For much of the 20th century, magazines were the most influential and lucrative mass medium in the United States. Newspapers tended to be locally focused and rarely more than regional in their readership. Radio wouldn’t become a major force until the 1930s and ‘40s, and television until the 1960s. As late as 1962, national magazine ad revenues topped $875 million, compared to $800 million for network television.[1] And during much of that era, few magazines were more influential or lucrative than the so-called “Seven Sisters.”
The “sisters”— Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, Redbook, and Woman's Day — advised women on how to dress, how to cook, how to decorate their homes, how to raise their children, and even how to think about politically charged issues such as birth control, the Vietnam war, and women’s rights.
Though it seems hard to fathom today, the chief editors responsible for dispensing such advice to women were, more often than not, men. Better Homes & Gardens, for example, was edited by men from its founding in 1922 until 1993. Family Circle would have an unbroken series of male editors from 1932 until 1988. Good Housekeeping, founded in 1885, wouldn’t hire its first female editor-in-chief, Ellen Levine, until 1994.
Woman’s Day appears to have been the lone exception, with a succession of female editors since its launch, by the A&P supermarket chain, in 1937.
Ladies’ Home Journal had a slightly more tangled history. Though its first editor was a woman, the wife of its owner, it would be edited by men from 1889 until 1935, when a husband-and-wife team, Bruce and Beatrice Gould, took over. While they were billed as equals on the magazine’s masthead, the executive who appointed them was quick to tell the male of the pair, “Bruce, don’t forget — you’re the boss.”
When the Goulds retired in 1962, their handpicked successor was another man, crewcut 33-year-old Curtiss Anderson. Perhaps on the defensive due to his age and gender, he told The New York Times, “I have always subscribed to the idea of the professional editor — the individual who can edit any magazine with taste and imagination.”
If Anderson seemed youthful at 33, his rise wasn’t unprecedented in the manly world of women’s magazines. Otis Weise, the “boy wonder” editor of McCall’s, had taken that job at age 22 and managed to keep it for another 30 years, until 1958.
Despite his taste and imagination, however, Anderson didn’t fare well politically and was out by 1964. His successor, and two more after that, would also be men. Only in 1973 would Ladies’ Home Journal get its first female top editor, Lenore Hershey. Never mind that its advertising slogan, since 1946, had been “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”
While many male editors-in-chief had women on their staffs, sometimes as their seconds-in-command, there was no question who was in charge or who set the agenda for what their magazines would or would not cover.
Edward Bok, a Dutch immigrant who edited Ladies’ Home Journal from 1889 until 1919 and built it into the first magazine with a circulation of over 1 million, used the power of his position to launch numerous crusades, some admirable and some otherwise, by today’s standards. Bok banned ads for quack remedies from his magazine, inveighed against the slaughter of endangered birds to decorate women’s hats, ran courageous articles about the taboo subject of venereal disease, and hired a staff of 35 editors just to answer readers’ questions by mail. At the same time, he disparaged women’s suffrage, explaining later that he “felt that American women were not ready to exercise the privilege intelligently”— though to his possible credit, he did allow suffrage proponents to make their case in his pages.
Bok's authority at the office was not to be questioned. In 1912, when he caught some of his young female employees practicing a popular but supposedly risqué dance called the Turkey Trot during their lunch break, he fired all 16 of them on the spot.
A famous figure in his day, Bok won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1921 autobiography and retired to Florida, where he built a 205-foot-tall shrine to himself, the Bok Singing Tower, at the base of which his remains now reside. But perhaps his most lasting legacy was as a patriarch of sorts to the several generations of male editors who succeeded him at the helm of major women’s magazines.
