“Don’t you wish you were an editor?”
Lavinia Goodell, June 1862
From 1859 until 1865, Lavinia Goodell’s father was the editor of the anti-slavery newspaper the Principia, and Lavinia worked alongside him in the paper’s offices in lower Manhattan. She started out writing short pieces, then graduated to longer stories, and eventually served as a co-editor. None of her pieces bear her full name. Many are signed with her initials and some with pseudonyms. We have been able to identify approximately fifty of Lavinia’s Principia pieces, and there are no doubt more – perhaps many more – since a letter written by Lavinia’s sister Maria recently came to light in which Maria said, “I don’t feel at all ashamed to have your articles attributed to me.” Lavinia sometimes wrote articles from a male point of view and relished the anonymity. She told her sister, “But then people generally won’t know it’s me, you know, and I think it is a fruitful theme. Young ladies are lectured to quite enough, and it is time the ‘opposition’ got a little.”

In a lengthy piece titled “A Day in the Life of an Editor” that appeared in the June 5, 1862 Principia, Lavinia adopted the persona of a male editor. Introducing her protagonist as “William Henry Hartley, a man of thirty-five years, and tolerably good looks,” she took her readers along on a frenzied, roller coaster ride of a day at the helm of a busy newsroom. (Read the full story here).
Continue reading →