Sarah Josepha Hale & Godey’s Lady’s Book

Godey’s Lady’s Book was the most popular magazine in the U.S. in the middle of the 19th century. Although it’s most well-known for its hand-tinted fashion plates, its content included poetry, fiction, household tips, music, and etiquette.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, the production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. I'm Holly Fry.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about etiquette on the
Internet and how sometimes there's sort of not any and

(00:24):
how etiquette isn't something that just springs forth from people unprompted.
The idea of what is and isn't polite or rude
has to be kind of cultivated and created and reinforced intentionally,
including through things like etiquette manuals and advice columns and magazines.
And that whole line of thought led me to something
that has been on my list for a long time

(00:44):
and has also been requested by a lot of our listeners.
That's Goadie's Ladies Book and its editor, Sarah Josepha Hale.
I will say that I have heard historians and archivists
say this as Goadie's and as Gotti's. I have also
on occasion heard good days. I think that's just people
trying to make a sound fancy that that does sound

(01:05):
like an attempt for fanciness. A bunch of folks that
I have listened to from Vassar, who she was associated with,
all said, goatis, so that's the one that we're going
to go with. This was the most popular magazine in
the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century,
and although it's mostly well known at this point for
its hand tinted fashion plates, the content of the magazine

(01:28):
was this collection of all kinds of material, including poetry
and fiction and household tips and music and yes, etiquette,
and it was incredibly influential in terms of both the
actual magazine content and Hale's work outside of his pages,
and a lot of ways that are still felt today.
In Europe, the first magazines were launched in the seventeenth century,

(01:49):
thanks to advances in printing technology and male distribution, as
well as increased literacy rates. The word magazine is much
older than that, but it was first used to describe
a periodical filled with works by various writers, often on
a range of subjects, aimed at a general audience, and
that was in seventeen thirty one. That was when Edward
Cave started publishing The Gentleman's Magazine. He called it a

(02:13):
magazine because the words earlier meaning of storehouse. The Gentleman's
magazine was meant to be a storehouse of knowledge. Magazines
aimed specifically at women were part of this whole ecosystem.
By seventeen fifty nine, that's when the Royal Female Magazine
or the Lady's General Repository of Pleasure and Improvement was
first published. In England and the United States, the first

(02:36):
women's magazine was called Ladies Magazine and it was founded
in seventeen nine. Two various women's magazines came and went
on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, most
of them folded within a year or two until Sarah
Josepha Hale started publishing her Lady's Magazine, which was the
first women's magazine in the US that lasted more than

(02:56):
five years. That is, in fact, a different la E's
magazine than the one that was founded in seventeen ninety two.
And we're going to go back up for a minute
and talk about how Hale got there. She was born
Sarah Joseph A Bull in Newport, New Hampshire, on October
Her parents were Captain Gordon Mule and Martha Whittlesey Bull,

(03:18):
and her father had fought in the Revolutionary War. Sarah
was the third of their four children. Sarah's parents thought
that girls should have access to education, and for the
Bull daughters that meant being tutored at home by their
mother along with their brothers. It did not, however, mean
that Sarah could go to college. Of all her siblings,
Sarah was closest to her brother her ratio, and when

(03:40):
he went to Dartmouth, he actively encouraged herself study, and
he shared his books with her when he was home.
In her words, quote, he seemed very unwilling that I
should be deprived of all his collegiate advantages. Sarah became
a teacher when she was eighteen, and in eighteen thirteen,
when she was twenty five, she married David Hale, who
was a lawyer. David encouraged her to continue educating herself again.

(04:04):
In her words quote, we commenced soon after our marriage
a system of study and reading, which we pursued while
he lived. The hours allowed were from eight o'clock in
the evening till ten two hours in the twenty four
How I enjoyed those hours in all our mental pursuits.
It seemed the aim of my husband to enlighten my reason,
strengthen my judgment, and give me confidence in my own

(04:27):
powers of mind, which he estimated much higher than I.
But this approbation which he bestowed on my talents has
been of great encouragement to me and attempting the duties
that have since become my portion. Sadly, David did not
live long. He died of pneumonia in nine years into
their marriage. By then, they had four children together. They

