Hale, Sarah Josepha - Patricia Okker (essay date 1993)
Patricia Okker (essay date 1993)
SOURCE: "Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Sigourney, and the Poetic Tradition in Two Nineteenth-Century Women's Magazines," American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, Vol. 3, 1993, pp. 32-42.
[In the following excerpt, Okker examines Hale's views on women's poetry as reflected in her editing of Godey's Lady's Book and Ladies' Magazine.]
No doubt in part because of her authorship of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," Sarah Josepha Hale—editor first of the Ladies' Magazine and then for forty-one years of Godey's Lady's Book—is often described in the context of … [what Allison Bulsterbaum has called] "mawkish, moralistic poetry" (144). Specifically, Hale is remembered as one of the many nineteenth-century editors who promoted a highly restricted notion of women's poetry. In their respective studies of American women's poetry, in fact, Emily Stipes Watts, Cheryl Walker,...
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