Born in Ridgefield, Connecticut, on November 29, 1788, Abigail Goodrich was the daughter of a clergyman and an elder sister of Samuel Griswold Goodrich, later famous as ╥Peter Parley,╙ author of scores of books for children. She received some formal education in local schools. In November 1808 she married the Reverend Samuel Whittelsey, with whom she lived in New Preston, Connecticut, until 1818; in Hartford from 1818 to 1824; in Canandaigua, New York where she served as matron of the Ontario Female Seminary, of which her husband was head, from 1824 to 1828; and in Utica, New York, where they established their own girls╒ seminary, from 1828. She became active in the Maternal Association of Utica and was chosen to edit its new periodical, the Mother╒s Magazine, which first appeared in January 1833. Aimed at educating mothers to their responsibilities and potentialities, the magazine quickly proved a success. It was transferred to New York City in 1834 when the Whittelseys moved there, and she continued to edit it, with one absence in 1847╨1848, until 1849.
After her husband╒s death in 1842 she had the assistance of a brother-in-law, the Reverend Darius Mead, editor of the Christian Parlor Magazine. The circulation of the Mother╒s Magazine reached 10,000 in 1837. Soon after a new proprietor merged it with the rival Mother╒s Journal and Family Visitant in 1848, she resigned. In 1850 she launched Mrs. Whittelsey╒s Magazine for Mothers, which she kept up, with the aid of her son Henry, for two years and in which she continued to dispense practical advice and instruction highly colored by religious sentiment. Whittelsey died in Colchester, Connecticut, on July 16, 1858.
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