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This article argues that geography played an important role in shaping the readership of the Ladies' Home Journal in the early and mid-twentieth century. It draws upon circulation records of Curtis Publishing Company and the Audit Bureau of Circulations, using them to map state distribution of the Journal in six periods from 1911 to 1955. Although the magazine's geographic identity shifted somewhat during that period, it showed a clear split between the South and the rest of the country. In exploring readership patterns, the article argues that the Journal provided an important cultural tie between West and East while the South, in large part, remained isolated. This suggests researchers must begin to see magazine audiences in regional terms, just as they deforms of fiction writing, social interaction, and ways of life.
Edward Bok, the famed editor of the Ladles Home Journal, wrote frequently about the magazine's audience. In 1901, with circulation at nearly 900,000, he boasted the Journal had the largest readership of any magazine in the world. He said, however, that if anyone deserved credit, "it is equally divided among the hundreds of thousands of Journal readers who have simply indicated a preference for a clean and wholesome kind of reading."1 Two years later, the magazine's circulation for the first time topped 1 million, which he said the staff had "tried with all our might and main to reach." Reaching a million, he said on the magazine's twentieth anniversary, had been a goal nearly from the start of thejournalin 1883.2
Bok aspired to reach more than mere numbers, though. In fact, he said he edited the Journal with an ideal woman in mind, someone who seemed "by her dress, manner, and in every way, to be typical of the best in American womanhood."3 He defined that reader more specifically in 1915, at a meeting of the advertising staff of the Journals parent company, Curtis Publishing Company. For the most part, he said, the magazine reached out to families with incomes of $1,200 to $3,000 (about $24,000 to $60,000 today4) and sometimes to those with incomes slightly higher. "We direct our attention, however, to the class from $1,200 to $3,000, because they are the families having the greatest need of help, and to whom...