Sarah Josepha Hale: Writer, editor, creator of Thanksgiving holiday
Edgar Allan Poe called her “a woman of fine genius and”—pardon the sexism—“masculine energy and ability.” He was referring to Sarah Josepha Hale, his brilliant editor at Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely read magazine of the antebellum era. A celebrity in her own day, Hale is largely forgotten in ours.
When Hale is remembered, it is likely to be as the godmother of our Thanksgiving holiday, which she reimagined as a shared national celebration rather than a series of local ones. Her name also comes up as the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” one of the most famous verses in the English language. Little known today, however, is the essential role she played in shaping the way Americans think about women and their place in society. Two decades before the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, Hale was editorializing about women’s rights to an education, to work and to manage their own money. For half a century, her name was synonymous with “women’s issues.”
Sarah Josepha Hale, nee Buell, was born in 1788 on a farm in Newport, New Hampshire. In an era when no college admitted women, she was one of the best-educated women of her generation thanks to a mother, who homeschooled her, and a brother who taught her everything he learned as a student at Dartmouth. Hale’s education continued when she married a lawyer, David Hale. Every evening after supper, David and Sarah would read the classics, examine the prose style of the great English writers, and study French, botany, mineralogy, geology and other subjects.
When David died unexpectedly in 1822, Sarah was left penniless with four young children and a fifth on the way. With the help of the Freemasons of Newport, of which David had been a member, she embarked on a career as a writer, a path that led her to Boston in 1828 and the editorial career that would last for half a century. She was one of the first women to earn a living by her pen.
Under Hale’s editorship, Ladies’ Magazine became so successful that publisher Louis Godey purchased it in order to entice Hale to move to Philadelphia to edit his magazine, Lady’s Book. Thus, was born a great partnership that created one of the first great national magazines in the United States. When Hale took over as editor in 1837, the circulation of Godey’s Lady’s Book was 10,000. In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, circulation had grown to 150,000. The average circulation of a magazine of the era was 7,000.
Hale brought a deeply patriotic sentiment to her magazines. She believed that while the thirteen former British colonies had been united politically by the Revolutionary War, they would not be truly unified until the new nation developed its own separate cultural identity. She set out to make that happen by publishing content by American authors writing on American themes. From the perspective of the 21st century, this may seem an obvious aim --- surely Americans want to read about their country and their countrymen and countrywomen. But it was a radical idea in an era when an American identity was still being formulated. It also was a radical idea in the publishing industry, where many periodicals were cut-and-paste jobs, compiled by so-called scissors editors who clipped articles from British or other publications and republished them in their own periodicals.
The bylines that appeared in her magazines represented the best of the country’s emerging literary talent: Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier and more. Hale sought out talented women, and many female authors got their start in her magazines or built or enhanced their reputations there. Among them were the young Harriet Beecher Stowe, the prolific poet Lydia Sigourney, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of “The Secret Garden.”
Hale’s all-American formula for her magazines helped shape a common American aesthetic – creating a mass culture not just in literature but also in food, art, music, etiquette, fashion and more. Readers in every corner of the expanding nation were learning what to meant to eat like an American, dress like an American, behave like an American. They were quoting the same poetry, cooking the same recipes, and sewing the same fashions.
Hale often said that education for women was her paramount mission. For 50 years, every issue of the Ladies’ Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book reported on and advocated for women’s education. One of her early campaigns was on behalf of women as teachers. This bucked the prevailing view of the day, which held that women lacked the intelligence and moral stature to be successful teachers except of very young children. Hale believed that the two sexes had equal intellectual capabilities but lacked equal educational opportunities. “There is no branch of learning taught in our common [public] schools, which females would not be capable of teaching,” she wrote. Her advocacy helped change Americans’ attitudes about women’s roles overall but especially about their suitability for the classroom.
Among her many other accomplishments on behalf of women were starting the first kindergarten in the U.S.; founding the first daycare center for working women; and creating the term “domestic science” to professionalize the work of women who worked in the home. She championed women who were doctors, scientists, business leaders, missionaries, postmasters, and more.
Hale’s range of interests and accomplishments was enormous. According to the Yale “Bibliography of American Literature,” she wrote, edited, or contributed to an astonishing 129 books. She excelled in numerous genres: poetry, short stories, novels, prose, children’s literature, cookbooks, advice books, religious books, plays.
The book she considered her masterwork was “Woman’s Record,” a 900-page compendium of the biographies of 2,500 distinguished women from “the Creation to A.D. 1854,”as the subtitle immodestly puts it. Woman’s Record holds the distinction of being the first volume of history to put women at the center of its research. As such it is a distinguished forerunner of a school of academic discipline, women’s studies, that didn’t emerge until the middle of the 20th century.
Thanksgiving was another of Hale’s great passions. She wanted all Americans, no matter where they lived, to give thanks on the same day, rather than on the various days proclaimed governors of the states where they happened to live. Starting in the 1840s, Hale used the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book to create public support for her proposal for a National Day of Thanksgiving. She also carried out a private letter-writing campaign, lobbying presidents, governors, congressmen, and other influential Americans. It’s a measure of the stature she occupied in American society that many of her correspondents—including several presidents– took the trouble to write back to her. Abraham Lincoln took up her suggestion in 1863 and proclaimed the first in the modern series of national Thanksgivings.
Hale died in 1879 at the age of 90. Thanksgiving isn’t her only legacy. Her writing and advocacy changed the national conversation about women’s roles, responsibilities, and power, seeding the path to the political, legal and economic rights women enjoy today. The extent of her influence hasn’t been sufficiently appreciated. She deserves her due as one of the most consequential figures in the narrative of women’s struggle for equality.
© 2024 Melanie Kirkpatrick
Melanie Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author of Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman.