Sarah Josepha Hale - Beliefs

Beliefs

Hale, as a successful and popular editor, was respected as an arbiter of taste for middle-class women in matters of fashion, cooking, literature, and morality. In her work, however, she was reinforcing stereotypical gender roles, specifically domestic roles for women," for women while casually trying to expand on it. For example, she believed that women shaped the morals of society, and pushed for women to write morally uplifting novels. She wrote that "while the ocean of political life is heaving and raging with the storm of partisan passions among the men of America... the true conservators of peace and good-will, should be careful to cultivate every gentle feeling". She did not support women's suffrage and instead believed in the "secret, silent influence of women" to sway men voters.

Hale was an advocate for education. She supported play and physical education as important learning experiences for children. She wrote in 1829 that "Physical health and its attendant cheerfulness promote a happy tone of moral feeling, and they are quite indispensable to successful intellectual effort." More specifically, she was an early advocate of women's education, particularly higher education for women; she helped in the founding of Vassar College. Her championship of education for women began with her editorship of the Ladies' Magazine and continued until she retired. She wrote no fewer than seventeen articles and editorials devoted to the subject of women's education, and is credited with helping make the founding of an all-women's college acceptable to a public unaccustomed to the idea. Her efforts in promoting women's education were rewarded in 1860 when the Baltimore Female College awarded her a medal "for distinguished services in the cause of female education". As an editor, she created a section headed "Employment for Women" beginning in 1852 discussing women's attempts to enter the workforce. She also published the works of Catharine Beecher, Emma Willard and other early advocates of education for women.

Hale was also a strong advocate of the American nation and union. In the 1820s and 1830s, a time when other American magazines merely compiled and reprinted articles from British periodicals, Hale was among the leaders of a group of American editors who insisted on publishing American writers. In practical terms, this meant that she sometimes personally wrote half of the material published in the Ladies' Magazine. In later years, it meant that she particularly liked to publish fiction with American themes, the frontier, and historical fiction set during the American Revolution. Hale adamantly opposed slavery and was strongly devoted to the Union. She campaigned in her pages for a unified American culture and nation, frequently running stories in which southerners and northerners fought together against the British, or in which a southerner and a northerner fell in love and married.