The end of Ladies’ Home Journal

“Never underestimate the power of a woman.” Coined by an ad agency to promote Ladies’ Home Journal, this slogan captures a major reason for the magazine’s runaway success. Launched in 1883 as a women’s supplement to a farming journal, LHJ reached its zenith during the baby boomer era by appealing to women’s influence — not only as wives, mothers and consumers but also as individuals and citizens.

From its inception, LHJ took women seriously, offering them a hefty mix of contemporary fiction, timely articles and household tips. For decades, it addressed the different facets of American women’s lives: In the Depression it encouraged women to keep up their family’s spirits; during World War II it boosted frugal shopping as patriotic. But as women have increasingly made their mark in business and politics, the power of a woman has transformed. LHJ lost its way, misjudging the shifting contours of women’s experiences and aspirations. It became a mashup of beauty tips, fashion, recipes, relationship advice and celebrity profiles, all without a coherent editorial angle. On April 24, the Meredith Corp. announced LHJ would cease publication as a monthly print magazine, ending a remarkable 130-year run. (It will continue on as a quarterly newsstand magazine and digital publication.)

Why, for so long, were LHJ and a few women’s magazines, for better or worse, able to direct the opinions and tastes of generations of American women? And why is that no longer possible? 

It was Louisa Knapp Curtis, wife of publisher Cyrus H. Curtis, who decided that his farming journal needed a section devoted to women’s interests. Those pages became a full-fledged magazine. Louisa Curtis edited LHJ until 1889, when Edward Bok took over. Bok led the magazine into the 20th century and built it into a publishing phenomenon. Later the husband-and-wife team of Bruce and Beatrice Gould steered women readers through decades of change.

The editors conceived of the magazine as a women’s space, devoted to their specific needs and interests. Numerous departments served up useful advice to women of all ages: Early issues featured Side Talks With Girls, warning teens against slang and bad manners, and Heart to Heart Talks, which addressed older women’s spiritual needs. Later the series How America Lives offered a compelling look at real families making ends meet.

Curtis and her successors emphasized writing for women by women, intentionally hiring female writers and editors at a time when such opportunities remained meager. Readers sent in letters seeking advice and offering feedback. The magazine became, in a sense, a virtual community long before the digital age. Reading LHJ was an immersive experience, with its long articles and (to a modern reader) an outsize amount of text. The writing and large format encouraged women to take time from household tasks to enjoy the magazine — a break they could justify because of what they learned in it.

The magazine promoted a coherent vision of middle-class life centered on the home and taught women how to achieve it. It offered practical lessons — how to make a casserole, redesign a child’s bedroom or entertain with buffet suppers. It helped foster a sense of aesthetic standards for women in the middle class and those aspiring to join it.

Integral to this vision was the marketing and sale of consumer goods, everything from packaged foods to appliances. In a pioneering technique, LHJ seamlessly blended advertising and editorial content — the original advertorial. It worked with ad agencies to create product promotions, formatting the page so that ads sat next to relevant articles. Both addressed women who were moving into a new role, that of consumers for their families.

Although it promoted traditional values, LHJ was not filled with fluff. It insisted that women were naturally concerned with public affairs. Early on, it took a public stand for drug safety, refusing to advertise patented medicines. After World War II, LHJ reported on what it termed female “political pilgrims” who had won public office. It even ran an excerpt from Betty Friedan’s 1963 best-seller, “The Feminine Mystique,” even though the book included a harsh attack on women’s magazines.

Still, Friedan’s two pages (“Have American women traded brains for brooms?”) were overshadowed by articles on how to keep a husband happy. The most popular column in the magazine’s history was Can This Marriage Be Saved? beginning in 1953. Each month author Dorothy MacKaye, writing under the name Dorothy Cameron Disney, and Paul Popenoe, a marriage counselor (and eugenicist), dissected a couple’s marital troubles and considered how to solve them. Educational and prurient, it became the column that readers turned to first and — written by other experts — has endured to the present. 

By the 1960s, the world that LHJ depicted was growing more distant from women’s real experiences. The feminist movement repudiated the image of the happy housewife and women increasingly entered the workplace. The sexual revolution spurred nonmarital sexual encounters and raised divorce rates. Under editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of “Sex and the Single Girl,” Cosmopolitan became hugely successful among young women with a formula that combined beauty, fashion and talk about sex and relationships. The civil rights movement led to the publication of Essence in 1970, and the re-emergence of feminism sparked Ms. magazine in 1972. Expanding African-American opportunities and rising Hispanic and Asian-American populations challenged women’s magazines to respond to the growing diversity and complexity of women’s lives — a challenge they only feebly attempted to meet.

Magazines such as LHJ, once an authoritative source of women’s advice, no longer had a captive or uniform audience. Today we have separate magazines for women of different ages and ethnicities as well as publications devoted to a single type of ostensibly female activity: Lucky for shopping, Shelter for home decor, TheGloss.com for beauty. The audience has fractured, and authority and influence diffused. Michelle Phan, a young beauty entrepreneur who launched her popular YouTube channel in 2007, has about the same overall audience as Allure (PDF), a leading beauty magazine founded in 1991. With the arrival of digital and mobile platforms, members of affinity groups engage directly with one another. Jezebel and other websites regularly take up gender issues — and aren’t publishing simply for women.

As for traditional women’s magazines, they continue to give pleasure to women, young and old, and at times publish significant journalism (as in Cosmopolitan’s recent award-winning guide to contraception). Yet as a force in American culture, they pale in comparison to LHJ in its heyday. Ladies’ Home Journal helped define American womanhood, the middle-class home, marketing and consumerism. In many ways, it is no surprise that such a magazine is gone. But given the debates that we see continuing today — about child rearing, “pushy” women in the workplace and women having it all — I would say that in other, somewhat bittersweet ways, we continue to feel its influence.