(04:48):
were David, Horatio, Frances Anne, and Sarah Joseph the elder.
Sarah was pregnant with their fifth child, William, who was
born not long after his father's death. Sarah was understandably devastated,
and she wore black for the rest of her life,
although this was also influenced by the fact that she
found black flattering on her and she also thought it

(05:09):
made her look taller. Sarah knew that she was going
to have to work to support her family, but that
a teacher's salary was never going to be enough to
support her in five children. Before her marriage, she hadn't
even been supporting herself on teacher's pay. She had been
living at home and using that salary to help cover
her father's medical expenses. David had been a freemason, though,

(05:30):
and his brothers at the Masonic Lodge helped get Sarah
and her sister in law, Hannah, established with a millinary
business that, along with dressmaking, was one of the very
few business opportunities that was considered appropriate for middle class women.
The Masonic Lodge also funded the publication of a book
of poetry that Sarah had written that was called The

(05:50):
Genius of Oblivion and Other Original Poems, and it was
published under the byline A Lady of New Hampshire. Sarah
earned enough money from this book that she was able
to leave Hannah in charge of what actually seems to
have become quite a thriving millinery business, and instead Sarah
focused on writing. Sarah submitted poems and stories to magazines
and journals, and in seven she published a novel called Northwood,

(06:14):
a Tale of New England. Northwood contrasted a woman's life
in New England to what she imagined to be a
woman's life in the South. At this point, Hale was
really concerned that the issue of slavery was going to
lead to a civil war or otherwise just destroy the country,
and Northwood reflects these fears as well as the eras
prevailing racism and Hale's own biases. The book condemned the

(06:39):
institution of slavery and the idea of a widening divide
between the North and the South, while also treating white
women of both the North and the South with a
lot of sympathy. Northwood was very well received, and it
caught the eye of the Reverend John Loris Blake, who
approached Hale about starting a magazine for women. This was
not an easy to see jan for her. If the

(07:01):
magazine was successful, she would probably make enough money to
send all five of her children to college, but taking
the job was also going to mean leaving her older
children with relatives while she moved to Boston to work.
Her oldest child, David, was thirteen at this point and
was getting ready to head to West Point, but the
rest of her children were years away from leaving home,

(07:22):
and her youngest child was only five. In the end,
Hale did take this job. She spent a few months
at home in New Hampshire preparing and planning out the
magazine's first issues, before sending her middle three children to
live with various aunts and uncles. She took William with
her when she left for Boston in the spring of
eighteen twenty eight, and we'll talk about that magazine after

(07:43):
we first paused for a little sponsor break. The magazine
that Sarah just at the Hale launched in eight was
initially known as Ladies Magazine in in the Literary Gazette.
It's believed to be the first magazine edited by a woman.

(08:05):
After a while, its name was shortened to just Ladies
Magazine and then expanded to American Ladies Magazine. This was
supposed to distinguish it from a different Ladies magazine that
was being published in Britain, and also to highlight what
Haile saw as the magazine's American focus. At the time,
most magazines being published in the United States were being

(08:27):
created primarily through a practice called clipping that was just
republishing material from other magazines without any kind of acknowledgement
or attribution or payment to its original creators. Most of
the time, the clipped content in the US was coming
from British publications, and we have talked a little bit
about the publications that worked in that style when we

(08:48):
have talked about um pose Era and his rivals, and
also also other other people that worked in in literary efforts, etcetera.
Came up, I thinking in our Wins or Mackay episodes,
possibly um. But Hale bless her did not approve of
this practice of clipping, and she wanted this to be

(09:10):
an American magazine by and for American women, meaning middle
and upper class white women. She did the vast majority
of the original writing herself in the magazine's pages included poetry,
fiction essays, news articles, household tips, and editorials where she
advocated things like property rights for married women. Some things

(09:31):
that hal did not want this magazine to include were
fashion plates. These were illustrations of people in fashionable clothing
and appealing surroundings, usually done as etchings or engravings. She
really wanted her magazine to be dedicated to the education
and enrichment of women, and that did not, in her mind,
include fashion. And her words quote, there is no part

(09:54):
of our duty as editor of a lady's journal which
we feel so reluctant to perform orm as to quote
or exhibit the fashions of dress. This is where I
retract my blessing upon her. But fashion plates were incredibly popular,
and Hale started losing subscribers as competing magazine started publishing
more of them. By late eighteen thirty, Hale realized that