In that autobiography, The Americanization of Edward Bok, he addressed the question of why men were better suited to edit women’s magazines than women themselves were. It’s worth reprinting a cringeworthy chunk of his argument:
There is a popular notion that the editor of a woman's magazine should be a woman. At first thought, perhaps, this sounds logical. But it is a curious fact that by far the larger number of periodicals for women, the world over, are edited by men; and where, as in some cases, a woman is the proclaimed editor, the direction of the editorial policy is generally in the hands of a man, or group of men, in the background. Why this is so has never been explained, any more than why the majority of women's dressmakers are men; why music, with its larger appeal to women, has been and is still being composed, largely, by men, and why its greatest instrumental performers are likewise men; and why the church, with its larger membership of women, still has, as it always has had, men for its greatest preachers.
In fact, we may well ponder whether the full editorial authority and direction of a modern magazine, either essentially feminine in its appeal or not, can safely be entrusted to a woman when one considers how largely executive is the nature of such a position, and how thoroughly sensitive the modern editor must be to the hundred and one practical business matters which today enter into and form so large a part of the editorial duties. We may question whether women have as yet had sufficient experience in the world of business to cope successfully with the material questions of a pivotal editorial position. Then, again, it is absolutely essential in the conduct of a magazine with a feminine or home appeal to have on the editorial staff women who are experts in their line; and the truth is that women will work infinitely better under the direction of a man than of a woman.[2]
Bok’s spiritual successors would include men like Herbert Mayes, a high school dropout who edited Good Housekeeping from 1942 to 1958 and McCall’s from 1958 to 1961. So powerful was Mayes that he could boast in a 1980 memoir that, “My office door was always open to the magazine’s [ad] salesmen provided they came in on their knees.”
The novelist Judith Krantz, who briefly worked for Mayes at Good Housekeeping, recalled in her own 2000 memoir that he “was unrelenting in his criticism, he barked the most unbelievably insulting things to people, he had no sensitivity to any feelings, no matter how justified, his progress down a hall of the magazine was preceded by a wave of fear, editorial meetings were mass anxiety attacks. His employees spent entire lunches whispering together, comparing monster stories about him.” And she seems to have liked him more than most.
Then there was John Mack Carter, an amiable Kentuckian from all appearances, who spent almost his entire career running women’s magazines, including the three biggest: McCall’s from 1961 to 1965, Ladies’ Home Journal from 1965 to 1973, and Good Housekeeping from 1975 to 1994. (From 1973 to ’75, he edited American Home magazine.)
Carter remained a power in the industry until shortly before his death in 2014, but he may be most widely remembered today for a single incident in March 1970. As recounted in newspapers at the time and more recently in books such as Lynn Povich’s 2012 The Good Girls Revolt, an estimated 100 feminist protestors occupied his plush corner office for 11 hours, smoked his cigars, denounced him as a male chauvinist pig, and demanded that the magazine put out a “special women’s liberation issue,” for which they had already mocked up a cover. In a compromise, Carter agreed to allow them an insert in a future issue.
Carter reportedly kept his cool throughout it all, although it’s hard to imagine he wasn’t at least a little peeved about the cigars.
Besides Mayes and Carter, other men with more than one women’s magazine on their résumés included Wade Hampton Nichols, Jr., who ran Redbook from 1949 to 1958 and Good Housekeeping from 1959 to 1975, and Robert Stein, who edited Redbook from 1958 to 1965, and McCall’s from 1965 to 1967 and 1972 to 1985.
In between Stein’s two McCall’s stints, the magazine’s editor was, of all things, a woman, Shana Alexander, who had previously worked at Life. Though her editorship ended in acrimony all around, Alexander went on to fame on TV’s 60 Minutes, where she regularly debated the conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick, a segment that became the inspiration for many a Saturday Night Live parody (“Jane, you ignorant slut!” “Dan, you pompous ass!”).
Today just four of the sisters survive in print form: Better Homes & Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, and Woman’s Day. All but Better Homes are currently edited by women.
Footnotes:
[1] 1971 Business Statistics, U.S. Department of Commerce, pages 55-56.
[2] For Bok's complete song and dance on this question, see The Americanization of Edward Bok, starting on page 160.
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