Mention of the nineteenth-century woman's movement immediately brings to mind the names of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Amelia Bloomer, and Lucretia Mott. There were other women, however, who made significant contributions, but, in Ida M. Tarbell's phrase, were women "who did not fight." "Fighting" is a matter of degree, and women like Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, and Sarah Josepha Hale, included by Tarbell among those "who did not fight," were perhaps not highly militant in their public battles, but they were, nonetheless, effective. In her own way, Hale, as literary editor of Godey's Lady's Book, one of the most successful magazines of the nineteenth century, exerted tremendous influence on the attitudes and values of the American housewife of her era.

Sarah Josepha Buell was born on 24 October 1788 near Newport, New Hampshire, in what she described as "a pleasant village nestled among the green hills." She was...