(10:17):
she really did have to include fashion plates if she
wanted her magazine to stay afloat. So the first few
issues that included fashion plates bemoaned the lack of original
American fashions to feature, or offered commentary that criticized fashion,
or printed an essay on the facing page that used
the plate as some kind of moral lesson. Eventually, though,

(10:39):
Hale moved on to publishing plates without all of the
judge commentary, and she was sort of like, if I
have to do this, I'm just gonna be as foot
draggy and complaining about it as I came. The irony is,
though she wore black her whole life because she thought
it made her look stunning, So she was into fashion,
she just wouldn't acknowledge it. Yeah, and also the this

(11:00):
magazine and then also Godi's Ladies book, which are going
to talk about more in a bit. I mean, they
became incredibly famous for all these fashion plants. So Ladies
Magazine stopped publishing fashion plates towards the very end of
its run, but it's not clear whether that contributed to
the magazine's decline by eighteen thirty four, the magazine had
started to struggle, in part due to the financial fallout

(11:23):
from President Andrew Jackson's efforts to try to dismantle the
Bank of the United States. Hale started appealing to her
subscribers to try to support the magazine and for the
ones whose subscriptions were in arrears to pay their bills.
So during these lean years, a man named Lewis Antoine
Godie approached Hale about moving to Philadelphia to edit his magazine.

(11:43):
His name does appear French, but he was born in
the U. S who are going with the Lewis pronunciation.
Goadi was born in New York, as i said in
the US on June six, eight o four, and like Hale,
most of his education had come through self study. He
had owned a small bookstore and news stand for a
while before he became a scissors editor at the Philadelphia
Daily Chronicle. In eighteen thirty he started publishing a magazine

(12:06):
called Ladies Book, which was like so many other magazines
created through clipping, and it also included fashion plates. But
Goodie also didn't want this magazine to just be your
standard clipping shop. He wanted it to be in his words,
quote the guiding star of female education, the beacon light
of refined taste, pure morals, and practical wisdom, and he

(12:28):
hoped that if he hired Hale, she could take it
in that direction. In spite of her own magazine struggles,
Hale actually turned him down. This was largely because she
didn't want to leave Boston. Her son, William was about
to start college at Harvard and she didn't want to
leave until he graduated. And she also wasn't quite ready
to give up her own magazine. At this point she

(12:49):
was its co owner. Hale had been very busy during
her whole tenure as editor of American Ladies Magazine. She
had written numerous books on top of all the writings
she was doing for the magazine. This included publishing poems
for our children, including Mary Had a Little Lamb, which
was published in eighteen thirty. It's poems were quote written
to inculcate moral truths and virtuous sentiments. She was also

(13:14):
hugely active in fundraising efforts for the completion of the
Bunker Hill Monument, and she helped found the Seamen's Aid
Society and become its first president. She kept up this
pace as her magazine struggled, but she really was not
able to turn things around. In eighteen thirty six, Goadi
made another proposal that he could buy American Ladies Magazine,

(13:34):
merge it with his Lady's Book, and let Hale edit
the combined magazine from Boston until her son William graduated
from college in eighteen forty one. This time Hale agreed.
As of its first issue in eighteen thirty seven, she
was the editor of Goadie's Ladies Book, and she took
it in a similar direction as she had taken American
Ladies Magazine, which is what Godi had been hoping for,

(13:57):
moving it away from clipping toward original Colm tent. Hale
also focused on hiring women for as many roles as
she could. Eventually this included a staff of a hundred
and fifty women to who hand color the fashion plates.
That means hand coloring them for every copy of the magazine,
which was a feat and also meant that sometimes different

(14:20):
people's copies would be in different colors because they ran
out of one. Obviously, that's one of the things we
said before that this magazine became really famous for. Also,
in keeping with her distaste for covering fashion and a
ladies magazine at all. Fashion was the only section of
Goadie's Ladies Book that Hale did not personally oversee. There
was a lot in the magazine beyond the fashion plates

