Whether or not it was her intention to do so, and though her professed priority was to find a way to support her children and offer them a good education, Hale’s actions while in her new post suggest a strong desire to give voice to the campaigns she held dear to her heart.
The working woman’s life in the 1830s was one often limited to the home, the seamstress’s shop, the milliner’s, the laundry, or, if fortunate, the schoolhouse. While no woman or person of color had the right to vote, Hale soon discovered that in the pages of her magazine and at the helm of its content, she did have a voice, and that voice and its opinions would not be stifled. In a day when the loudest voices were those of men, especially via their political power and in the church, Hale used her own pulpit to advance her goals—often in the service of others.
Shortly after her arrival in Boston, Hale learned of the forestalled Bunker Hill Monument, intended to commemorate the Revolutionary War battle of the same name. Members of the Bunker Hill Monument Association had secured land and raised enough money to see the cornerstone of the monument laid in 1825. But by 1830, it remained unfinished for lack of funding. Hale, the daughter of an injured Revolutionary War veteran, became devoted to seeing the monument completed. With a new audience, she took to her pages and called for support from her readers. She believed in the aggregate power of small. Noting that if each woman living in New England—some nine hundred thousand of them—were to donate just twenty-five cents, the necessary sum would be raised. The response was not what Hale had hoped for, but she remained undeterred.
“Our doubts are traitors,” she penned for the editorial page of her new endeavor. “And make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
Ladies’ Magazine was founded by an Episcopal minister, Reverend John Lauris Blake, and Hale was its editor from the get-go. Putnam & Hunt served as the publication’s initial printers, and offices were located on Washington Street in Boston, which was fast becoming a hub for booksellers, publishers, and the like. For three dollars per year, the monthly magazine supplied content that Hale insisted had not been printed elsewhere (a common practice then). She also reluctantly agreed to a fashion column and images for the magazine.
Hale published the work of up-and-coming young poets and writers—many of them women—Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, and Sarah Whitman among them. In addition to her editing responsibilities, Hale contributed her own writing to the publication, including editorials, articles, advice, and reviews. In 1830, the magazine published a review of a book of poems by a promising young author. The review called some of the poems “boyish, feeble, and altogether deficient in the common characteristics of poetry,” but admitted there was great potential in the fellow, who, though he “appears to be very young, is evidently, a fine genius; but he wants judgment, experience, tact.” Nevertheless, the review deemed the unknown to “remind us of no less a poet than Shelley.”
Early in 1831, following the review of this young poet’s work, Hale’s eldest son, David, wrote to her from West Point, where he was now attending the U.S. Military Academy. The poet was in fact a classmate of his.
“I have communicated what you wrote to Mr. Poe,” her son David wrote of his classmate Edgar, whom David described as “too mad a poet to like mathematics.” And so began Hale’s relationship with Edgar Allan Poe.
Whether she was supporting a mad male poet or an uneducated female essayist, Hale was aware of not only the opportunity but also the challenges facing her as a writer with increased exposure and a woman in a position of editorial power.
“Few females are educated for authorship,” she later wrote, “and as the obstacles which oppose the entrance of woman on the fields of literature are many and great, it requires, usually, a powerful pressure of outward circumstances to develop and mature her genius.
“It may be truly said of her that
—‘Strength is born
In the deep silence of long suffering hearts,
Not amidst joy.’”
Between her editorial work and parenting, time to pen another of her own novels was proving unmanageable, but Hale was eking out hours here and there to work on a new collection of poems. In the face of each day’s shifting challenges, she shifted, too, tacking like a nimble skiff when need be, navigating uncharted waters in a sea of new professional and personal obligations and opportunities.
The thriving city of Boston now provided Hale increased visibility and access to those who might see fit to join forces with her on whatever her latest crusade might be. She reached them not only via her readership but also in her rapidly expanding social circle. The petite, ebon-clad powerhouse was attractive and impeccably well spoken, and Hale the journalist became savvy about forming alliances. She threw herself into her new hometown. She attended lectures, reviewing them on occasion for her readers. She started a literary club. As an accomplished seamstress whose magazine offered homemaking tips and information on schooling, in addition to reviews and fashion plates, she spearheaded a sewing circle that often focused its efforts on making clothes for those in need. Through these activities and charitable pursuits, Hale grew her sphere of influence, allowing her to create useful alliances when it was time to rally forces. One such fortuitous friendship was that which she forged with Deborah Taylor, the wife of Father Edward T. Taylor—a Methodist minister known in Boston and well beyond that city’s limits as “the sailor’s preacher.”
