It’s the birthday of the woman who wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” or who at least gets credit for the final version of the poem, Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879). Hale was also the first American woman to be editor of a magazine and a tremendous social and literary influence. If you google her image, you will find a matronly woman wearing one of those awful frilly white caps with long straps that inevitably make one think of basset hounds.

Hale, born in Newport, New Hampshire, was a thirty-four-year-old mother of five when her husband died unexpectedly, leaving her scrambling to support them. Her husband’s colleagues set her up in a millinery business (hats, you know) and also published a book of her poems, which gave her enough financial stability to leave hats and write a novel, Northwood (1927), about slavery. The novel resulted in Hale being offered a job as editor of Ladies Magazine, which later merged with another magazine to become Godey’s Lady’s Book, and under her leadership the magazine grew to have 150,000 subscribers by the end of the Civil War.

Hale was a powerful force, furthering the education and independence of women and shaping the literary world. She insisted on original content and wrote much of it herself; she published the likes of Edgar Allen Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She never aligned herself with feminist movements, but she did (eventually) support the idea of women doctors, and when Vassar College was founded in 1861, she was one of the first and strongest voices to support a college for women. She was 89 when she retired from her position as editor. (That’s like 150 in 21st century years.)

On May 24, 1830, Hale published “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and as it happens, the gripping tale of Mary and her lamb was based on a true story. A girl named Mary Sawyer of Sterling, Massachusetts, had talked her parents into letting her raise a lamb rejected by its mother. She was a good surrogate mother to the lamb, who—wait for it—began following her all over the place, including, one day, to school and into literary history. Mary tried to hide the lamb, the lamb predictably bleated, and the teacher put the lamb outside. An older boy, John Roulstone, was in town to study for college and witnessed these events; he wrote the first stanzas and gave the poem to Mary. Hale later expanded the poem with three stanzas she’d added herself for moral uplift (because everything’s more fun with moral uplift) and published it. (See a version here.)

Fun fact: Mary’s mother made stockings from the beloved lamb’s wool, and later in life Mary donated that wool for a fundraising cause, attaching the wool to cards that read “Knitted wool from the first fleece of Mary’s Little Lamb.”

Have a heartwarming sort of Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.