SYMHC Classics: Sarah Josepha Hale

This 2019 episode covers Sarah Josepha Hale's well-known poetry, and her publication Godey's Lady's Book, the most popular magazine in the U.S. in the middle of the 19th century,

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since the US holiday of Thanksgiving is coming
up today, we are sharing our episode on Sarah Jessefa Hale,
who was one of the people who really drove the
effort to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. At the time,
the holiday was not associated with a fictionalized or romanticized
story about a first Thanksgiving celebration supposedly bringing together Indigenous

(00:24):
people and colonists, but Hale was hoping a national holiday
for giving thanks would help keep the nation together as
it became increasingly divided over the issue of slavery. This
originally came out on August twenty eighth, twenty nineteen, So
enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a

(00:45):
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Lately, I've been
thinking a lot about etiquette on the Internet and how
sometimes there's sort of not any and how etiquette isn't

(01:07):
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
and has also been requested by a lot of our listeners.

(01:29):
That's Gotie's Lady's Book, and it's editor, Sarah Josepha Hale.
I will say that I have heard historians and archivists
say this as Goati's and as goddies. I have also
on occasion heard good Days. I think that's just people
trying to make us sound fancy. That does sound like
an attempt for fanciness. Yeah, A bunch of folks that

(01:50):
I have listened to from Vassar who she was associated with,
all said goaties. 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 hands tinted fashion plates, the content of the magazine
was this collection of all kinds of material, including poetry

(02:13):
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
in a lot of ways that are still felt today.
In Europe. The first magazines were launched in the seventeenth century,
thanks to advances in printing technology and mail distribution, as

(02:35):
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
magazine because of the word's earlier meaning of storehouse. The

(02:59):
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 Ladies General Repository of Pleasure and Improvement
was first published. In England and the United States, the
first women's magazine was called Ladies Magazine and it was

(03:21):
founded in seventeen ninety 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 five years. That is, in fact, a different ladies

(03:41):
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 Josepha Buell in Newport, New Hampshire, on October twenty fourth,
seventeen eighty eight. Her parents were Captain Gordon Buell and
Martha Whittlesey Yule, and her father had fought in the
Revolutionary War. Sarah was the third of their four children.

(04:05):
Sarah's parents thought that girls should have access to education,
and for the Buell 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 Horatio, and when he
went to Dartmouth, he actively encouraged her self study and

(04:25):
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.

(04:46):
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

(05:08):
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 eighteen twenty two,
nine years into their marriage. By then they had four

(05:29):
children together. They were David, Horatio, Frances Anne, and Sarah Josepha.
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

(05:50):
also thought it 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 page. She'd
been living at home and using that salary to help
cover her father's medical expenses. David had been a Freemason, though,

(06:11):
and his brothers at the Masonic Lodge helped get Sarah
and her sister in law, Hannah established with a millinery
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

(06:32):
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 eighteen twenty seven she published a

(06:55):
novel called Northwood, 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

(07:15):
as the era's prevailing racism and Hale's own biases. The
book condemned the 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,

(07:37):
who approached Hale about starting a magazine for women. This
was not an easy decision for her, if the 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

(07:58):
getting ready to head to West Point, but the rest
of her children were years away from leaving home, 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

(08:20):
when she left for Boston in the spring of eighteen
twenty eight. And we'll talk about that magazine after we
first paused for a little sponsor break. The magazine that
Sarah Joseppa Hale launched in eighteen twenty eight was initially

(08:41):
known as Ladies Magazine and Literary Gazette. It's believed to
be the first magazine edited by a woman. 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 public
in Britain, and also to highlight what Hale saw as

(09:03):
the magazine's American focus. At the time, most magazines being
published in the United States were being created primarily through
a practice called clipping that was just republishing material from
other magazines without any kind of acknowledgment or attribution or
payment to its original creators. Most of the time, the
clipped content in the US was coming from British publications,

(09:27):
and we have talked a little bit about the publications
that worked in that style when we have talked about
Poe's era and his rivals, and also also other people
that worked in literary efforts, etc. It came up, I
think in Our windsor Mackay episodes possibly, But Hale bless

(09:49):
her did not approve of this practice of clipping, and
she wanted this to be 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

(10:12):
rights for married women. Some things that Hale 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,

(10:32):
and that did not, in her mind, include fashion. In
her words, quote, there is no part of our duty
as editor of a lady's journal which we feel so
reluctant to perform 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

(10:54):
subscribers as competing magazines started publishing more of them. By
late eighteen thirty, Hale realized that 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

(11:16):
on the facing page that used the plate as some
kind of moral lesson. Eventually, though, Hale moved on to
publishing plates without all of the Judgy 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 can now. Irony is though she wore
black her whole life because she thought it made her

(11:37):
look stunning, So she was into fashion, she just wouldn't
acknowledge it. Yeah, and also this magazine, and then also
Godey's Ladies Book, which you're going to talk about more
in a bit. I mean, they became incredibly famous for
all these fashion plates. So Ladies Magazine stopped publishing fashion
plates toward the very end of its run, but it's
not clear whether that contributed to the magazines to line.

