The Ladies' Magazine was an early magazine for women published in Boston, Massachusetts. Also known as Ladies Magazine and Literary Gazette and , later as American Ladies Magazine, it was designed to be American, and named to separate itself from the Lady's Magazine

Lady's Magazine

The Lady's Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement, was a British fashion magazine produced every month from 1770 until 1837 and cost six pence per copy. It was started in August 1770 by London bookseller John Coote and publisher John Wheble...

of London. The magazine was founded by Reverend John Lauris Blake, Episcopal minister and headmaster of the Cornhill School for Young Ladies, who desired to set a model for American womanhood.

It is thought to have been the first magazine to be edited by a woman; from 1827 until 1836, its editor was Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Hale

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale was an American writer and an influential editor. She is the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb"...

. As editor, Hale hoped she could aid in the education of women, as she wrote, "not that they may usurp the situation, or encroach on the prerogatives of man; but that each individual may lend her aid to the intellectual and moral character of those within her sphere".

In 1837 it merged with the Lady's Book and Magazine published in Philadelphia by Louis Antoine Godey

Louis Antoine Godey

Louis Antoine Godey was an American editor and publisher, known as the founder of Godey's Lady's Book, the first successful American women's fashion magazine.-Biography:...

 and better known by its later name, Godey's Lady's Book

Godey's Lady's Book

Godey's Lady's Book, alternatively known as Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, was a United States magazine which was published in Philadelphia. It was the most widely circulated magazine in the period before the Civil War. Its circulation rose from 70,000 in the 1840s to 150,000 in 1860...

. Hale moved from Boston to Philadelphia to edit the new, combined magazine.

Further reading

• Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1938-68.)
• Price, Kenneth M. and Susan Belasco Smith, eds. Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-century America. (Charlottesville, VA : University Press of Virginia, 1995.)

External links

• Hathi Trust. Ladies' Magazine. Boston : Putnam & Hunt, 1828-1829.