Sarah Josepha Buell Hale: Entrepreneur, Editress, and Edison

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1788-1879) circa
1831 (Richard's Free Library, Newport, NH)

Like contemporary Emma Willard, the story of Sarah Josepha Buell Hale fell victim to an editing purge in the weeks leading up to the birth of Innovation on Tap.  (An editor herself, perhaps Hale would have understood.)

Sarah Hale was a force to be reckoned with in life and remains an inspiration in death.  

Eleven years old when George Washington died, Hale lived to see the birth of Herbert Hoover and to hear Edison's first sound recording--for which she will forever be associated.  Read on. 

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Sarah Hale lost her husband four days after the birth of their fifth child in 1822.  A widow at 34 with five young children, Sarah turned to her husband's Freemason lodge, which underwrote her first book of poetry in 1823. 

Encouraged by this success, Hale published her first novel, Northwood: Life North and South, Showing the True Character of Both, four years later.  In the Preface, she told readers that most of the book had been written holding a small child in one arm.

Northwood was one of the first American texts to deal frankly with slavery.  It was the story of Miss Lydia Romilly, a strong-willed Northern beauty who throws off her arranged marriage to wed Mr. Horace Brainard of South Carolina, “reputed immensely rich –as all southern people are.”^[1] 

Three weeks after meeting him, she is on her way to South Carolina, far from her family farm in New Hampshire--and stunned by how backward slavery has left the South. 

Look at Virginia!  Absolutely a century behind Massachusetts in agriculture, arts and manufactures . . . Slave labor keeps Virginia poor: free labor markets make Massachusetts rich.   So it is throughout our whole land.  Everywhere the free states are the most prosperous.^[2]

Hale was one of many to conclude that slavery diminished both slave and master, stunting national progress. 

Impressed by her work, John Lauris Blake invited Hale to Boston to edit The Ladies Magazine, an ambitious and novel enterprise that met with immediate success. 

Throughout the 1820s Hale was a strong advocate of American writers, the nation, and union; she published stories in which the North and South fought together against the British, and tales in which Northern and Southern youth fell in love.  While in Boston, she also focused on publishing works that educated women without encroaching on men's' public sphere. She insisted throughout her own career, for instance, on being called “editress.”

After nine productive years, Hale moved to Philadelphia to work with Louis Godey, another publishing innovator, as editor of Godey's Lady's Book.  This job would engage her for the next forty years and result in a publication that by 1860 had a record-breaking readership of 160,000^[3]—making it the most widely read magazine in America.  

Godey’s spoke to both tradition and change, reinforcing the domestic role of women while promoting female health and property rights.  In 1852 it even offered a section called “Employment for Women.”  

Editress Hale was a no-nonsense taskmaster, intent on saving the magazine from sugary romance and telling readers that “we again repeat that we will not accept any stories where runaway horses or upsetting of boats is necessary to the denouement—certainly some other incidents can be invented.”^[4]  Hale believed that American women could soften the edges of capitalism and help reconcile a Union that was being torn apart by slavery.  

Her energy was enormous; while overseeing the best-read periodical in America, she published almost fifty volumes of her own poetry and novels.

Hale’s remarkable work in publishing was equaled by her extraordinary success as a social entrepreneur.  In 1833 she founded the Seaman’s Aid Society to assist the surviving families of Boston sailors who died at sea.  Hale helped to found Vassar College and was tireless in her support of female instructors.  (Sarah sent both of her daughters to Emma Willard’s school in Troy.)^[5] 

Hale advocated for infant nutrition and the construction of playgrounds. She was unafraid to praise female physicians like America’s first, Elizabeth Blackwell. 

Not unlike John Pintard and Christmas, Hale is also credited with establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday. She advocated zealously for this cause in a campaign begun in 1846, ending only when she convinced Abraham Lincoln to adopt the holiday in 1863.  Her desire to bind the country also led to her support for preservation of George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation (“Ladies to the rescue!  Manufacturing speculators have offered $200,000 for Mount Vernon!”^[6]) and to raising $30,000 for completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, in part, by asking her readers to each contribute $1.00.

Sarah Hale’s 1830 collection, Poems for Our Children, included “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (originally “Mary’s Lamb”).  When Hale retired in 1877 at age 89, Thomas Edison spoke the opening lines of “Mary’s Lamb” as the first speech ever recorded on his newly invented phonograph.

Hale’s influence as a social entrepreneur complemented the enormous sway of her work editing some of the nation’s most popular magazines.  Her own writing included a novel about slavery that anticipated Uncle Tom’s Cabin by two decades.  Recalling the desperate times after the death of her husband, she (alongside Emma Willard) believed that “every young woman in our land should be qualified by some accomplishment which she may teach, or some art of profession she can follow, to support herself creditably, should the necessity occur.”^[7]  

In 2013, Sarah Josepha Hale’s hometown of Newport, New Hampshire, dedicated a memorial in her honor, recognizing that despite her impressive resume, she was largely “off the radar” for modern Americans.^[8]

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[1] Sarah Josepha Hale, Northwood; or, Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Both, New York: H. Long & Brother, 1852, 14.

[2] Sarah Josepha Hale, Northwood; or, Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Both, New York: H. Long & Brother, 1852, 167.

[3] Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Kindle edition), 2001, Location 1306.

[4] Amy Condra Peters, “Godey’s Lady’s Book and Sarah Josepha Hale: Making Female Education Fashionable,” The Student Historical Journal, 1992-1993, Loyola University Department of History, 1993, http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1992-3/peters.htm.

[5] Judith Freeman Clark, “Gentle Crusader: New Hampshire’s Sarah Josepha Hale,” Richard’s Free Library, 2014, http://www.rfltest.dreamhosters.com/sarah-josepha-hale-award/sarah-josepha-hale/.

[6] “Editors’ Table,” Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, Sarah J. Hale, ed., v. 51, 1855, 177.

[7] Amy Condra Peters, “Godey’s Lady’s Book and Sarah Josepha Hale: Making Female Education Fashionable,” The Student Historical Journal, 1992-1993, Loyola University Department of History, 1993, http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1992-3/peters.htm.

[8] Jon Kamp, “’Thanks’ to Unsung Heroine Sarah Josepha Hale,” The Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304281004579222432724866914.