Sarah Josepha Hale Thinks You Have no Sense of Fashion

Although the face of beauty changes, the pressure to attain that perfect beauty does not.In a time without the proliferation of communication that we have today, ladies had one primary source for thier fashion and social guidance: Godey's. Godey's Ladies Book was the Vogue magazine of the 19th century. Godey's had the same far reaching influence and it's editor the same power of an Anna Wintour.





Here is a qoute from Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1850):


"...The chaste and innocuous Godey's 'Lady's Book,' with painted fashion-plate of wax-figure women with mouths all alike—lips and eyelids the same size—each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot."

I think that's hilarious.