marshaled as part of a carefully conducted plan or editorial
policy having to do mainly with education. Somebody was
putting up a good fight for children and women, and was
especially concerned for the latter's intellectual and economic
freedom.

All the while I had known, but had only dimly grasped
the significance of the fact, that the editor of Godey's was a
woman. I began to try to find out something about her
personally, this "Lady Editor"--"S. J. H.," "Mrs. Hale,"
"Sarah J. Hale," "Sarah Josepha Hale." It was little enough
I could unearth, at first. But in any event there was the
"editress," reporting month in and out for decade on decade
all the things that were happening to women, to children,
to education. So I thought to use her as the peg, instead of
her magazine, on which to hang, not a general social review,
but a specific discussion of the progress of woman in the
nineteenth century.

And then was brought home to me Victorianism--through
the eyes of Sarah Hale. Always, like most other persons I
suppose, I had regarded Victorianism dubiously as a curious
social and historical phase that was sentimentally maudlin
and soft when it was not bigoted and dogmatic, typified by
wasp-waisted, fainting females and frock-coated, bewhiskered
gentlemen. But Sarah Hale showed me Victorianism as it-
self a revolt from something even more deplorable.

By now I had noted that, aside from her editorial work,
Mrs. Hale had been a prolific writer. With a fair degree of
success I collected her writings, in order to study in detail
her own exposition of her era, and was astonished to find
that away back in 1827 here was a woman declaring it was
economic rivalry between the North and South--not slavery,
just beginning to be agitated--that would precipitate civil
war.

This last was arresting. It suggested that a person possess-

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