Existing studies of Godey’s Lady’s Book are narrow and antiquarian, and they do not consider many important aspects of the magazine or approach them in an integrated way. There have been two book-length studies of Sarah Josepha Hale life and her career at the magazine. Ruth Finley’s 1931 study, Lady of Godey’s, is a celebratory biography of Hale that also provides descriptions of developments in the magazine. Finley looks to Hale as a heroine who championed female education as one of the first steps towards female empowerment and expanded employment opportunities. Isabelle Webb Entrikin’s 1946 study offers a detailed narrative about Hale’s life and writings, includes a thorough bibliography of Hale’s publications, and is less celebratory in tone than Finley’s book. Entrikin describes the period from 1850 to 1879 as one of decline for Godey’s Lady’s Book even as she chronicles its rising circulation figures. She does not examine how the diversification of the content coincided with its phenomenal success.[1]
Frank Luther Mott’s important 1930 study, A History of American Magazines, provides some useful clues about the production, dissemination, and content of Godey’s Lady’s Book, but his preoccupation with fine literature colors his assessment. Mott describes 1837 to 1850 as the magazine’s “best literary period,” during which it published the work of authors such as Lydia H. Sigourney, Edgar Allen Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and T. S. Arthur. However, in his eyes, Godey’s Lady’s Book’s preponderance of sentimental fiction, as well as its lack of discussion of current events or politics after 1850, signaled a decline in quality. Mott’s critiques of Godey’s Lady’s Book are unsurprising, given that he made his assessment decades before women’s history became a field. Mott evaluates his subject using anachronistic standards, demanding that Godey’s Lady’s Book be a literary magazine on a twentieth-century model. In spite of these limitations, his work has influenced historians’ perceptions of the periodical.[2]
Scholars debating nineteenth-century gender roles have analyzed Godey’s Lady’s Book and Hale’s life and work. Historian Barbara Welter’s foundational article, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” argues that the advice literature, such as that published in the magazine, demonstrates that American women were expected to exhibit four “cardinal virtues”: purity, piety, submissiveness, and domesticity. Lawrence Martin labels Hale a “dynamic conservative,” while other scholars draw attention to the distinct contrast between her successful public life and her advice to middle-class women to confine themselves to the domestic sphere. Other scholars complicate this picture. For example, Patricia Okker argues that Hale advocated for a separate moral sphere for women, empowering women by legitimating their work on periodicals, in schools, and in medicine. I believe that these studies do not tell us much because they rest on unrepresentative sampling of Godey’s Lady’s Book’s content.[3]
The most extended analysis to date of the magazine’s content in terms of gender is Laura McCall’s examination of 120 fiction stories (chosen at random) and editorial content. She aimed to test whether it championed the four key traits of “the cult of true womanhood” identified by Welter.[4] McCall found that those “cardinal virtues” did not characterize the heroines in the periodical’s fiction. Stories in her sample indicate that Godey’s Lady’s Book did not advocate that nurturing husbands and families were the sole role women should pursue. Instead, stories featured strong-willed, educated, sometimes insubordinate women, and none of the 234 female characters she evaluated possessed all four key traits. McCall concludes that, at the very least, Godey’s Lady’s Book “was not a journal at the forefront of a movement calling for adherence to rigid cultural norms.”[5] She does not provide specific commentary on whether or not there was any change over time.
Other historians have studied Godey’s Lady’s Book to answer vastly different questions from those I am posing. Cynthia Lee Patterson considers the role of the magazine and other 1840s “Philadelphia Pictorials” – the periodicals Graham’s, Peterson’s, Miss Leslie’s, and Sartain’s Union Magazine – in encouraging the work of American artists and bringing American art to middle-class homes.[6] Elizabeth White argues that Godey devoted editorial space to educating his female audience about how business transactions worked. For example, Godey needed to instruct women that authorized subscription agents were identified on the cover of the periodical and that he was not responsible for the financial loss if a woman was swindled by a confidence man selling fake discounted subscriptions.[7] Others have analyzed the periodical’s representation of French culture and of music and the relationship of the fashion plates to tableaux vivants.[8]
My study is also in conversation with studies of late nineteenth-century magazines and the development of consumer culture. Richard Ohmann, Helen Damon-Moore, Ellen Gruber Garvey, and Jennifer Scanlon all argue that late-nineteenth-century magazines, middle-class women’s roles, and consumerism were bound together; women received magazines in their homes, and these magazines presented images of women as consumers and men as producers.[9] Citing magazines such as the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, which achieved circulations of over one million copies in the early 1900s, these scholars have shown that such figures became possible in part because of evolving business practices. For example, publishers found that they could lower the purchase price by subsidizing the cost of production through selling space to advertisers. However, Godey’s Lady’s Book’s wide circulation and encouragement of consumerism suggest that wide readership and consumerist messages were linked decades earlier. Certainly late nineteenth-century magazines successfully revised the formula for women’s magazines, but these studies underestimate or dismiss the success and significance of Godey’s Lady’s Book and its closest antebellum competitors.
[1] Finley, The Lady of Godey’s. Isabelle Webb Entrikin, Sarah Josepha Hale and Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia: Lancaster Press, Inc., 1946).
[2]Mott, History of American Magazines, 1:580-94.
[3] Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966), 152; Lawrence Martin, “The Genesis of Godey’s Lady’s Book,” The New England Quarterly 1 (Jan. 1928), 41-70; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1957; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Karol Gyman, “The ‘Woman’s Sphere’: A Study of the Life and Work of Sarah Josepha Hale” (Master’s Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 1973); Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995). See also Nicole Tonkovich, Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
[4] Laura McCall, “‘The Reign of Brute Force is Over’: A Content Analysis of Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1830-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 9 (Summer 1989): 217-236. In choosing the editorial content, McCall read those which appeared in the same issues in which she found her chosen stories (223).
[5] McCall, “‘Reign of Brute Force is Over,’” 236. Karen Lystra also challenges the existence of such norms in her study of the love letters of antebellum Americans, which demonstrates a disjuncture between the ideal of “passionless” women and their lived experience. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[6] Cynthia Lee Patterson, Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), 11, 17. See also Karin J. Bohleke, “Americanizing French Fashion Plates: Godey’s and Peterson’s Cultural and Socio-Economic Translation of Les Modes Parisiennes,” American Periodicals 20 (2010): 120-155.
[7] Elizabeth White Nelson, Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 69-72.
[8] Grace Bussing, Sherrer, “French Culture as Presented to Middle-Class America by Godey’s Lady’s Book,” American Literature 3 (1931): 277-286; Julia Eklund Koza, “Music and References to Music in ‘Godey’s Lady’s Book’, 1830-1877” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1988), via Proquest (AAT 8815808); Monika M. Elbert, “Striking a Historical Pose: Antebellum Tableaux Vivants, ‘Godey’s’ Illustrations, and Margaret Fuller’s Heroines,” The New England Quarterly 75 (June 2002): 235-275.
[9] Richard Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (New York: Verso Books, 1996); Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1920 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Fashioning American Women 