Adieu to the Ladies’ Home Journal

When I was a teenager my mother subscribed to the Ladies’ Home Journal. It was published out of Philadelphia, with the sort of sedate worldview embraced by that dignified city. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote for the Journal. The fashions were attractive and modest. There was short fiction of a high moral character. I can remember coming home in the afternoon to find that the Journal had arrived, seizing it happily, and retiring with it to a corner of the living room, there to search its pages for images of the grownup life I would someday enjoy.

“Seduction of the Innocent,” Dr. Frederic Wertham’s bizarre rant against comic books, a rant that nearly killed an entire industry, somehow escaped my attention. I was busy reading “Can This Marriage Be Saved.”

Magazines used to be a big part of women’s lives in this country. A hundred years ago my grandmother Gallison loved them, in her little town of Vanceboro, Maine, which was, let’s face it, a backwater even in her day. Magazines were for her a connection to the great world, as they were for many women in rural places. My suburban housewife mother loved them. I loved them too, for I was obsessed with fashion and hairstyles and needed guidance about how to live. But things change, people change.

I now see that my love of magazines was a bad thing, far worse than my childhood love of comic books, no matter what Dr. Wertham had to say about it. Not that the Ladies’ Home Journal deserves to fail, necessarily, any more than The Vault of Fear or the Crypt of Terror did. Excellent horror comics, by the way, destroyed by Wertham’s foolishness. If you missed them you probably sleep better, but you missed some authentic works of art.

Anything that gets between you and real life is a bad thing, and this is something the magazines did brilliantly. The magazines when I was young strove to bend us into certain shapes. Not just physically, although that was certainly part of it. Mentally. Socially. World War II was over, the Korean conflict didn't seem to require Rosie to be a riveter, so the magazines helped her go back to the kitchen and cook.

The seventy-thirty marriage was the standard promulgated by the counselors of “Can This Marriage Be Saved” in the early days, in the nineteen-fifties, before the women were able to liberate themselves. I bought that, just as I bought the idea that the clothes they showed in Vogue Magazine were what I was supposed to wear. I had no idea. Eventually I noticed that the people who wrote for the magazines knew even less about life than I did, so I stopped reading them.

Now the Ladies’ Home Journal has fired their entire editorial staff and proposes to become a quarterly, although how they’re going to publish anything at all without an editorial staff is a mystery to me. Perhaps they will steal content from the internet, or persuade people to write articles for them for nothing. That seems to be the wave of the future. I suspect they were doomed when they left Philadelphia for the fleshpots of New York City, where Redbook prints articles teaching our daughters how to give good head. I can’t imagine what Dr. Wertham would say about that. It would kill Eleanor Roosevelt, if she weren’t already dead.

There are no ladies anymore. There are scarcely any homes. And now there will be no Journal.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Blindingly Obvious Advice

I picked up a copy of Family Circle at the supermarket the other day, intrigued by their offer to tell me twenty ways to organize my living quarters, or twenty things it was okay to throw out, or something like that. When I got it home I was disappointed; turned out that the article could be boiled down to one useful piece of advice, which I already knew: get rid of all the stuff you don't need. The other articles were all about parenting. How to parent. I'm not in that game anymore.

That's the trouble with women's magazines nowadays, or the trouble with me. Most of the sage wisdom they dish out is stuff I've known for years, blindingly obvious stuff. Get rid of what you don't need. Don't eat spoiled food. Be civil and kind to your significant other. The fashion and lifestyle magazines for single women that I used to love so well when I was young and giddy are offering very different articles from the ones I grew up on.

I remember one article in Mademoiselle – yes, I know, it folded in 2001 – that told us how to care for our clothes, how to hem them if necessary, how to get spots out and sew up rips, how to treat our shoes so that they would last a long time. Nobody bothers with that anymore. Throw them out and get new ones from China. Nowadays, if you can believe their covers, the magazines for young women offer articles like Should I Have my Breasts Enlarged, and By How Much? and Fifty Kinky Things You Can Do With the Pool Boy.

It struck me the other day, as I perused article after article giving advice about things I already knew and things I didn't care about, that it would be a public service to unload my own accumulated wisdom upon the cringing heads of the young. After all, I didn't always know everything either.

In the interests of passing on a lifetime of wisdom, here goes:

Twenty Hints for Living a Free and Happy Life. 

(Many of these things I learned from bitter experience.)

1. Get rid of what you don't need.
2. Don't eat spoiled food.
3. Be civil and kind to your significant other.
4. Brush your clothes and hang them up when you take them off.
5. Remain on good terms with your neighbors as far as possible.
6. Change your oil every three thousand miles.
7. Never quit a job without having another job lined up.
8. Keep your kitchen and bathroom spotlessly clean.
9. Don't marry before you're thirty.
10. Stay sober.
11. Wear only well-made clothes that fit properly.
12. Don't smoke.
13. Brush your teeth twice daily.
14. See your dentist regularly.
15. Don't talk when you should be listening.
16. Don't have sex without protection.
17. Never lend a relative more money than you can afford to lose.
18. Make sure you're always wearing clean underwear.
19. Sieze the day.
20. Follow your bliss.

These bromides will keep you safe from serious grief until you grow your own wisdom. As for the pool boy, you're on your own.

Kate Gallison