(12:00):
By eighteen thirty four, the magazine had started to struggle,
in part due to the financial fallout 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 and Tuan Goady approached

(12:23):
Hale about moving to Philadelphia to edit his magazine. His
name does appear French, but he was born in the
US who were going with the Lewis pronunciation. Gody was
born in New York, as I said in the US,
on June sixth, eighteen oh four, and like Hale, most
of his education had come through self study. He had
owned a small bookstore and newsstand for a while before
he became a scissors editor at the Philadelphia Daily Chronicle.

(12:47):
In eighteen thirty, he started publishing a magazine called Ladies Book,
which was like so many other magazines created through clipping,
and it also included fashion plates. But Gody also didn't
want this magazine to just be years standard clipping shop.
He wanted it to be, in his words quote, the
guiding star of female education, the beacon light of refined taste,

(13:09):
pure morals, and practical wisdom. And he 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

(13:30):
own magazine. At this point, she 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 writing 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 Its poems were quote written to inculcate moral truths

(13:54):
and virtuous sentiments. She was also hugely active in fundraising
efforts for the complete 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, Goady made another proposal that he

(14:15):
could buy American Ladies Magazine, 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 Goady's Lady's Book,
and she took it in a similar direction as she

(14:36):
had taken American Lady's Magazine, which is what Gody had
been hoping for, moving it away from clipping toward original content.
Hale also focused on hiring women for as many roles
as she could. Eventually this included a staff of one
hundred and fifty women to hand color the fashion plates.
That means hand coloring them for every copy of the magazine,

(15:00):
which was a feat and also meant that sometimes different
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 in a
lady's magazine at all, fashion was the only section of
Gody's Lady's Book that Hale did not personally oversee. There

(15:21):
was a lot in the magazine beyond the fashion plates
and other fashion coverage. Hale still wanted to quote provide
quality material to benefit and educate the female reader, So,
like her earlier magazine, Godey's Lady's Book began publishing poetry,
fiction essays, biographical vignettes, news advice, and household tips. She

(15:42):
introduced stories and articles for children meant to be read
to them by their mothers. Each issue included sheet music,
and there were also sewing and embroidery patterns, also recipes,
anything that Hale thought would be educational, edifying, and useful
for American Ladies. This meant that Godey's This Lady's Book
also became a publishing outlet for some of the United

(16:03):
States leading writers at the time. The magazine published work
by 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 Amontiado.
Under the leadership of Hale as editor and godi A's publisher,

(16:24):
Godey's Lady's Book became incredibly successful. We mentioned earlier that
Hale's American Ladies Magazine was the first women's magazine in
the US to last more than five years. Gody's Lady's
Book lasted for almost seventy from eighteen thirty to eighteen
ninety eight. It outlived both its editor and its publisher.
It also became hugely popular. It had about ten thousand

(16:48):
subscribers when Hale came on as editor. At its peak
in eighteen sixty, it had about one hundred and fifty
thousand subscribers, which was the largest circulation of any magazine
in the u 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

(17:09):
make these comparisons, but this is usually cited as between
eighty 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,

(17:29):
and the cover price for a year of Martha Stewart
Living is forty nine dollars and ninety cents. That is
according to each of their websites. It was also read
well beyond its subscriber base. Its intended audience was ladies.
In the mindset of the 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

(17:52):
their money to share a subscription, or boarding houses sharing
one copy among all its residents, or patrons reading copies
and libraries in reasa rooms. So today Godey's Lady's 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

(18:13):
after a quick sponsor break. Like we've said a couple
of times at this point, Sarah Josepha Hale and Godey's
Lady's Book were enormously influential. Under her leadership, the magazine
reinforced several traditions that are a big part of life

(18:35):
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 in
part to Gody's Lady's Book. The first picture of a
Christmas tree in the magazine's pages actually was copied from
an engraving that had run in the Illustrated London News.

(18:57):
That engraving depicted Queen Victoria and her family around a
Christmas tree. The Goady's version took out the Queen's crown
and Albert's sash and mustache, and some German biscuits from
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

(19:17):
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
a Thanksgiving holiday to be celebrated nationwide, and she began
that quest in eighteen thirty seven. It was something that
went on within and outside the pages of Godey's Ladies Book,

(19:40):
but her interest in Thanksgiving as a holiday went back
before that. She had written a lot about Thanksgiving before
Godey's Lady's Book was even founded. There's a whole stretch
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

(20:01):
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
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

(20:21):
lordly station, sending forth a rich odor of its savory stuffing,
and finally covered with the froth of the basting. At
the foot of the board, a surloin of beef, flanked
on either side by a leg of pork and loin
of mutton, seemed placed as a bastion to defend innumerable
bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables disposed in that quarter.

