1837

 

January: Sarah Josepha Buell Hale takes over editor duties at Godey’s Lady Book, what Ruth E. Finley, writing in 1931, calls “America’s first great magazine.” She would sign herself, “The Lady Editor.”

Refusing a proposal of marriage.

 

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“The wish to promote the reputation of my own sex was among the earliest mental emotions I can recollect.” 

Sarah Josepha Hale

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Born October 24, 1788, Hale’s patriotic mother taught her George Washington’s forty-eight rules of conduct – which she would later reprint in Godey’s many times. Hale had married in due time, as was expected of women of her era. Her husband was advanced in his thinking for the time, and the two often studied together at home. 

We commenced, soon after our marriage, a system of study and reading, which we pursued while he lived. The hours allotted were from eight o’clock until ten – two hours in twenty-four. How I enjoyed those hours! In this manner we studied French, Botany – then almost a new science in this country but for which my husband had an uncommon taste; and obtained some knowledge of Mineralogy, Geology, etc., besides pursuing a long and instructive course of reading. 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 powers of mind, which he estimated more highly than I did. (113/36)

 

The family always had at least one servant to lighten her load. But her husband died of pneumonia, on September 25, 1822. Sarah was left pregnant, with four children, no money, and a fifth child born two weeks after the father’s death. Her eldest boy at the time was seven. In such situations, families of that period were often broken up, with relatives or friends having been persuaded to take on one of the children. Hale intended to keep everyone together. 

“Money must be earned,” Finley writes. So, “Out into a world totally unaccustomed to a woman seeking monied success she took the essential qualification – a trained brain, however unpopular in a woman – for the accomplishment of her end. (113/83) 

Her path may have been somewhat smoothed by the fact that “Sarah Hale was strikingly beautiful,” according to Finley. (113/89) 

“The alternative for working women in 1822, barring the kitchen,” Finley writes, “was sewing. So sewing it was.” 

Sarah tried her hand in the millinery business. It did not last. (113/37) 

Her heart, however, was in writing, and Hale made a name as an author. In 1827, her novel, Northwood: Or Life North and South, was published. Sarah hoped her story would foster a better understanding between the two sections, although she did call for abolition of slavery. In 1828, at the urging of a Boston publishing house, she accepted an offer to become editor of the Ladies’ Magazine. Hale would later describe it as “the first literary work exclusively devoted to women ever published in America.” Given the attitudes of the time, even Hale felt the necessity of making the following promise. “Husbands,” she wrote, “may rest assured that nothing found on these pages… shall cause her [the wife] to be less assiduous in preparing for his reception” or encourage her to “usurp station, or encroach on the prerogatives of men.  (113/39) 

In 1835 she published a book of essays. Finley offers a few examples of her wisdom: 

“Political controversies are never entered into with any wish to gain knowledge, but only a triumph for the party.” 

“To speak without metaphor – the engrossing pursuit of Americans is wealth.” 

“We shall never be free in spirit, while bigotry and intolerance are cherished among us.” 

“This is a speculating and selfish age; and to think ‘money will answer all things’ is too much the characteristic of Americans.” (113/270)

 

The myth of the “good old days.”

Even in her era, the image of the “good old days,” was false. Hale described America in the late 1700s: “there remain the facts, clearly attested, of highways infested with ‘gentlemen of the road,’ rape, preferment, slavery, dueling, hanging for petty theft, public whipping, wife-beating, child-selling, ‘bundling’ – general as well as individual beastliness.” (113/21) Godey’s Lady’s Book, May 1837. 

Hale had been editing her own Lady’s Magazine for some years before. One of her “causes” was completion of the Bunker Hill Monument. It was begun in 1825, with Lafayette laying the first trowel. Construction faltered. Hewn blocks lay scattered about the hill. A burst of enthusiasm led to a second attempt. The monument rose to 80 feet then progress stopped. Hale pushed for more funding, raised donations, and organized a “fair,” with women baking and doing needle pointing, and brought in $30,000. The monument was finished in 1843. 

