The Lady of Godeys, Sarah Josepha Hale by Ruth Finley, c. 1931–1940

The Piece

The Lady of Godey's, Sarah Josepha Hale, by Ruth E. Finley, published by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and London. Mustard yellow linen-weave cloth over boards, stamped in dark blue on the front with a looping ribbon device that unfurls into three banners reading Sarah, Josepha, Hale, with small flowers tucked into the folds. The title arcs above it and the author's name sits below. The rear board is blank. The spine carries the title, the subject, the author and the Lippincott imprint in blue.

The title page repeats the period feeling with a small engraved vignette of a lace and ribbon bonnet, and the line with eight illustrations. Facing it, the publisher lists Finley's earlier book, Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them. The dedication reads simply, to Emmet Finley. The copyright page reads Copyright, 1931, by Ruth E. Finley, made in the United States of America, Sixth Printing.

Eighteen chapters and an index across roughly 320 pages. The chapter titles read like a map of nineteenth century American domestic life: The Lady Editor, The Prince of Publishers, Beauty in Business, Precious Panaceas, The Victorian Tide, Homes for the Millions, From Crinoline to Bustle, Twenty-one Miles an Hour, The Union Forever, Thanksgiving Day, The First College for Women, Companionate Education, The Authorial Galaxy, A Female Writer, Mary's Lamb and Mr. Ford, and a closing chapter titled Truly Your Friend.

On the front free endpaper, in pencil, a former bookseller's note: two short lines that read as Selling cost, as is 6.00. Six dollars, sold as found, at some point in the last ninety years.

History & Provenance

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was born in Newport, New Hampshire on 24 October 1788 and died in Philadelphia on 30 April 1879. Her husband David died in 1822 and left her with five children; she wore black for the rest of her life. She wrote her way out of it. Her 1827 novel Northwood made her one of the first American women novelists and one of the first American novelists of any kind to write about slavery. She edited the Ladies' Magazine in Boston from 1828, and when Louis Godey bought it and folded it into his own journal she went with it.

From 1837 until she retired in 1877 she edited Godey's Lady's Book, which at its height carried more than 150,000 subscribers and set the terms of American taste in dress, decoration and domestic architecture for two generations. Every issue opened with a hand-colored fashion plate. The magazine put the Christmas tree into American parlors and the white dress onto American brides.

Two things she did outlast the magazine. She wrote Mary's Lamb, published in Poems for Our Children in 1830, which is the verse Edison chose in 1877 for the first words ever recorded on a phonograph. And she campaigned for seventeen years, beginning in 1846, to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, writing to president after president without result until her letter to Lincoln in 1863 finally landed. She is why the fourth Thursday in November exists. She also argued for higher education for women across at least seventeen articles and editorials, helped found Vassar, and told its trustees to hire women to teach and to run it.

Ruth E. Finley wrote this in 1931, two years after Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them, the book that made her name among quilt historians and that still gets cited. The Lady of Godey's was the first full modern biography of Hale and is the reason much of the Hale material survives in general circulation at all.

On the date. The copyright is 1931 and the printing statement reads Sixth Printing, with no year attached to it. That makes 1931 a hard floor and nothing more. A sixth printing of a trade biography that sold steadily through the decade most reasonably falls in the 1930s, which is the basis for the range given here. It is an estimate, not a fact on the page.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Mustard is the color designers keep asking for and almost never find on a period book. Most cloth from the thirties is navy, maroon or black, and the few yellows that exist have usually gone brown. This one has held, and the dark blue ribbon device on the front gives it a graphic the way a modern cover would.

The subject does real work too. This is the woman who got Thanksgiving onto the calendar, wrote the lamb poem that became the first recorded human speech, ran the most influential American magazine of the nineteenth century for forty years, and pushed Vassar into hiring women. Almost nobody knows her name. That is the kind of book that starts a conversation when a guest picks it up, which is a different and better thing than a book that only looks correct on a shelf.

It also sits squarely in two collecting lanes that overlap with interiors: Godey's fashion plates, which people frame, and American quilt and textile history, where Finley is a name. Shelve it with other yellows, stack it under a lamp, or keep it where someone will open it.