(20:42):
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 burgomaster of the provisions,
called a chicken pie. This pie, which is wholly formed
of the choicest parts of fowls, enriched and seasoned with
a profusion of butter and pepper, and covered with an

(21:03):
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
to describe sideboards laden with a whole other course, plus
a collection of desserts, including pumpkin pie. I have made

(21:24):
some Thanksgiving meals, and thank goodness, I did not have
to make all of those different fowls. This is simultaneously
familiar sounding to a lot of people in terms of
the turkey and the pie and the vast quantity of food,
but it also seems even bigger than like the over

(21:44):
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 a lot. There are other references to
Thanksgiving and Hale's work after that, and then in eighteen
thirty seven she wrote an editorial in Gody's Lady's Book

(22:05):
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 gave
his Thanksgiving Proclamation in eighteen sixty three. That proclamation said,

(22:26):
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
are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands,
to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November

(22:48):
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 Wampanog. That association didn't
really evolve until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
so a few decades after Lincoln issued his proclamation, and

(23:12):
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 connecting it to
ideas like freedom and good citizenship and construction paper pilgrim
hats in my case, yeah and problematic Yeah, comped headdresses, yes,

(23:35):
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 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

(23:58):
was so dedicated to a nowtional Thanksgiving holiday goes back
to her thought that slavery might tear the nation apart.
So she thought a national Thanksgiving holiday might 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

(24:19):
the underlying issue of slavery. I have so many thoughts
that I'm just going to keep in my head. Hale
thought slavery was wrong, but she also didn't agree 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,

(24:41):
we have 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
the only way that they might truly be free, and
people who were simply racist and wanted the enslaved population removed.
For more detail, you can check out our previous episode
on Marcus Garvey and Thomas Morris Chester. So this same

(25:04):
mindset also influenced the editorial direction of Godey's Lady's Book.
When Hale was editing American Lady's Magazine, she'd written various
editorials that clearly stated her political opinions, but Gody 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

(25:26):
default woman here was white and usually middle class. He
was also interested in quote avoiding nationalism or any 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 Godey's Lady's Book

(25:47):
described as not being political, But it would be more
accurate to say that the magazine avoided overt 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 US Civil War, it published poetry, essays, and stories

(26:10):
that highlighted the potential tragedies of war and also emphasized
the idea of national unity. Although the hope 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. Afterward, people started gravitating toward publications where they
could get news about what was happening. On top of that,

(26:33):
in a different political direction, Godie's Lady's Book heavily reinforced
a very specific idea of what a woman should be.
Sarah Josepha 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

(26:54):
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 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

(27:16):
of women's sphere of influence, and because women had fewer
opportunities for education and political engagement, thus they were less
likely to be informed voters. Instead, Godi's Lady's 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

(27:39):
come up in a few episodes lately, including Packard versus Packard.
It was an incredibly common idea 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 hers to become the first woman in

(28:01):
the United States to earn an MD. In Hale's mind,
medicine could be within a woman's sphere. In 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

(28:23):
this by the fireside, the bedside, in the inner chamber,
where her true place is. 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 Vasser Female College after its founding in eighteen

(28:44):
sixty one, as well as corresponding extensively with its founder,
Matthew Vasser on everything from 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.

(29:05):
For example, she didn't seem to think that women should
study the physical sciences for their own sake. Various articles
in Godie's Lady's Books suggest 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

(29:27):
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 were large enough that
they were printed on fold out pages, were all white
and all affluent, with similarly attractive features and the same
slender body type. They reinforced the ideas of heterosexual marriage

(29:47):
and motherhood as unifying forces in women's lives. Really, for
most of its existence, the magazine didn't address the experience
of native people, or enslaved people, or free black people
or immigrants at all. In the words of a piece
in the July eighteen ninety seven issue, which was after
Haile and Gody had both died, quote, a little over

(30:08):
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
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

(30:28):
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. Uh. Even so, the magazine was
widely read and widely respected. In the words of the
Philadelphia City Item in eighteen seventy quote, it has been

(30:48):
well remarked that where Goati's is taken, there is domestic neatness, comfort, elegance, virtue,
which we think is saying a good deal for the
American woman. God bless godies and keep it with us.
Many years Gody sold the publication to John Hill, says Hallenbeech,
in eighteen seventy seven, after he and Hale both retired.

(31:10):
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. Lewis Antwine Gody died
the following year. On November twenty ninth, eighteen seventy eight.
Sarah J. Hale, who called herself an editress, died on
April thirtieth, eighteen seventy nine. She had continued to write

(31:31):
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 Ady
eighteen fifty four, arranged in four eras with selections from
female writers of every age. That was all the title,

(31:52):
But in her day she was so associated with Godey's
Lady's Book that people called it missus Hale's magazine. She'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 then it's a funny thing.

(32:13):
Where just as as the magazine was 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

(32:33):
want fashion, which is in itself a commentary on fashion right,
and she would consult on women's apparel at Vassar but
didn't want fashion involved. It's a fascinating thing to me.
He's got a lot of contradictions. You can There are
scans of a lot of these, a lot of issues

(32:55):
of this book that you can see online. You can
read through. I mean, there's it goes on for years.
There's pages and pages of 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, thanks so much for

(33:23):
joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out
of the archive, if you heard an email address or
a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of
the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email
address is History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
find us all over social media at missed in History,

(33:43):
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.