SOURCE: "Sarah Josepha Hale, Lydia Sigourney, and the Poetic Tradition in Two Nineteenth-Century Women's Magazines," American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, Vol. 3, 1993, pp. 32-42.

In the following excerpt, Okker examines Hale's views on women's poetry as reflected in her editing of Godey's Lady's Book and Ladies' Magazine.

No doubt in part because of her authorship of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," Sarah Josepha Hale—editor first of the Ladies' Magazine and then for forty-one years of Godey's Lady's Book—is often described in the context of … [what Allison Bulsterbaum has called] "mawkish, moralistic poetry" (144). Specifically, Hale is remembered as one of the many nineteenth-century editors who promoted a highly restricted notion of women's poetry. In their respective studies of American women's poetry, in fact, Emily Stipes Watts, Cheryl Walker, and Alicia Suskin Ostriker all cite Hale's declaration in 1829 that "the path of poetry, like every...