Hale was struck by the scores of impoverished individuals, many of them veterans or their widows, she saw struggling on the streets daily. As someone who herself had been left financially struggling when her own husband died, Hale called upon her readers not to turn a blind eye to the situation engulfing them.
Father Taylor had caught the ear of many a sailor returning to shore, and there were more than a thousand ships docked in Boston in those days. Taylor ministered to the destitute, the shipwreck survivors, the widows of men lost at sea, and also the likes of writers Charles Dickens and Walt Whitman, both of whom clamored to hear the salty man of the cloth when they found themselves in Boston. Whitman wrote of Taylor, “I have never heard but one essentially perfect orator.”
Having lost her eldest brother, Charles, to the sea, been widowed at a young age, and now having a son, David, seemingly destined for battle in Florida, Hale was perhaps predisposed by personal tragedy to raise awareness about the suffering of returning seafarers and those women and children left behind in the wake of their losses. And so the Seaman’s Aid Society was born.
The society served not only returning sailors themselves, but their families. Hale’s efforts resulted in the establishment of an associated school, as well. Raising donations of books proved not too difficult a task, and soon the group created the Seaman’s Society Library. Hale railed against inadequate pay for returning veterans and sailors, and the rum-soaked boardinghouses in which so many of them had no choice but to reside. She believed that living surrounded by that sort of dilapidation and filth could only negatively affect those who dwelled there.
She was finding her footing as an advocate, and her words were profoundly convincing. She keenly pointed out the irony in a sailor’s responsibility for moving great wealth across oceans but keeping none of it for himself, and that despite this invaluable role in ensuring the prosperity of others, it was “almost certain that his widow and orphans will be left destitute.”
Still a champion of education, Hale wrote poems and verses for children that were destined for the nation’s schoolhouses. In 1834, she published the School Song Book with Allen & Ticknor of Boston, billing herself as “Mrs. Sarah J. Hale, Editor of the Ladies’ Magazine, and author of ‘Flora’s Interpreter,’ &c. &c.” Included in that text was a poem believed to have been inspired by her early days teaching in Guild, New Hampshire, when she observed a lamb following one of her students to school. That poem, “Mary’s Lamb,” would achieve lasting popularity, recited by countless children who remembered it into their adulthood.
Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And every where that Mary went
The lamb was sure to go:
It followed her to school one day,
That was against the rule;
It made the children laugh and play
To see a lamb at school.
And so the Teacher turned him out,
But still he lingered near,
And waited patiently about,
Till Mary did appear:
And then he ran to her, and laid
His head upon her arm,
As if he said, “I’m not afraid,
You’ll save me from all harm.”
“What makes the lamb love Mary so?”
The little children cry—
“O Mary loves the lamb, you know,”
The Teacher did reply:
“And you each gentle animal
In confidence may bind,
And make them follow at your call,
If you are always kind.”
The poem had been included in another collection published several years earlier, titled Poems for Our Children, as well as in Lydia Maria Child’s Juvenile Miscellany. As not just an editor but also an abolitionist and author, Child was embroiled in her own professional struggles. Her novel Hobomok, in which a Puritan woman marries a Native American man, Hobomok, gained Child notice, but also some measure of scandal. At this point in history, the federal government was forcibly and violently removing Native peoples from their eastern lands to points west on the Trail of Tears.
Sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans as well as enslaved peoples, Child didn’t shy away from sharing her views. She had also recently published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, in which she called for the immediate emancipation of all enslaved persons with no compensation to the slaveholders. Subscribers to her children’s magazine began to drop. But those kinds of consequences did not deter her from speaking her mind in an age that both Hale and she knew was far from welcoming to Women with Opinions.
“When I published my first book,” Child wrote, “I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.”
Hale—by now part owner of Ladies’ Magazine—found her own subscriptions falling as well, if not for the same reasons as Child. Once Hale had her own stake in the magazine, she had dropped the publication’s popular fashion illustrations (of which she was never a fan), which may have impacted the magazine’s subscription income. She was struggling. And yet when Child resigned as editor of the Juvenile Miscellany, Hale took over that, too, adding even more burden to her already weighty responsibilities. She renamed Ladies’ Magazine the American Ladies’ Magazine (to distinguish it from a similarly named publication in England), but keeping the publication afloat was trying her energies as well as her finances. By 1835, subscriptions in arrears were more than $400 (nearly $12,000 in 2020 dollars). Hale had been approached to contribute significantly to yet another magazine, but she wanted to hold on to all she had worked to build in Boston. Boston had become home to her and her youngest son, William. David, her oldest, was indeed off to fight in the Second Seminole War. (This would become the longest war of removal fought by the United States, resulting in the forcible relocation of approximately three thousand members of the Seminole Nation.) Still, Hale needed to find a solution: a way to maintain and even to build on what she had accomplished thus far and, most important, to be able to continue to support herself and her children.
