Godey's Lady's Book: An Unexpected Find While Shelf Reading

Shelf-reading is tedious to say the least. With a packet of papers and a clipboard in hand, I look at every book on every shelf in every section just to check that everything is in its place.

One day, I started on a new section in the Rare Book Room. Usually, I find few problems in the order of the books, but this day, the first shelf held the most problems. Discreetly placed between ancient volumes, Godey’s Lady’s Book peaked out at me. I carefully flipped through the pages and discovered drawings from the mid and late 1800s of women in full skirts with pouty faces and scores of music. What is this? In that moment, I knew that I just had to answer that question for myself.

Godey’s Lady’s Book is a nation-wide woman’s magazine created by Louis A. Godey in 1930. The first magazine was published in Philadelphia and ran until 1878. Louis A. Godey got the idea for the magazine from gift books, which were popular at the time and marketed towards women. Lavishly decorated, gift books are defined as 19th century books that were bought for the sole purpose of giving as a keepsake. Gift books consisted of essays, short fictions and poetry. Godey’s Lady’s Books mirrored the gift book. Inside, women could find short stories, music scores, poetry, essays, and pictures that were created by prominent writers and artists of the time.

Godey's Lady's Book

One of the most interesting things that I discovered about Godey’s Lady’s Book is its editor: Sarah Josepha Hale. Sarah Josepha Hale, author of “Mary had a little lamb,” was the United States’ first woman editor. She began her career as creator and editor of Ladies’ Magazine, the first magazine “published especially for women.” Acting within the boundaries of the time, Hale advocated for the education of women and fought within her own editorials for the acceptance of women as the mental equals to men (Burt, 54-55). Hale became editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book after Godey bought Hale’s own publication, Ladies’ Magazine, from her financers. With that, Hale became editor of the Lady’s Book in 1837. After Sarah Josepha Hale became editor, sales of Lady’s Book jumped from 10,000 to 40,000 and then again to 150,000 by 1860. With the popularity of Godey’s Lady’s Book growing, Hale used her influence to further several causes for women. In the spring of 1840, Hale used an issue of the Book as a call to action for The Monument Fair. The fair itself was created to showcase women’s intelligence, skill and power through their work. Hale also influenced the creation of the home sewing machine (Burt, 125-126). Using her editorials and her position as the editor of Lady’s Book, Sarah Josepha Hale influenced women’s worlds within the boundaries of the time.

Quote from Hale

I must admit, I was worried about Godey’s Lady’s Book at first. I thought: Well, here’s another misogynistic book from the nineteenth century. Great. But I was wrong. Sure, there are aspects of the book that most women today would find somewhat annoying, such as the emphasis on homemaking. But the book itself offers so much more! Hale, like other women of the time, not only acknowledged the boundaries that restricted her, but also, worked within and against those very boundaries to advance women’s rights.

Source:
Burt, Olive. First Woman Editor: Sarah J. Hale. New York: Julian Messner, Inc. 1960. Print.

 --Cat Clark, Class of 2016