SOURCE: "Sarah Hale, Political Writer" in Feminism and American Literary History: Essays, Rutgers University Press, 1992, pp. 167-75.

In the following excerpt, Baym discusses the political nature of Hale's writings and describes a shift she sees in them from an interest in general political issues to an emphasis on women's role in society.

Sarah Josepha Hale, author of poems, stories, sketches, a play, novels, and several home reference books, is remembered chiefly for her lengthy tenure (1837-77) as editor of Godey's Lady's Book, the most widely read women's magazine of its day. Using her position year after year to advance the doctrine of separate spheres for women and men, Hale is assumed by most critics to have exerted considerable influence on the gender ideology and cultural mores of the nineteenth-century American middle class.¹

The doctrine of the separate spheres was once thought to reflect reality; now it is recognized...