The media maverick was about to become involved in a merger.
We are confident our readers will not regret the change, when they learn that Mrs. S. J. Hale, late Editor of the American Ladies’ Magazine, (which is now amalgamated with The Lady’s Book,) will superintend the Literary Department of the Book. Mrs. Hale is too well known to the public to need eulogy from us. For nine years she has conducted the Magazine, which she originated. . . . It will therefore be perceived that a new era in the work has been commenced.”
December 1836 was coming to an end, and publisher Louis Godey—owner of a Philadelphia publication, Lady’s Book—was addressing his readers about changes coming the following month to his publication, including his desire to fill future editions of his magazine with original material only. The energetic, plump, boastful publisher with a knack for marketing had worked in newspapers, where he had been trained as a “scissors editor”—clipping and reusing previously published material, often without attribution or payment to the original author and publication. He had run a newsstand-cum-bookshop before founding his magazine. Spread thin, he now desperately needed assistance and had approached Hale years earlier about working with him. Now he had finally managed to woo her to his publication—but not yet to Philadelphia.
As Hale’s tenure as editor began in 1837, she initially decided to stay in Boston rather than move to Philadelphia, then the center of the publishing world and home to Godey’s business—telecommuting without the “tele” part. Her son Horatio, a budding linguist, would soon graduate Harvard and set off on an international expedition for South America, New South Wales, and beyond. Her youngest, William, was to enter his brother’s alma mater.
After the merger with Godey, Hale had not only a business partner but access to a much larger audience. It was as mutually beneficial a relationship as one could want. Godey had managed to decrease his workload and had hired a well-respected, highly connected, increasingly popular, and now experienced magazine editor, to boot. Hale, for her part, stood to amplify her already impressive voice.
She took no time exploiting this new position. In November of her first year at the helm of the Lady’s Book, she penned an editorial on one of her favorite subjects.
“That merry anniversary, our Thanksgiving, has changed, to us, the gloomy aspect of the season, and made November (in which month the Thanksgiving should always be held) one of the brightest and best months in the year. . . .”
Hale also referred to December’s festival (read “Christmas”) as “peculiar” and bemoaned its eclipsing of her favorite annual holiday, one she considered linked to the “noble patrimony” of her Puritan Fathers. The Puritans did not embrace Christmas, considering it too closely linked to pagan rituals. They instead centered their annual seasonal celebration on the fall harvest. Many northern states, in addition to declared days of thanksgiving and prayer, had long celebrated an annual day of general thanksgiving, a date that roved around the end of the calendar, depending on the year and the location. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the practice had begun to spread west and south as well.
“The noble annual feast day of our Thanksgiving resembles, in some respects, the Feast of Pentecost, which was, in fact, the yearly season of Thanksgiving with the Jews. [Thanksgiving] might, without inconvenience, be observed on the same day of November, say the last Thursday in the month, throughout all New England; and also in our sister states, who have engrafted it upon their social system. It would then have a national character, which would, eventually, induce all the states to join in the commemoration of ‘In-gathering,’ which it celebrates. It is a festival which will never become obsolete, for it cherishes the best affections of the heart—the social and domestic ties. It calls together the dispersed members of the family circle, and brings plenty, joy and gladness to the dwellings of the poor and lowly. . . . The moral effect of this simple festival is essentially good.”
And though Hale was not visibly or vocally aligned with the growing suffrage movement, she was not shy about extolling the rights and works of other women in her pages as well. In an editorial titled “Rights of Married Women,” also published in her first year as editor of Lady’s Book, she denounced laws dictating a woman’s limited rights to property—even that which was rightfully and solely hers prior to marriage. As she had written years earlier in her annual reports to the Seaman’s Aid Society, she abhorred the modern American practice that gave “to the husband uncontrolled power over the property of his wife. Though she possessed a million of dollars before she marries, she cannot, after she is a wife, dispose of a dollar in her own right . . .”
She continued in this vein in “Rights of Married Women”: “The barbarous custom of wresting from woman whatever she possesses, whether by inheritance, donation or her own industry,” Hale wrote, “and conferring it all upon the man she marries, to be used at his discretion and will, perhaps wasted on his wicked indulgences, without allowing her any control or redress, is such a monstrous perversion of justice by law.”