(14:41):
and other fashion coverage. Hale still wanted to quote provide
quality material to benefit and educate the female reader. So,
like her earlier magazine, Goadie's Ladies Book began publishing poetry,
fiction essays, biographical vignettes, news advice, and household tips. She
introduced story reads and articles for children meant to be

(15:02):
read to them by their mothers. Each issue included sheet music,
and they were also sewing and embroidery patterns, also recipes,
anything that Hale thought would be educational, edifying, and useful
for American ladies. This meant that Goadie's Ladies Book also
became a publishing outlet for some of the United States
leading writers at the time. The magazine published work by

(15:24):
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth,
Longfellow in Washington, Irving Edgar Allan Poe was a contributor
as well, publishing stories and poems, including the Cask of
a Monteato. Under the leadership of Hale as editor and
Goadie as publisher, Goadie's Ladies Book became incredibly successful. We

(15:45):
mentioned earlier that Hale's American Ladies Magazine was the first
women's magazine in the US to last more than five years.
Goadie's Ladies Book lasted for almost seventy from eighteen thirty
to eight. It outlived both its editor and its publisher.
It also became hugely popular. It had about ten thousand
subscribers when Hale came on as editor. At its peak

(16:08):
in eighteen sixty, it had about a hundred and fifty
thousand subscribers, which was the largest circulation of any magazine
in the United States at all. This was in spite
of an annual subscription cost of three dollars, which was
considered expensive for the time. It's always tricky to make
these comparisons, but this is usually cited as between eighty

(16:29):
five and ninety dollars a year today. It's also tricky
to compare that to current magazine subscription rates because there
are so many bundles and deals and digital only subscriptions
and whatnot. But the current bundle subscription rate for Vogue
is twenty one dollars and ninety nine cents a year.
The cover price for a year of Martha Stewart Living
is forty nine dollars and ninety cents. That is, according

(16:52):
to each of their websites. It was also read well
beyond its subscriber base. It's intended audience was ladies in
the mindset of the time time that meant white Protestant
women who were mostly middle class or more affluent. But
it was also read beyond that demographic, with women pooling
their money to share a subscription, or boarding houses sharing

(17:12):
one copy among all its residents, or patrons reading copies
in libraries and reading rooms. So today Goadie's Ladies Book
is a huge source of information about middle class white
women in the nineteenth century, and it and Hale were
also enormously influential, which we'll get to in a moment
after a quick sponsor break. Like we've said a couple

(17:40):
of times at this point, Sarah Josepha Hale and Goadie's
Ladies Book were enormously influential. Under her leadership, the magazine
reinforced several traditions that are a big part of life
for many Americans today. Things like Christmas trees and white
wedding dresses, which were being popularized in Britain thanks to
Queen Victoria, were popularized in the United States thanks and

(18:02):
part took Goadie's Ladies Book. The first picture of a
Christmas tree in the magazines pages actually was copied from
an engraving that had run in the Illustrated London News.
Pat engraving depicted Queen Victoria and her family around a
Christmas tree. The Goatie's version took out the Queen's crown
and Albert's sash and mustache, and some German biscuits from

(18:23):
under the tree. Otherwise, though it was the same picture
supposed to be an American family. The biggest and most
obvious example of Hale's influence in this regard is the
American Thanksgiving holiday. In the United States, Thanksgiving was already
celebrated in various parts of the country, especially in the Northeast,
before she became an editor. Hale started publicly advocating for

(18:45):
a Thanksgiving holiday to be celebrated nationwide, and she began
that quest in eight seven. It was something that went
on within and outside the pages of Goadie's Ladies Book,
but her interest in Thanksgiving as a holiday went back
for that she had written a lot about Thanksgiving before
Goadie's Ladies Book was even founded. There's a whole stretch

(19:07):
in her first novel, Northwood, that's focused on Thanksgiving, including
a New England family explaining to a visitor from elsewhere
that it's not celebrated in the whole country, but hopefully
one day will be, with one character saying quote, Thanksgiving,
like the fourth of July, should be considered a national
festival and observed by all our people. The Thanksgiving meal

(19:28):
is described in her writing this way quote the roasted
turkey took precedence on this occasion, being placed at the
head of the table, and well did it become its
lordly station, sending forth the rich odor of its savory stuffing,
and finally covered with the froth of the basting. At
the foot of the board, a sirloin of beef, flanked
on either side by a leg of pork and loin

