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Ladies' Home Journal

History

The Ladies' Home Journal arose from a popular single-page supplement in the American magazine Tribune and Farmer titled Women at Home. Women at Home was written by Louisa Knapp Curtis, wife of the magazine's publisher Cyrus H. K. Curtis. After a year it became an independent publication with Knapp as editor for the first six years. Its original name was The Ladies Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper, but she dropped the last three words in 1886. It rapidly became the leading American magazine of its type, reaching a circulation of more than one million copies in ten years. At the turn of the 20th Century, the magazine published the work of muckrakers and social reformers such as Jane Addams.

The Journal, along with its major rivals, Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Redbook and Woman's Day were long known as the "seven sisters". For decades, the Journal had the greatest circulation of this group, but it fell behind McCall's in 1961. In 1968, its circulation was 6.8 million compared to McCall's 8.5 million. That year, Curtis Publishing sold the Ladies' Home Journal, along with the magazine The American Home, to Downe Communications for $5.4 million in stock. Between 1969 and 1974 Downe was acquired by Charter Company, which sold the magazine to Family Media Inc., publishers of Health, in 1982 when the company decided to divest its publishing interests. In 1986, the Meredith Corporation acquired the magazine from Family Media for $96 million. By 1998, the journal's circulation had dropped to 4.5 million.

Editors and features

Knapp continued as editor until she was succeeded by Edward William Bok in 1889. However, she remained involved with the magazine's management, and she also wrote a column for each issue. In 1892, it became the first magazine to refuse patent medicine advertisements. In 1896, Bok became Louisa Knapp's son-in-law when he married her daughter, Mary Louise Curtis.

The most famous cooking teacher of her time, Sarah Tyson Rorer served as LHJ first food editor from 1897 to 1911, when she moved to the magazine Good Housekeeping.

In 1936, Mary Cookman, husband of New York Post editor Joseph Cookman began working at the Ladies Home Journal. She was named Executive Editor and remained with LHJ until 1963 . She was known throughout most of her career as Mary Bass
In 1946 LHJ adopted the feminist slogan "Never underestimate the power of a woman" which it continues to use today.

The magazine's trademark feature is Can This Marriage Be Saved?, a popular column in which each person of a couple in a troubled marriage explains their view of the problem, a marriage counselor explains the solutions offered in counseling, and the outcome is published; it was written for 30 years starting in 1953 by Dorothy D. MacKaye under the name of Dorothy Cameron Disney.