Sarah Josepha (Buell) Hale Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Sarah Josepha (Buell) Hale

Sarah Josepha (Buell) Hale (24 October 1788-30 April 1879), editor, poet, and novelist, was born in Newport, New Hampshire. She was well-educated in the classics by her family and her desire to learn continued after her marriage in 1813 to a lawyer, David Hale, as they studied together in the evenings. After the death of her husband in 1822, Hale turned to writing to support herself and her five children. In 1828, after publishing a volume of verse and a novel, Northwood (Boston: Bowles & Dearborn, 1827), she accepted the editorship of the Ladies' Magazine and moved to Boston. Her work attracted the attention of a competitor, Louis Godey, and in 1836 he offered to buy her magazine (since 1834 called the American Ladies' Magazine) and merge it with his own Lady's Book. The first number of the new Lady's Book, with Hale as editor, appeared in January 1837, and in 1840 its title was changed to Godey's Lady's Book. Hale, who moved permanently to Philadelphia in 1841, continued to edit the magazine until 1877. As an editor, Hale was outstanding: through the use of color illustrations of the latest fashions and original contributions by nearly all the famous American authors of the day, she raised the circulation of the magazine to 150,000 at its peak.

Although Hale devoted much space to discussing "woman's role," she was too much rooted in the eighteenth century to deny the traditional distinction between the sexes: man was physically stronger and the breadwinner, while woman, weaker in strength but spiritually superior, provided moral guidance and uplifting. She often criticized those female reformers who left the home for the "man's world" by lecturing in public for woman's rights. Yet she did complain about woman's intellectual inferiority with man, which she considered the result of poor training rather than an inherent quality, and she championed greater educational opportunities for women. Her most famous publication is Woman's Record: or Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from the Creation to A.D. 1854 (New York: Harpers, 1855), one of the first biographical dictionaries devoted exclusively to women. Godey's editorial policy of noncontroversy limited Hale's reform activities but she was an important advocate of many public campaigns, including raising funds for the Bunker Hill Monument and for making Mount Vernon a national shrine, and declaring Thanksgiving a national holiday. In later years she proved a tireless author of her own instructional works and editor of writings by others, producing nearly fifty volumes by her death. Her views of woman's role and "woman's sphere" are summed up in Manners: or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1868).