Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman by Melanie Kirkpatrick
Back when men ran everything and women couldn’t vote, Sarah Josepha Hale was a formidable influence in U.S. history, responsible for a remarkable list of contributions that ranged from persuading President Lincoln to proclaim Thanksgiving a national holiday (in the middle of the Civil War, no less) to the introduction of the word “lingerie” to the American lexicon. Yet, she is best known, if she is known at all, for writing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Melanie Kirkpatrick, in her latest book Lady Editor: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman (Encounter Books), presents an educated, determined and unstoppable woman who would have been a champion in the 1960s, along with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Readers may wish Hale could have lived to meet them.
Born in New Hampshire in 1788 to Gordon and Martha Buell, Sarah was lucky to have a family that valued education, even for girls when that was deemed totally unnecessary. She did, however, follow the path that young women were groomed for, marrying David Hale just short of her 25th birthday — quite late in life for a girl back then. The couple had five children in nine years before David, caught in a freak snowstorm, died upon arriving home, frostbitten and weak.
Here is where Sarah Josepha Hale shows her true mettle. A widow with five children and no source of income, she manages to use her wits and tenacity to not only survive but become a real force in the changing role of the American woman.
INFLUENCING MINDS IN A BUDDING NEW NATION
As editor of a magazine called Godey’s Lady’s Book, she was able to showcase emerging writers, including Daniel Webster, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Poe. She created the formula of a successful women’s periodical — which included intellectual content, entertainment and practical advice. Her influence grew beyond the readership of the magazine; she changed people’s minds, she gained the ear of senators and local politicians, she added to our language. She encouraged women to educate themselves and their children, and she encouraged them to dance.
Lady Editor is not just a valuable biography of Sarah Hale; it is also a history of a growing new nation where men and women both had to carve out their places in society. It will be educational for many of us, who are not historians or women’s studies professors, to see how life has changed and how one woman navigated the reluctance and reality of the world around her.
This is not the first time Kirkpatrick has made nonfiction an easy read. She’s the author of Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground Railroad and Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience. As a former deputy editor of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and member of a non-profit Washington D.C. think tank, Kirkpatrick brings brains and experience to what she writes. Lady Editor is a great example.
Thank you, Sherri, for your spirited and enthusiastic review of “Lady Editor!” I had great fun researching it and writing it. As a former “lady editor” myself, I was amazed at how much influence Hale had on so many things that we now take for granted: Thanksgiving, of course. But also such ideas as women are the intellectual equals of men. That was a radical thought in the 1820s and 1830s. Or that women are capable of teaching kids older than 5 or 6. Or that women can become doctors. Hale was a great figure in our history, and I wrote “Lady Editor” in the hope that my readers will think so too.