Sarah described the new method of construction: 

The only difference in the work – showing too the progress of the age during the few years since the last suspension – was the introduction of the Steam Engine, which displaced the horse power formerly used in hoisting. It was a novel site to behold the immense blocks of stone gracefully moving upwards to their places, propelled by that mysterious and newly adopted force. By the aid of steam the period of construction was materially shortened. (113/74)

 

Mrs. Hale soon became interested in the plight of seamen’s families, Boston and other ports then being full of vessels crewed by American sailors. Finley writes that the “distress of seamen’s families was chronic. With husbands and fathers absent for long periods, months at a time and often years, the women and children suffered recurrent destitution.” 

Hale herself wrote: 

“The lot of the sailor’s wife is of extreme hardship. The highest wages, which at the best of times a common seaman can obtain, is eighteen dollars a month – often he is obliged to accept ten or twelve dollars only. Of this sum he is usually obliged to take up two months’ pay in advance for his outfit.” This she went on to explain, meant that the sailor on undertaking a voyage could leave his family so little that his wife “cannot do more than pay rent and buy fuel from her husband’s wages, and must either wholly or in part support herself and children.”

 

Probably what spurred the lady editor, herself an inlander, to activity in the behalf of seamen’s wives was her sudden coming face to face with wholesale want. There could be no actual starvation in a New Hampshire rural community. But in Boston she found a large percentage of the population hopelessly involved – hundreds and thousands of women, most of them mothers of little children, caught up in a system that denied them both support and work, or, if work, at grinding wages. (113/75)

 

Hale and others organized an aid society to help unmarried sailors find better lodgings. The men who ran the boarding houses of that era, says Finley, were of low character, “dispensers of filthy lodgings, unwholesome food and inferior grog. Sailors once drunk were easily robbed.” Sarah helped set up a Mariner’s House, and an industrial trade school for the girls whose fathers went to sea. A Day Nursery was founded, with older pupils watching the little children. (113/77) 

In 1836, one incident particularly troubled Hale. Finley explains: 

A sailor’s wife, who with her children have been rescued from abject poverty and who for the first time in her life was enjoying the comfort of a decent wage earned at the Store, had suffered legal confiscation of her earnings, in the mid-winter of 1836, by a creditor of her husband. This was only one of several like cases. The comparative affluence of seamen’s wives that resulted from the work given them by the Society having become noised abroad, men whom their husbands had long owed saw a golden opportunity to recover. Both the Society and the women were helpless to resist. The creditors were within the law: all property of a wife, including her earnings, belonged to the husband. That he was absent and that she was supporting his children mattered not. Her wages were subject to seizure for his debts. Hence the May, 1837, editorial and the years of campaigning that followed. (113/80)

 

Louis Antoine Godey had first published his magazine in July 1830. For the first six years, it was mostly reprinted material from England. There was no international copyright in that day. In 1836 he announced that he would focus on publishing the best work of American pens. It was a different world, with postage paid on the magazine by the receiver. Godey’s plates were hand-colored. In 1851, with a circulation of 63,000, Godey’s had twice as many patrons as any other magazine in the country. By the time Hale resigned her position, circulation was 150,000. 

Ruth E. Finley in her biography of Hale, lists some of her accomplishments: 

She was responsible for Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

 

She was the early champion of elementary education for girls equal to that of boys and of higher education for women.

 

She was the first to advocate women as teachers in public schools.

 

As the friend and adviser of Matthew Vassar, she helped organize Vassar College, the first school of collegiate rank for girls.

 

She demanded for housekeeping the dignity of a profession and put the term “domestic science” into the language.

 

She began the fight for the retention of property rights by married women.

 

She founded the first society for the advancement of women’s wages, better working conditions for women and the reduction of child labor.

 

She started the first day nursery – boon to working women.

