Bunker Hill monument as a project. I tried to emphasize her sense of a mother’s duty as a patriotic contribution to the still young democracy. Her ideas on women’s education also speak to a republican upbringing and to her own mother’s education. When she speaks about her personal and editorial goals, her focus on women emphasizes their practical as well as moral contributions to society.

Her editorship of the Lady’s Book did not end until 1877; she died two years later at age 92. I am an inaccurate representation of Sarah Hale in the early 1850s, since she was a grandmother then in her sixties. Plus, she did have excellent eyesight and never wore glasses. We achieve some realism with her dress (the skirt is possibly dated only a decade later). She did not wear hoop skirts when they came into fashion, since they were too cumbersome for women. She wrote against their use as well as wrote against the use of bone and wire corsets. Her fashion columns were detailed and emphasized current fashion and proper dress for different occasions, but she also encouraged women to not to sacrifice their health and well-being or their families financial resources. She pointed out that one dress with all its lace, decorations, and imported fabrics, could house a family for a year.

*Addendum: Antique skirt and matching bonnet on loan from Dr. Beth Keiter of Johnson City.
These items belonged to Julia Gilmore Idleman, Beth's great-great-grandmother, who was a young lady in the 1830's and 1840's; she was still living in 1893.

Beth's mother reports, "I wish I could share more information about her. I remember Mother saying she wore the skirt with a cotton [sateen] blouse, and she wore it with her bonnet when she "went to meetin'". Undoubtably she may have also worn a tight laced up corset."

Julia Idleman's grandmother was Mary Rush Idleman. "She practiced medicine, but as a woman, was not accepted nor licensed in the East. This is one of the reasons they came to the Kentucky frontier."

Mary Rush Idleman was trained by her father, a physician related to Benjamin Rush, a physician and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

The skirt and hat are clearly hand-made. The best way to date the items are probably by the hat style. Flat hats appear to come into fashion in the late '60's and early '70's, as an alternative to large bonnets. Afterwards, the smaller hats are replaced by more elaborate and larger styles. This would date the skirt and hat at about 140 years old.

Sarah campaigned for the right for women to go to medical school and practice.

I also tried to emphasize that her most famous poem—“Mary’s Lamb”—has had both positive and negative effects on her reputation. The poem keeps her name alive because of its popularity, but it also led to negative portrayals of her life’s work. She was the most important editor of her time—man or woman—and she is noteworthy for approaching her job professionally at a time when women on the whole did not work. She held clear standards for publication, despite the accusation that she was “only” the writer of children’s poems and that as a woman she was too “sentimental.” She was not a women’s rights activist; she did not join the leagues of women calling for the vote. She did, however, work her entire life for a woman’s right to education. Her interpretation of what women could do outside the home was quite liberal. “Woman’s sphere”—the Victorian phrase for woman’s position in the home as children’s educator and moral guide—meant something different to Hale. It meant that women had a responsibility to their husbands to be a “better mental companion” and that they needed to work in the community to improve their neighbor’s lives. This might mean getting a degree and becoming a doctor, going overseas (even when single) as a missionary, and working as a teacher—and getting a higher education suitable for the job.

Her activities and her magazine campaigns focused also on rights for children, boys and girls. She asked her readers to speak out and write letters against corporal punishment in schools (and to hire women, whom she believed were less likely to be abusive). She advocated education that included reading and writing at a time when 25% of Americans could not read or write and less than 50% of women could do so. By 1860, women’s literacy rates reached over 90%.

During her editorial advocacy of women as readers, she had to soothe her audience. Men were afraid of turning their wives into “lazy novel readers” who neglected their domestic duties for novel reading. Their other fear was that women would become intellectual “blues” who were not domestic and who were unfeminine, engaging in too much reading of philosophy to be practical. Hale advocated magazine reading instead—certainly a financially sound move—because a magazine could be picked up and easily put down. Newspaper reading was also encouraged, to keep women informed, along with her family, about politics and events.

Hale was a remarkable woman because she was both ‘of her time’ and a leader in her time. She maneuvered within society rather than fighting against it. In “Mary’s Lamb” she is emphasizing both a young girl’s responsibility to go to school (the lamb has to wait patiently for her to finish) and the girl’s character as a kind-hearted protector of weaker beings. We can see from the other poem and illustrations in the booklet how much of the Lady’s Book is written for a Victorian audience concerned with lawful behavior, character development, and healthy sentiment. Love, friendship, ethical behavior, care for children and the elderly, respect for parents, sincere mourning for the dead…these are all valued behaviors and emotions.

Secondary information comes primarily from two studies:

Ruth E. Finley, The Lady of Godey’s: Sarah Josepha Hale, Philadelphia: Lippencott, 1938.
Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editor, Athens: U of Georgia P, 1995.

*Photos taken by Eugenia Estes, Publicity, Tusculum College

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