Home Shopping: Gender and Consumerism in Godey’s Lady Book

Godey’s Lady’s Book graced the parlor tables and bookshelves of thousands of nineteenth-century American women. Scholars including Barbara Welter, Karen Halttunen, and Patricia Okker have considered Godey’s, its publisher Louis A. Godey, and editor Sarah Josepha Hale as leading advocates for the cult of domesticity in middle-class culture. Godey’s did more than entertain readers with fiction and poetry. It circulated issues in the tens and then hundreds of thousands from the Northeast to the South and West, and it moved goods, information, and ideas from cultural centers abroad (London and Paris) and commercial capitals at home (Boston, New York, and Philadelphia) into homes all over the republic.

“Home Shopping” will examine the role that Godey's Lady's Book played in shaping ideas about home, cultivating desire for domestic goods and connecting far-flung female consumers to those goods from the east coast. Little attention has been paid to the advertisements of products on the magazine’s covers and the retail-by-mail operation that Godey developed. In the 1850s Godey added a personal shopping service to his business. In addition to seeing the newest styles in the fashion plates, readers could order cloth, jewelry, and other items directly from Godey. Over the next two decades Godey’s also featured an array of advertisements on its ephemeral paper wrappers, including for sewing machines, pianofortes, bronze sculptures, paintings and engravings. While businesses like department stores created an atmosphere that mimicked domestic spaces to court female shoppers, Godey’s and its advertisements waltzed into women’s homes on a monthly basis.