Voices of the Past

Historical Romance Author

Encouraging Women and Shaping Culture with her Pen
Friday, May 20, 2022 by Sherry Shindelar

Born decades before the Civil War, Sarah Hale helped shape femininity for more than half of the 19th century. She didn’t start out as a trailblazer. Although she was well-educated, she believed that a woman’s place was in the home, impacting the world through her husband and children. Then, when she was thirty-four and pregnant with their fifth child, her husband contracted pneumonia and died. Suddenly, she was on her own with five children to provide for.

She discovered she had a flair for writing and used her pen to help feed her children. In 1827, she wrote an anti-slavery novel, Northwood, that established her as one of the country’s leading novelists. Then, she wrote a poem that probably every toddler or preschooler has heard since: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

However, her greatest impact came from her decades as the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book. In 1828, she founded the first women’s magazine, in America and nine years later merged it into what would become Godey’s Ladies Book. Her magazine was known for its professional journalism and for publishing original fiction. Sarah printed stories from Poe, Emerson, Longfellow, and others in addition to helping to launch the careers of a number of women writers, devoting whole issues to women authors on occasion. In addition, she published a biographical dictionary of American women writers in 1854.

No doubt Sarah contributed to the success of such women who were selling more books in the 1840s – 1860s than Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Nathanial Hawthorne (Scarlet Letter) and other established male authors. Hawthorne bemoaned, “America is now given over to a d___ mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash…” He further complained that these women’s books were selling by the “hundred thousand.”

In addition, to enabling and encouraging these “scribbling women,” Sarah became the 19th-century authority on literature, women’s fashion, and culture. The magazine included fashion plates that women could use to make the designs featured on the pages, but this did not preclude the publication from being known for its quality news, as well.

Sarah was a voice to be reckoned with. For seventeen years, she campaigned for Thanksgiving to be declared an official holiday. Lincoln finally agreed and instituted the tradition in 1863.

Christmas trees and white wedding dresses? Along with her London reporter, Lydia Sigourney, Sarah brought these traditions from the court of Queen Victoria and planted these new cultural seeds in America.

However, despite her success and almost century-long impact on American women and culture, Sarah didn’t back down from her belief that a woman’s greatest calling was to care for her family. This led to her falling out of favor with some women in her later years, but she continued to lead the magazine until her 90^th birthday. She’d fought the good fight and changed women’s lives and culture for the better.