LADIES' HOME JOURNAL

American monthly magazine, one of the longest-running in the country and long the trendsetter among women's magazines. It was founded in 1883 as a women's supplement to the Tribune and Farmer (187985) of Cyrus H.K. Curtis and was edited by his wife, Louisa Knapp. The Journal began independent publication in 1884 with a pious and demure editorial posture and a sentimental literary diet and had a circulation of 20,000. Curtis boosted circulation to more than 400,000 with an innovative multiple subscription club and a large advertising campaign. Edward W. Bok became editor in 1889, and under him the Journal attracted great writers from Europe and the United States, offering quality fiction and nonfiction articles to women. By the turn of the century, its circulation surpassed all other American publications. As editor, Bok gave the magazine a sense of intimacy and established service departments to answer letters from readers. All of these contributed to the Journal 's outstanding success and revolutionized the women's magazine field. The Journal instituted an advertising code to eliminate fraud and extravagant claims by advertisers and was noted for its attention to social causes. It refused, for example, to advertise patent medicine, and its subsequent muckraking campaign against those products helped bring about the passage of the U.S. Federal Food and Drugs Act in 1906. Its features on residential architecture, fine arts, and domestic life won renown. The Journal was often imitated, and it was long the leader of all American women's magazines in circulation, but after the mid-20th century it was overtaken by its older rival, McCall's (1873).