When editors were gods

What were the Seven Sisters magazines—and why were their editors usually men?

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.

An advertising poster for The Ladies' Home Journal, 1896. (New York Public Library Digital Collections)

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.

 

Ah, that explains it!

This 1957 promotion for The Saturday Evening Post bravely attempts to answer the perennial question "What does an editor do?," with the assistance of Marilyn Monroe.

The recumbent man in the photo is Pete Martin, a Post senior editor who was known primarily as a writer and celebrity interviewer. The ad appeared in the trade magazine Advertising Age.

 

 

 

 

 

Tame cats need not apply

"Long experience has proved in the magazine field that editorial freedom is essential to the maintenance of reader interest. If a magazine is edited by tame cats, it won't be interesting to readers. If readers are not excited by it, the publisher has little to sell the advertisers. To be useful to advertisers a magazine must be in fact free to serve readers." — William L. Chenery, editor of Collier's magazine, in a 1934 speech. 

The magazine historian Frank Luther Mott writes that Chenery presided over one of the "great eras" in the weekly's 68-year run, during which Collier's attained "an important position in American affairs and in the history of our magazines." Its 1957 demise, Mott added, was "the result of more than a decade of management which was consistent only in its ineptitude."

 

Great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes, #6

Just as the dotcom bubble was preparing to burst, Esquire's April 2000 issue introduced readers to the latest too-good-to-be-true Internet start-up, FreeWheelz.com, the brainchild, of course, of a Stanford MBA.

The article, by Ted C. Fishman, explained the company's business model: free cars for drivers who were willing to turn them into "rolling, bumper-to-bumper, top-to-tire" billboards for such products as StayFresh sanitary napkins. In order to rack up "eyeballs" for the ads, participants were required to drive at least 25,000 miles a year and incentivized to create "rush-hour rubbernecking delays," presumably by staging accidents. Not every would-be driver qualified: Applicants had to complete an online form with more than 600 questions, requiring an average of seven hours.

In a newspaper column written soon after the magazine appeared, Fishman marveled at how many people had apparently taken the article seriously: "Was I foolish in thinking my prank was a joke when in this age of goofy businesses and paper zillionaires, wacky ideas are the new Klondike? Maybe I should have just called for investors."

A Father's Day salute to some famous magazine "fathers"

This being Father’s Day, a salute to some of the men who are credited with the paternity of one thing or another in the magazine world:

William James Carlton, "father of magazine advertising." His early agency evolved into ad giant J. Walter Thompson Company.

Ben Franklin, “father of American magazines.” An equally (perhaps more) worthy contender for that title would be Andrew Bradford, Franklin's competitor and fellow Philadelphia printer. Franklin is also credited with publishing the first paid advertising in an American magazine.

Hugo Gernsback, "father of magazine science fiction." The Hugo Awards are named in his honor.

George Rex Graham, “father of the American magazines of the first class.” Founder of Graham's magazine, he published, among others, Edgar Allan Poe, himself considered the "father of the detective story."

Bernarr Macfadden, “father of the confession magazine.” His True Story magazine, launched in 1919, was the first of the breed and a pioneer in what these days is often referred to as reader-generated content.  

Frank Munsey, “father of the pulp magazine.” His fiction magazine The Argosy, printed on cheap paper and selling for a dime, is considered the first pulp.

 

[ Reprinted from June 17, 2012, with some added information and updated links. ]

 

Harold Ross’s second most famous creation

Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, is often credited with coining the term “captive audience.”

It came about during a much-publicized 1949 dispute with the New York Central over the music and commercials the railroad had begun piping into Grand Central Terminal through loudspeakers. Ross himself had become a commuter by that point, with a home in Stamford, Connecticut.

Addressing a hearing called by the State Public Service Commission to resolve the dispute, Ross complained that, “You cannot hear anything. It's just a ringing in your ears,” and added, “If they get away with this, nobody will be able to read on any means of conveyance in the United States.”