Hale continued publishing her own books on the side, and promoting the work of other women. The year she moved to Godey’s she published The Ladies’ Wreath, a collection of writings of women poets, among them noted poet and essayist Lydia Huntley Sigourney, who also worked as an editor at Lady’s Book. The Ladies’ Wreath included notes for “young ladies” and was, as Hale declared on the title page, “A Gift-Book for All Seasons.”
“I am aware that there are critics, who always speak of the ‘true feminine style,’ as though there was only one manner in which ladies could properly write poetry,” she wrote in her preface, inviting readers to compare the styles of her chosen authors. “The delicate shades of genius are as varied and distinctly marked in the one sex as its bold outlines are in the other. There are more varieties of the rose than of the oak.”
And within the pages of Godey’s that year was a piece by author Harriet Beecher Stowe titled “Old Father Morris,” which Stowe followed the next year with “Trials of a Housekeeper.” Hale’s ability to share women’s writing was a cherished ideal.
“The wish to promote the reputation of my own sex and my own country, were among the earliest mental emotions I can recollect,” Hale wrote in The Ladies’ Wreath, “and had I then been told that it would be my good fortune to gather even this humble Wreath of poetical flowers from the productions of female writers, I should have thought it the height of felicity.”
It was an active first year, in and outside the magazine. She spent Christmas with her children, save for her son Horatio, who was off exploring the Antarctic. She was already finding it hard to manage her Philadelphia workload while living in Boston. A move was clearly on the horizon, but it had to be delayed, not by obligation or preference but rather by grief. After fighting in the second Seminole War, Hale’s son David and his artillery regiment were transferred to the northern reaches of the United States, in New York near Plattsburgh. There, the son on whom Hale had heavily relied as a single mother—emotionally and sometimes financially—became ill and died within days from what a superior officer described as an “unexpected and sudden effusion of the lungs.”
“Lieutenant Hale was universally beloved by his brother officers,” the notice in the Plattsburgh Republican read, mourning the premature death of this “young, gallant, and enterprising” military man. His fellow officers erected a monument to him in Plattsburgh’s Riverside Cemetery. The inscription read, in part: “He was amiable, brave, and talented.”
A bereft Hale wrote to her Godey colleagues, who in turn shared her letter with readers.
“It is not a common loss that I mourn,” Hale wrote.
My son was so noble and disinterested, that his character would not fail of exciting the affection of all who knew him, and to me his life has been one unbroken scene of obedience, love and generosity. I depended on him as a friend who would never disappoint me, and as the protector of my daughters and young son.—His death has destroyed all my plans of life; and though I know and feel that it is all right, that God, who gave me such a precious blessing, knew the best time to recall him, yet I cannot, at once, summon fortitude to enter on the occupations of a world so dark and desolate as it now appears.
Though Hale eventually resumed her editorial duties, she further postponed her plans to move to Philadelphia. Then, in 1841, roughly four years into her tenure with Godey, with her son Horatio finally on his way home from his travels, Josepha in Georgia training to be a teacher, and William graduating from Harvard—second in his class, no less—the timing at last seemed right. Hale, challenged by managing the growing Lady’s Book from afar, decided to move with her daughter Frances to Philadelphia.
Hale’s time at Godey’s would impact not just her life but those of countless others, male and female, across the country. She was, whether she had set out to be or not, establishing herself as both a literary and domestic tastemaker. She became an influencer, not only of fashion, manners, and the well-set table but also of tradition.
She proved to be remarkably prescient when it came to identifying cultural shifts. Two years after Queen Victoria ascended the throne of England at just eighteen years of age, Hale remarked, “Victoria’s reign will be one of the longest in English annals. . . . She may so stamp her influence on the period in which she flourishes, that history shall speak of it as her own. It will be the Victorian, as a former one now is the Elizabethan age.”
But the cultural institution that truly obsessed her was one that she knew she could better use her growing readership to achieve.
This campaign would not be limited to the pages of her magazine, though that platform afforded her unprecedented access to thousands upon thousands of eyes and minds. That wasn’t going to be enough. She, herself, would write letters. To governors, to the heads of existing territories, and to presidents. She had what would seem a simple request. Would they consider uniting, as one nation, on the last Thursday of November each year to give thanks? For their country, for all they had, whether in times of scarcity or abundance?
To her, that day was an obvious choice—that was the very day that President George Washington had chosen.