Background
Sarah Josepha Buell was born on October 24, 1788, in Newport, New Hampshire, to Captain Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell.
A prestigious literary prize, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, is named for her.
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Sarah Josepha Buell was born on October 24, 1788, in Newport, New Hampshire, to Captain Gordon Buell and Martha Whittlesay Buell.
Buell grew up in an era when girls were denied access to advanced formal education. Young Buell was instead tutored by her brothers and through them received the equivalent of a college education.
As a young woman Buell taught boys and girls in a private school near her home in Newport, New Hampshire, until 1813. Her writing career began when her husband submitted some of her stories and poems to the Newport weekly newspaper. 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.
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.0
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" as the first speech ever recorded on his newly invented phonograph. Hale died at her home, 1413 Locust Street in Philadelphia, on April 30, 1879. A blue historical marker exists at 922 Spruce St. She is buried in a simple grave in the Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Sarah Josepha Hale was a renowned 19th-century writer and editor who pushed for girls’ education reform and the establishment of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
Liberty Ship #1538 (1943–1972) was named in Hale's honor, as was a New York City Board of Education vocational high school on the corner of Dean St. and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. However, the school closed in June 2001.
A prestigious literary prize, the Sarah Josepha Hale Award, is named for her. Notable winners of the Hale Award include Robert Frost in 1956, Ogden Nash in 1964, Elizabeth Yates in 1970, Arthur Miller in 1990, and Julia Alvarez in 2017.
Hale 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.
Hale is honored with a feast day on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on April 30. She is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
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. In her work, however, she reinforced stereotypical gender roles, specifically domestic roles for women, while casually trying to expand them. For example, Hale 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". Hale did not support women's suffrage and instead believed in the "secret, silent influence of women" to sway male voters.
Hale advocated education, and ultimately women's entry into the work force. Furthermore, as an editor beginning in 1852, Hale created a section headed "Employment for Women" discussing women's attempts to enter the workforce. Hale also published the works of Catharine Beecher, Emma Willard and other early advocates of education for women.
She supported play and physical education as important learning experiences for children. In 1829, Hale wrote, "Physical health and its attendant cheerfulness promote a happy tone of moral feeling, and they are quite indispensable to successful intellectual effort." Hale became an early advocate of higher education for women, and helped to found Vassar College. Her championship of women's education began as Hale edited the Ladies' Magazine and continued until she retired. Hale wrote no fewer than seventeen articles and editorials about women's education, and helped make founding an all-women's college acceptable to a public unaccustomed to the idea.
Hale also became a strong advocate of the American nation and union. In the 1820s and 1830s, as 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 Hale particularly liked to publish fiction with American themes, such as the frontier, and historical fiction set during the American Revolution. Hale adamantly opposed slavery and was strongly devoted to the Union. She used her pages to campaign 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.
Quotations:
“No influence is so powerful as that of the mother.”
“Democracies have been, and governments called, free; but the spirit of independence and the consciousness of unalienable rights, were never before transfused into the minds of a whole people...The feeling of equality which they proudly cherish does not proceed from an ignorance of their station, but from the knowledge of their rights; and it is this knowledge which will render it so exceedingly difficult for any tyrant ever to triumph over the liberties of our country.”
“What matter though the scorn of fools be given If the path follow'd lead us on to heaven!”
“The burning soul, the burden'd mind, In books alone companions find.”
“A blessing on the printer's art! Books are the mentors of the heart.”
“It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms, let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.”
“Though youth be past, and beauty fled, The constant heart its pledge redeems, Like box, that guards the flowerless bed And brighter from the contrast seems.”
“I've learned to judge of men by their own deeds; I do not make the accident of birth The standard of their merit.”
Hale founded the Seaman's Aid Society in 1833 to assist the surviving families of Boston sailors who died at sea.
Sarah was married to David Hale in 1811. Of this marriage five children were born, but Hale died in 1822, and his wife was obliged to devote herself to the support of the family.
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(May 3, 1817 – December 28, 1896)
He was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist and businessman who studied language as a key for classifying ancient peoples and being able to trace their migrations. He was the first to discover that the Tutelo language of Virginia belonged to the Siouan family, and to identify the Cherokee language as a member of the Iroquoian family of languages. In addition, he published a work Iroquois Book of Rites (1883), based on interpreting the Iroquois wampum belts, as well as his studies with tribal leaders.
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(1822–1876)