When the railroad’s lawyer asked Ross whether his hearing was good, the editor replied, “I am thinking of having an eardrum punctured.”

Ross was not alone in his objections. Another commuter, a psychiatrist, testified that the racket could cause peptic ulcers and mental illness among commuters, due to “suppressed rage and hostility.” Still another commuter, a woman whose occupation wasn’t noted, added that it was “not too fantastic to predict that one of the employees would go berserk and start shooting up the customers.”   

Several weeks later the railroad relented, and the music (and advertising) stopped.

Ross is not the only editor who added a word or two to the American language.

Sarah Josepha Hale, the longtime editor of Godey's Lady's Book, best known today for badgering Abraham Lincoln into establishing Thanksgiving as a national holiday and as the author of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb," is credited with importing the French word “lingerie” to the U.S. in the mid-19th century. Thanks to her magazine’s popularity and wide distribution, it soon became part of American vernacular.

Frank Crowninshield, longtime editor of Vanity Fair, was credited as the inventor of the word “philanthropoid” and quoted as defining it as “a politician in office, who gives away other people’s money for no good, and for no good purpose.” (I am relying here on 1938 newspaper accounts and haven’t been able to find Crowninshield’s original use of the term, if, indeed, he ever used it.)

“Philanthropoid” seems have gained some popularity among anti-New Dealers, who objected to Depression-era social programs. In more recent years it has sometimes been used to refer to people who work for nonprofits and charitable foundations, usually disparagingly.

H.L. Mencken, editor or co-editor of the Smart Set and American Mercury magazines, is credited with coining all kinds of terms (“booboisie” and “ecdysiast,” to name just two). Best known, perhaps, is the “Bible Belt,” which he used to describe the heavily Christian evangelical southern states of the U.S. As is true of most Mencken coinages, it wasn’t necessarily meant to be taken as a compliment. Mencken is often said to have invented the term in 1924 or 1925, although it’s interesting to note that while he mentions it in his 1936 book “The American Language” (Fourth Edition), he doesn’t seem to take any credit for it.

Finally, Forrest J Ackerman, longtime editor of the immortal Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, is often credited with inventing the term “sci-fi” in the early 1950s. Besides his employment as an editor, Ackerman was also a literary agent who represented many science fiction writers.

Know any other examples? Please add them in our Comments section.

William Randolph Hearst’s 3 secrets of magazine success

As paraphrased by writer O. A. Owen in the November 23, 1918 issue of Advertising & Selling magazine:

"1. In magazining, the best, most comfortable, most profitable place is the head of the procession.

"2. You arrive there by putting the country’s finest obtainable brains and talent into your publication; then making the world see and acknowledge your primacy.

"3. This last will come by itself in the course of some years, anyhow, but (and here is the interesting half of Hearst’s formula) recognition comes ever so much sooner if the merits of your medium are advertised. The public is a slow animal and sees few things not thrust upon it.”

Owen, who at times seems as if he might be applying for a job with Hearst, goes on to describe him as "an editor supreme" with "that rarest power, the power to understand people unlike him.... He reaches for the best of the interest, taste and aspiration of the great, kindly, intelligent American middle class."

 

The editor who lived two lives, both happy

“I always left my door open

So that they could come in without knocking.

I was never out.

They arrived with small hopes.

I sent them away with great hopes.

They sought me out because I was a good listener.

A man looking for a pair of ears

Hates to run up against a mouth.”

— Robert H. Davis, in a letter explaining his unusually cordial relations with writers, quoted in a 1919 newspaper article.

 

Davis, who became famous for giving many well-known writers their start, went to work for the magazine entrepreneur Frank A. Munsey in 1904, editing fiction for the company’s flagship, Munsey's Magazine. While Munsey himself seems to have held the magazine’s top editorial post until his death in 1925, Robert H. Davis was its editor as far as many writers were concerned, especially after it became an all-fiction title in 1921. Davis was also responsible for much of the content in other Munsey publications, including Argosy. He reputedly read, or at least skimmed, a million words a week.