 

She was the first to stress the necessity of physical training for her sex.

 

She was the first to suggest public playgrounds.

 

She was among the earliest to recognize health and sanitation as civic problems and the first to crusade for remedial measures. (113/17) 

Add to the list: She wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” 

Battling for equality.

Finley says of her, that “not a month passed during her entire half century of editorship but that Sarah Hale proclaimed the gospel of equal education, equal economic rights, equal recognition under the law, and equal professional opportunity for women.” 

Hale would later write: “The wish to promote the reputation of my own sex was among the earliest mental emotions I can recollect.” 

I owe my early predilection for literary pursuits to the teachings and example of my mother [Hale explained]. She had enjoyed uncommon advantages of education for a female of her times, possessed a mind clear as rock water, and had a most happy talent of communicating knowledge. (113/27)

 

Sarah, of course, was not expected to go to college. Her brother Horatio saved her. “To my brother Horatio,” she later wrote, “I owe what knowledge I have of Latin, of the higher branches of mathematics, and of mental philosophy.” 

In his months at home the two kept regular hours during which the boy expounded to the girl the mysteries of his sacred class-rooms. When Horatio was graduated from Dartmouth, Sarah to all intents and purposes was graduated with him. She was awarded no sheep-skin. Nevertheless she had acquired the rarest of all possessions for a woman of her day – the equivalent of a college education.

 

Meantime she had been teaching school. That in itself was a distinction. “Women were looked on as mentally unfit to teach. Indeed, this attitude prevailed for many years until Mrs. Hale, then become a foremost champion of equal opportunity for women, succeeded in persuading the public to give them a chance.” (113/29)

 

In an editorial: “The Rights of Married Women,” she thundered: 

The barbarous custom of wrestling from woman whatever she possesses, whether by inheritance, donation or her own industry, and conferring it all upon the man she marries, to be used at his discretion and will, perhaps wasted on his wicked indulgences, without allowing her any control or redress, is such a monstrous perversion of justice by law, that we might well marvel how it could obtain in a Christian community.” (113/22)

 

Referring to one style, Finley speaks of “bustle-deformed ladies.” (25) Even Finley calls it, “the bustle, most hideous style in all the history of dress.” (113/156) 

As early as 1837, Godey’s was questioning style choices made by American women, noting, “We once remarked a very fine lady, and found, on counting the hues that adorned her, that, from her green kid gloves to the lilac bow on the crown of her sky-blue bonnet, she wore no fewer than fifteen distinct colours – sufficient to make two rainbows and a fraction.” (113/153) 

Hale railed repeatedly about the “wasp-waisted” woman; but the style remained popular. Hoop skirts eventually became so large that twenty-five yards of material might be used in making one; and the dream of a stylish woman was to display an 18'' waist when she went out in public. (113/155) 

According to Finley, it was Hale who introduced the word “lingerie” to her American readers, or “everything of the under wardrobe.” 

“No sex in education.”

Hale, through the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book, advanced many good causes. But dearest to her heart was education for girls and women. In the January 1837 issue of Godey’s, she highlighted the efforts of early pioneers in the field: Catherine Fisk, who in 1814, had founded her Young Ladies Seminary in Keene, N.H. It was, Hale wrote, “the oldest institution of its kind in New England, and, we believe, in the United States.” Lydia English, a lady of some wealth, and “devoted to the work of improving her own sex,” maintained a Female Seminary at Georgetown D. C. in the early 1830s. Finley adds: 

Being subsidized, Miss English’s school was not subjected to all the ups and downs – mostly downs – that were the fate of the “female” educational institutions of the period. The Georgetown catalog for 1835 gave the number of pupils as 130, an unusual enrollment for those days, with nine teachers in attendance besides the Principal.

