SOURCE: "Onward Christian Women: Sarah J. Hale's History of the World." New England Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2, June, 1990, pp. 249-70.

In the following excerpt, Baym discusses Hale's views on the moral superiority of women as expressed in Woman's Record.

We know Sarah J. Hale as the editor, for almost half a century (1837-77), of Godey's Lady's Book. In that position she exercised considerable power (or, to use a word she would have preferred, influence) over emergent middle-class culture in the United States.¹ Dedicated above all to the cause of women's education, Hale approached social issues with strongly expressed convictions that authorize the critic of today to see her either as a profound conservative or equally as a progressive liberal. More often than not, however, she is interpreted as a retrograde force, a woman who impeded the development of egalitarian feminism through her espousal of the ideology of separate spheres...