With the boss's demise, Davis officially became the editor of Munsey's in 1925 and remained with the company until 1929. In the meantime he launched a career as a newspaper columnist and the author of numerous books. His new byline, Bob Davis, was soon familiar to a wide national audience.

By 1930, in fact, Davis had become such a celebrity that the makers of Lucky Strike cigarettes ran newspaper ads in which he endorsed their product, remarking, in part, that their “use of the Ultra Violet Ray in the ‘Toasting’ of the tobacco is a splendid example of achievement.”   

As his fellow newspaper columnist O. O. McIntyre observed in 1933:

“No man at two different periods of life so acquired two directly antithetical reputations as Bob Davis. As Robert H. Davis he was for years a magazine editor rarely grooving out of his routine — a worn path from his editorial desk to his apartment.

“As editor, a discoverer of writers, he rarely wrote a line. About nine years ago he became Bob Davis, globe trotter, and in that time has written nine books and hundreds of newspaper columns. At the moment he is off for a long caprice in far away Iceland."

Davis died in 1942, at age 73, on a visit to Montreal.

In an editorial soon after his death, the New York Herald Tribune enumerated his accomplishments as an editor and author (as well as a photographer, playwright, world traveler, and “mighty fisherman”), before concluding:

“But it is as a person, warm, witty, quizzical, wise and so nobly equipped with the more attractive human qualities, that he will be missed most. He had one of the happiest of lives. It was the sort he deserved, and, somehow it is hard to see how he could have made it otherwise.”

Davis's surviving letters, manuscripts, and other papers seem to be almost as widely traveled as the man himself. Some of his papers reside at the New York Public Library, others at Syracuse University, and still others at Princeton.

The Flatiron Building in New York City, where Davis's door was always open. His office was on the 18th floor.

Ah, the life of the magazine writer, 1911

“The successful author today owns a town house on the east side of Central Park, a country place in the Berkshires, a string of polo ponies, and he drives down to the magazine offices in a limousine.” — A 1911 newspaper ad for the Red Book Magazine, bragging about how well it paid its writers.

One of a colorful trio of Chicago-based magazines (the others were the Green Book and Blue Book), the Red Book was in those days primarily known for its fiction. It later evolved into the women’s magazine Redbook.

The magazine: a better-dressed newspaper

“A good magazine is a good newspaper in a dress suit. It should have all the brightness, interest, enterprise and variety of the newspaper, with the dignity, refinement and poise of the magazine.” — an advertisement for The Saturday Evening Post, 1898.

The Post had been acquired by the Curtis Publishing Company, owner of Ladies’ Home Journal, late in 1897. This ad, which occupied four solid pages in several leading magazines of the day, sought to reintroduce and reposition what at that point was a failing title. The Post’s new editor, for about a year, was William George Jordan. He was succeeded in 1899 by George Horace Lorimer, who ran the show until 1936 and built the Post into one of the most successful magazines of all time.

How magazines became ‘cunning traps’ for readers

“Time was when you could take the vast bulk of a magazine, and rip off one fourth from the front and two fourths from the back, and in the remaining fourth you had something to read in a form you could enjoy. But the advertising gentry got on to that practice and stopped it. They demanded what they call 'full position,' next to reading matter. One magazine gave way, and then another; until now all popular magazines are cunning traps to bring your mind into subjugation to the hawkers of wares.” — Muckraker Upton Sinclair, in his 1928 book “The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism.”

Make magazines great again

“What is a Great Magazine?

“It is a magazine with a definite purpose.

“It seeks to inspire a good thought, and to publish the country’s best thought upon the most important topics.

“It adds to the powerful written word illustrations by the best artists, the finest work that good pressmen, good ink, good paper, good printing can produce. A good magazine, like a good man, strives to make the world better, upholds justice and attacks wrong.”

— a 1918 advertisement for Hearst’s Magazine