 

The women and girls were stirring. Boston had had a high school for girls, but it closed after eighteen months due to overcrowding. Unsupported by public funds, officials refused to allow the school to expand its facilities. Meanwhile, Dr. and Mrs. Cook established the West Chester Young Ladies Seminary in Pennsylvania. Emma Willard’s sister, Almira Phelps, taught there, rose to principal, and wrote (says Finley) several “widely used text-books.” Rev. Henry Jones established the Greenfield High School for Young Ladies around the same time, “high school” being synonymous with a “boarding or finishing school.” His wife was the daughter of Noah Webster. 

“No sex in education,” was Hale’s motto. 

Hale was far ahead of her times, pushing four basic reform ideas: 

School and college opportunities for girls equal to those granted boys;

Abolishment of corporal punishment;

Employment of women as teachers;

Government aid of teachers’ training schools. (113/223-225)

 

Liberal clergy, Finley writes, advocated education for women to ensure they were better mothers. 

As early as November 1828, Hale, in her Ladies’ Magazine, had framed education for women as a boon to husbands. “Confessions of a Husband,” purportedly represented the complaints of one such man; but Finley has no doubt it was written by Hale. The supposed husband of the story complains that he has “no companion in my wife.” She, “being uneducated and consequently unable to take an interest in the intellectual pursuits” of her spouse, fails to understand him. 

Hale must, in that article, also include a story of a neighbor’s wife. She is pretty, amiable, an excellent housekeeper – and educated. She was “full of good works,” and schooling had not harmed her or warped her as a wife. Finley says Hale “flattered man into educating woman.” 

Later, she would write, “Better leave the boys of a generation without learning than the girls, if one sex must be doomed to ignorance.” 

“What has made this nation great?” she asked. “Not its heroes but its households.” 

“The future of the country depends upon the training of its children. … Woman has the citizen from the first…, working...not only for the present generation, but for the countless millions that will fill the continent; and her influence will go on ever broadening and deepening with the future of the nation.” 

Hale naturally gave space in her own and later Godey’s, for reformers like Emma Willard to espouse their views. (113/227-228) 

See also: Year 1846. 

 

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Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. later describes the treatment of young women in this era like so: 

They braced my aunt against a board

    To make her straight and tall,

They laced her up, they starved her down,

    To make her light and small.

They pinched her feet, they singed her hair,

    They screwed it up with pins –

Oh, never mortal suffered more

    In penance for her sins.                                                    (Earle, 109)

 

* 

Samuel Morse, having been turned down for help by Congress, and in London, and in Paris, does manage to send a message from one room in the New York University to another across 1700 feet of copper wire. (124/346)

 

* 

In a work titled The Battlefield, William Cullen Bryant writes: 

“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,

Th’ eternal years of God are hers.”

 

* 

From McLaughlin, we have this description of the Panic of 1837: 

In the winter before the inauguration a large gathering was held in New York in response to a call headed “Bread, meat, rent, fuel! Their prices must come down!” The meeting was followed by a riot. Abroad, too, there was business depression. April 10, 1837, the London Times said that great distress and pressure had been produced in England in every branch of industry, and that the calamity had never been exceeded. Englishmen that had invested money in this country now began to demand payment on their stocks, bonds, and notes. With what were Americans to pay? With the paper of the hundreds of banks scattered here and there throughout the country – banks with little or no gold and silver in their vaults, and without capital that could be turned into good money? Of course, the English wanted good money. Jackson’s specie circular, too, did much to topple over the castles in the air which people had been building.

 

It now became clear enough that the paper of worthless banks was not money; and it soon appeared that nearly everything had acquired an unreal price. Speculation came sharply to a standstill. Commercial failures began in April. One business house after another failed. All sorts of goods fell in price. Workmen were thrown out of employment, and there was much suffering among the poor. Men who had thought themselves rich, found that their wealth was in Western lands for which there was no market, or in promises to pay on which they could not realize, or in shares of some gigantic project which was now no more. The great fabric, reared on credit and hope, fell, and the whole country was in consternation. Such was the dismal outcome of the extravagance and wild speculation of a decade.” (56/340)