(19:50):
of mutton, seemed placed as a bastion to defend innumerable
bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables disposed in that quarter.
A goose and pair of ducklings occupied side stations on
the table, the middle being graced as it always is
on such occasions by that rich burgomester of the provisions
called a chicken pie. This pie, which is wholly formed

(20:12):
of the choicest parts of fowls, enriched and seasoned with
a profusion of butter and pepper, and covered with an
excellent puff paste, is, like the celebrated pumpkin pie, an
indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving, the
size of the pie usually denoting the gratitude of the
party who prepares the feast, and then it goes on

(20:32):
to describe sideboards laden with a whole other course, plus
a collection of desserts, including pumpkin pie. I have made
some Thanksgiving meals, and thank goodness, I did not have
to make all of those different fouls. This is simultaneously
familiar sounding to a lot of people in terms of

(20:53):
the turkey and the pie and the vast quantity of food,
But it also seems even bigger than like the over
the top thanksgivings that a lot of people have. Yeah,
by the time we got to Mutton, I was like,
are you kidding me? This was also depicting a meal
that was going to be for a whole lot of people,
but still it's it's a lot. There are other references

(21:15):
to Thanksgiving and Hale's work after that, and then in
eighteen thirty seven she wrote an editorial in Godie's Ladies
Book that advocated a Thanksgiving holiday to be celebrated in
every state on the last Thursday of November. She started
contacting state governments with this proposal, along with contacting a
series of US presidents, continuing on until President Abraham Lincoln

(21:37):
gave his Thanksgiving Proclamation in eighteen sixty three. That proclamation said,
in part quote, it has seemed to me fit and
proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged,
as with one heart and one voice, by the whole
American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in
every part of the United States, and also those who

(21:57):
are at sea and those who are so earning in
foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday
of November next as a day of thanksgiving and prayer
to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. At
this point, the Thanksgiving holiday wasn't really associated with a
romanticized first dinner involving the Pilgrims and the wampan dog.

(22:19):
That association didn't really evolve until the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, so a few decades after Lincoln issued
his proclamation, and it was decades after that before Thanksgiving
officially became a national holiday. That romanticized First Thanksgiving story
was reinforced in the early twentieth century through school lessons

(22:39):
connecting it to ideas like freedom and good citizenship and
construction paper pilgrim hats in my case yeah and problematic
yeah head dresses quotation marks. So today, the First Thanksgiving
story and consequently the holiday as a whole, has been
really criticized for erasing centuries of exploitation and genocide of

(23:02):
North America's native peoples at the hands of colonists in
the government. But even without that connection to that romanticized story,
Hale's Thanksgiving campaign has its own problems. One of the
reasons she was so dedicated to a national Thanksgiving holiday
goes back to her thought that slavery might tear the
nation apart, so she thought a national Thanksgiving holiday might

(23:25):
help unify the nation in the face of its division
over the issue of slavery. So, in other words, she
thought this holiday might help keep the country together without
actually addressing the underlying issue of slavery. I have so
many thoughts that I'm just going to keep in my head.
Hail thought slavery was wrong, but she also didn't agree

(23:45):
with radical opposition to it. She advocated the resettlement of
enslaved Africans in Liberia where they would be free, rather
than the abolition of slavery within the United States. This
resettlement plan, we've talked about it on some episodes before,
had a lot of advocates arguing from all kinds of perspectives,
including people of African descent who thought that this was

(24:05):
the only way that they might truly be free, and
people who were shimply racist and wanted the enslaved population removed.
For more detail, you can check out our previous episodes
on Marcus Garvey and Thomas Morris Chester. So the same
mindset also influenced the editorial direction of Goadie's Ladies Book.
When Hale was editing American Ladies Magazine, she had written

(24:28):
various editorials that clearly stated her political opinions but Goadi
wanted the Ladies Book to appeal to women regardless of
what their political views were. And of course this wasn't
a distinction he was consciously making in his mind. But
the default woman here was white and usually middle class.
He was also interested in quote avoiding nationalism or any

