Woman's Record.
“The Ninth Wave Of The 19th-Century
Is The Destiny Of Woman”
[Anthologies]. Hale, Sarah Josepha. Woman’s Record; Or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women, From “The Beginning” Till A.D. 1850. Arranged in Four Eras. With Selections of Female Writers of Every Age... New York: Harper’s, 1853.
Thick, large 8vo.; 904 pages; engraved frontispiece portrait of the author; 230 other engraved portraits of notable women throughout; endpapers foxed; brown morocco, front and rear covers stamped ornately in gilt; light wear to extremities; else a lovely copy.
First, and apparently only, edition of this massive encyclopedia of famous women. The ambitious Mrs. Hale compiled careful biographies of literally hundreds of heroines from biblical times until the mid-19th-century. Those profiled include Esther, Aphra Behn, Catharine Beecher, Elizabeth Blackwell, Margaret Fuller, and Julia Ward Howe. With 230 lovely engraved portraits by Lossing and Baritt, and brief critical essays about women of different eras, nationalities, and cultures. A stunning example of the early construction of a self-conscious women’s history.
Sarah Hale (1788-1879) found herself and her five children in dire need of a steady income when her husband died suddenly in 1822. Friends backed the anonymous publication of a collection of her poetry, The Genius of Oblivion (1823). She also began to submit stories and poems to literary magazines and quickly gained the attention and respect of editors of the leading periodicals.
Asked by a Boston publishing firm to edit the first American magazine written for women, Sarah Hale accepted the position and moved her family from New Hampshire to Boston in 1828. She applied scrupulous editorial standards to the Ladies’ Magazine: she accepted only original material, solicited work from female contributors, and printed articles that she thought would “improve” her readers. In 1837, at the invitation of Louis Godey, she became the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book after Godey
purchased the Ladies’ Magazine. She moved to Philadelphia and made Godey’s the leading American women’s literary and fashion periodical for the following four decades.
Although she opposed women’s suffrage and eschewed controversy in Godey’s (she maintained that political involvement would corrupt women’s pristine moral sensibility), she consistently advocated education, exercise, property rights, and sensible fashion for women. In addition to her work on Godey’s, she authored or edited many volumes. In 1853, she issued Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from “The Beginning” till A.D. 1850, which included abridged selections from
the writers’ works as well as short biographical sketches. She issued two subsequent editions of the text and in them featured many of the authors whose careers Hale had helped launch.
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