Sarah Josepha Hale. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Without the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale—an influential nineteenth-century editor, writer, and abolitionist—Thanksgiving as we know it would not exist. Writing in The First Person, Hudson Senior Fellow Melanie Kirkpatrick tells her story.

Key Insights

1. Her most well-known accomplishment is making Thanksgiving a national holiday.

Hale’s contribution was transforming Thanksgiving from a jumble of local events marked on various dates into the shared national celebration we know today. Four presidents rejected her proposal before Abraham Lincoln took it up in 1863, proclaiming the first in what has become an unbroken series of national Thanksgivings up to the present day. The story of how Hale helped recreate Thanksgiving as a national holiday is a classic American saga of how one enterprising, hardworking individual with a good idea can have an impact in an open, democratic society.

2. Hale advocated for women.

When her name comes up, it is usually in the context of her role as godmother of Thanksgiving or as the author of the children’s poem, “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” But her accomplishments extend well beyond either of those achievements. Hale was the most influential woman of her day and one the most influential in American history. She was an author, editor, social reformer, and, above all, a relentless advocate of women’s advancement, especially the right to an education. Women were the intellectual equals of men, she believed, countering the conventional wisdom of the day. The difference, she believed, was that men, unlike women, had the benefit of an education. When she began her editorial career in 1828, half of American women were illiterate and no institution of higher education admitted women. A partial list of Hale’s achievements on behalf of women includes leading the fight for property rights for married women, campaigning for women to become public school teachers, encouraging the establishment of colleges for women, supporting medical-school education for women, creating the first daycare center for small children and the first public playground, and founding a society dedicated to increasing the wages of working women. She invented the term “domestic science” as part of her effort to elevate the status of women who worked in the home.

3. She helped create a common national culture.

At Godey’s Lady’s Book, she set out to publish American authors writing on American topics. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Hale’s approach doesn’t seem in the least surprising. Surely Americans want to read about their country. But it was a radical idea in the 1820s, when magazines typically reprinted articles they had pirated from British and other publications. Hale believed there was a market for a national women’s magazine that focused on American culture, and she published such notable American authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, among many others. Hale’s interest in American culture extended to everyday aspects of life—food, fashion, manners, health, running a household. Her work was instrumental in establishing a common national aesthetic. Thanks in part to Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first magazines to circulate nationwide, Americans in every part of the expanding country were quoting the same poetry, cooking the same recipes, and sewing the same fashions. In the 1840s, she introduced the white wedding gown and the Christmas tree to this country, customs that continue to flourish today.

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length. 

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