(24:49):
political entanglements within the pages of the journal, and he
also said, quote I allow no man's religion to be
attacked or sneered at, or the subject of politics to
be mentioned in my magazine. So sometimes you'll see Godie's
Ladies Book described as not being political, but it would
be more accurate to say that the magazine avoided overt

(25:09):
political controversy. Really it was incredibly political. It avoided direct
discussion of the Civil War or the movement for abolition.
That's an inherently political decision. Instead, in the years leading
up to the U S Civil War, it published poetry, essays,
and stories that highlighted the potential tragedies of war and
also emphasized the idea of national unity. Although the hope

(25:33):
was that this would avoid offending either side, in reality
it meant that the magazine's readership peaked in eighteen sixty,
just before the war. Afterwards, people started gravitating toward publications
where they could get news about what was happening. On
top of that, in a different political direction, Goadie's Ladies
Book heavily reinforced a very specific idea of what a

(25:56):
woman should be. Sarah Guseppa Hale believed that women were
more moral and compassionate than men were, and Hale's words
quote God has given to man authority to woman influence.
She wanted women to influence men to be better so
that men could put their authority to better use. The
magazine focused on the idea that a woman's role given

(26:18):
by God was to be a moral force in her
sphere of influence, which was the home. Although the magazine
never took a clear position one way or the other,
Hale herself was against the idea of women's suffrage because
it was outside of women's fhere of influence, and because
women had fewer opportunities for education and political engagement, thus

(26:38):
they were less likely to be informed voters. Instead, Godie's
Ladies Book really enforced the idea that a true woman
was pious, pure, submissive, and domestic, a collection of ideas
known as the Cult of True Womanhood or the cult
of domesticity. Yeah, that's come up in a few episodes lately,
including Packard versus Packard. It was an incredibly common idea

(27:01):
of what a woman was supposed to be at the time,
and elements of it continue to today. Hale did advocate
for better opportunities for women, but only within this framework.
This included supporting Elizabeth Blackwell and her efforts to become
the first woman in the United States to earn an
m d. In Hale's mind, medicine could be within a

(27:22):
woman's spear, and her words written in March of eighteen
fifty two quote, the study of medicine belongs to a
woman's department of knowledge. Its practice is in harmony with
the duties of mother and nurse, which she must fulfill.
It is not going out of her sphere to prescribe
for the sick. She must do this by the fireside,
the bedside, in the inner chamber, where her true place is.

(27:44):
It is man who is there out of his sphere.
Hale also advocated for women to have better educational opportunities,
especially when it came to an education in the liberal arts.
She was a huge advocate for vass Or Female College
after its founding in eight sixty one, as well as
corresponding extensively with its founder, Matthew Vassar on everything from

(28:06):
the student's dress to the number of female faculty to
whether to keep the word female in the name. But
there were also a lot of limits to Hale's advocacy
for women's education, all connecting back to the idea of
what a woman's sphere was. For example, she didn't seem
to think that women should study the physical sciences for
their own sake. Various articles and Godie's Ladies books suggest

(28:29):
that science has a use in a woman's life, like
how understanding scientific concepts can help her keep a better home,
but it doesn't really support the idea that a woman
should just become a chemist or a physicist because she
wants to. And there were also limits to which women
she was writing for and depicting in the magazine. The
women in the magazine's famous fashion plates, some of which

(28:51):
were large enough that they were printed on fold out pages,
were all white and all affluent, was similarly attractive features
and the same slender body hype. They reinforced the ideas
of heterosexual marriage and motherhood as unifying forces in women's lives. Really,
for most of its existence, the the magazine didn't address
the experience of native people, or enslaved people, or free

(29:14):
black people or immigrants at all. In the words of
a piece in the July issue, which was after Hale
and Goadie had both died, quote, a little over a
century ago, colored women had no social status, and indeed
only thirty years ago, the term womanhood was not large
enough in this Christian republic to include any woman of

(29:34):
African descent. That's from a piece that was clearly written
for white women to let them know that quote, the
thousands of cultured and delightfully useful women of the colored
race who are worth knowing and who are prepared to
cooperate with white women in all good efforts, are simply
up to date new women in the best sense of
that much abused term. Even so, the magazine was widely

