Sarah Josepha Hale

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SJH , nineteenth-century American woman of letters and one of that country's earliest female professional journalists, wrote or edited about fifty books. These include fiction, household advice, works for children (she is the author of the nursery-rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb), poetry, and biography. She won fame as the editor of Godey's Lady's Book and the encyclopaedic biographical dictionary Woman's Record. She offers a complicated, controversial, and in some respects feminist version of middle-class female sensibility as crucial to the republic.
Half-length painting of Sarah Josepha Hale by James Reid Lambdin, c. 1831. She stands at a slight turn against an outdoor nighttime scene, wearing a black dress that sits low on her shoulders, with white at the neckline. Her dark hair, pulled back, hangs in ringlets around her face.

Milestones

24 October 1788

Sarah Josepha Buell (later SJH ), US writer, editor, and encyclopedist, was born at Newport, New Hampshire, the third of four children in her family.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.

January 1828

SJH edited her first number of the new Ladies' Magazine, the first successful periodical for women in the USA. She continued as editor when Louis Godey bought it in 1837 and transmuted it into Godey's Lady's Book.
Okker, Patricia. Our Sister Editors. University of Georgia Press, p. 264 pp.
44, 50

By 23 April 1853

SJH published her monumental Woman's Record, an international biographical dictionary containing over 2,500 entries, tactfully Inscribed to the Men of America.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Hale, Sarah Josepha. Woman’s Record. Source Book Press.
v
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
1330 (23 April 1853)

30 April 1879

US woman of letters SJH died at the age of ninety; she outlived by only five months Louis Godey, the magazine proprietor with whom her career was linked.
Okker, Patricia. Our Sister Editors. University of Georgia Press, p. 264 pp.
58

Biography

SJH often used as a pseudonym the name of the Roman matron, mother of the Gracchi, who said that her jewels were her children: a symbol both of motherhood and of republican patriotism.
Tonkovich, Nicole. Domesticity with a Difference. University Press of Mississippi.
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Birth and Family

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