(29:58):
read and widely respect did. In the words of the
Philadelphia City Item in eighteen seventy quote, it has been
well remarked that where Godi's is taken, there is domestic neatness, comfort, elegance, virtue,
which we think is saying a good deal for the
American woman. God bless Godie's and keep it with us
many years. Goadi sold the publication to John Hill say

(30:21):
Is Holland Beek in eighteen seventy seven, after he and
Hale both retired. As of their retirement, she was eighty
nine and he was seventy three, so they worked on
this magazine almost until the end of their lives. Louis
Antoine Godi died the following year, on November twenty nine,
eight seventy eight. Sarah J. Hale, who called herself an editress,

(30:42):
died on April thirty, eighteen seventy nine. She had continued
to write for much of her life, publishing poems, fiction essays,
recipe books, etiquette manuals, and a women's encyclopedia titled Woman's
Record or Sketches of All Distinguished Women from the Creation
to a the eighteen fifty four arranged in four eras

(31:03):
with selections from female writers of every age. That was
all the title. But in her day she was so
associated with Goadie's Ladies Book that people called it Mrs
Hale's magazine. Like it's pretty complicated. Yeah, you know, I
want to like her in some ways, but that whole
like nose down at fashion thing is a problem, and

(31:27):
then her it's the funny thing. Where just as as
the magazine was um claiming that it did not take
a political stance, but obviously did because of its refusal
to acknowledge certain things, I feel like similarly, and obviously
on a much more important level, that's also how she
dealt with fashion, right, She's like, I don't want fashion,

(31:50):
which is in itself a commentary on fashion, and she
would consult on women's apparel at Vasser but didn't want
fashion involved. It's a fascinating thing to me. You just
got a lot of contradictions. You can there are scans
of a lot of these uh, a lot of issues

(32:11):
of this book that you can see online. Um, you
can read through. I mean they're just they goes that
goes on for years. There's pages and pages stuff you
can dive into if you were interested in little glimpses
of life for nineteenth century white women. Slash the kinds
of standards the magazine was really heavily reinforcing. Yeah, uh,

(32:33):
do you have some listener mail? I sure do you.
This is from Helen, and Helen has so helpfully updated
us on the amendment regarding the Port Chicago fifty that
we talked about in a previous listener mail. Helen says, Hi,
Holly and Tracy, I just heard your listener mail about
the Port Chicago amendment, and as someone who works a
lot with congressional websites, I went ahead and pulled up

(32:56):
the link for you. That's not actually an amendment, I believe,
which is probably you had of finding it. It's section
t HR National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal year twenty.
Hopefully this link will take you directly to that section
of the resolution. Love the show and always look forward
to new episodes, Helen. Helen got a reply for me

(33:16):
that started with the words thank you in all capital letters,
because I had really kind of torn my hair out
trying to find this text. Um having looked at the
link that she sent, I think the core issue was
that the engrossed in house version was not posted yet
when I was doing all this looking, and that's where

(33:38):
it is. I don't recall seeing that option in the
dropdown when I was doing my search for it. But anyway,
this uh here is the actual text of it. It
is sense of Congress regarding the Port Chicago fifty. It
is the sense of Congress that one the American people
should recognize the role of racial bias in the prosecution

(33:58):
and convictions of the Port Chicago of the following the
deadliest home front disaster in World War two, to the
military records of each of the Port Chicago fifty should
reflect such exoneration of Annie and all charges brought against
them in the aftermath of the explosion. And three, the
Secretary of the Navy should upgrade the general and summary
discharges of each of the Port Chicago fifty sailors to

(34:20):
honorable discharges. So, as of right this minute, this is
not something that has passed both Houses of Congress and
been signed into law. Yet it is something that had
had that made its way through the House back in July.
So thank you again, Helen for sending that to me,
because I probably would not have gone back to look

(34:42):
for it again. Um, and thanks to everybody who sends
us helpful, awesome emails or just says hi or sends
pictures of cats if you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast where at History
podcasts at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're
all over social media at MSS in History. That's where
you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. You can

(35:02):
come to our website, which is Missed in History dot com,
where you will find show notes of all the episodes
that Holly and I have worked on together and a
searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts, the I heart Radio app,
and wherever else you get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed

(35:24):
in History Class is a production of I heart Radio's
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