Comparing Major Women’s Magazine Circulation Across the 20th Century
By Ed Timke and Wenyue (Lucy) Gu
From magazines’ earliest years, women have been a central target and subject of advertising and editorial content. As Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck state in their important book Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Magazines, “Consumer women’s magazines have mirrored the changing roles, responsibilities, duties, and interests of America’s females ever since the early days of the Republic. Literally thousands of magazines have served the reading interests of generations of women in the United States.”
To start to see the importance of women’s magazines in the publishing and advertising world of the twentieth century, it is helpful to compare their long-term circulation, which has been made more easily possible through the Circulating American Magazines Project’s compilation of the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s issue-by-issue circulation data. By downloading these data and processing them through visualization software like Tableau, one can develop revealing time-series graphs for several titles at a time. One can also dig deeper into the nuances of each magazine’s history by breaking out each title’s circulation on its own. Making comparisons of time-series data across many titles as well as focusing on individual titles allows researchers to obtain macro and micro views of magazine circulation over time and start to home in on important historical moments for a particular genre of magazines like women’s magazines.
When looking at many major women’s magazines together, we can see an upward trend throughout much of the twentieth century. Significant growth for most women’s magazines occurred after World War II. Despite its continued rise throughout the first half of the century, Woman’s Home Companion is the only magazine among the selected titles that closed shop (in January 1957).
Looking more closely at Better Homes & Gardens’ circulation across the twentieth century, one sees strong continuous increases in circulation with the exception of expected plateaus and troughs during the Great Depression and World War II years.
Looking at Cosmopolitan alone presents an interesting case in women’s magazine history but also in the history of magazines making sudden editorial shifts. The magazine was originally a general family magazine up until 1965 when Helen Gurley Brown took over and rebranded the title as a women’s interest magazine. One can see the family magazine peaked after World War II, but it took a severe dive throughout the 1950s and mid-1960s. After Gurley Brown’s takeover in 1965, one can see a significant upward swing in the magazine’s circulation. Such a significant reversal in circulation encourages research into the formula Gurley Brown used to flip a magazine from failing to successful.
Ladies’ Home Journal’s long-term circulation reveals an upward trend that is most pronounced in the lead up to its peak circulation in the early 1960s. However, the magazine started to plateau throughout the 1960s. One might hypothesize that the magazine’s more traditionally-focused content did not resonate well with young women who were part of the “booming” youth culture emerging in the 1960s. Other magazines like Cosmopolitan with more trendy discussions could have moved women’s attention away from Ladies’ Home Journal. The significant rise of television in the American household or the rise in magazine prices may have played a role as well.
McCall’s magazine saw a precipitous rise in circulation in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but circulation plateaued in the mid-1960s and eventually dropped in the early 1970s.
Redbook saw a continuous rise throughout the twentieth century, with the largest increase in the early 1960s before a gradual slowing down in growth by the early 1970s.
Woman’s Home Companion saw increasing readership up through the middle of World War II, but as the postwar period progressed, the magazine saw erratic swings in circulation before its ultimate closure in 1957.
The fashion magazine Vogue shows growth over time, but looking closely at individual issue circulation reveals the magazine’s dramatic upward and downward swings in circulation. Upon closer inspection, one realizes that the issues with highest circulation tend to coincide with the issues about the fall and spring fashion seasons when readers most likely wanted to see what the newest and most exciting fashions would be.
This initial comparison of women’s magazine circulation across the twentieth century reveals that women’s magazines saw a continuous and ever-increasing presence in the American magazine landscape, especially in the years after World War II. Some magazines saw more dramatic increases or decreases at certain moments in time, and others, like Vogue, exhibit interesting and persistent circulation swings within a year based on demand for particular content. Such similarities and differences beg for more in-depth macro and micro level research using circulation data, which can provide deeper insights into the important place of women’s magazines over time.
Ed Timke is the Co-Director of the Circulating American Magazines Project. He is also Associate Editor of Advertising & Society Quarterly, a journal focused on advertising’s place in society, culture, history, and the economy. He is an instructor of advertising and innovation courses for the Department of Cultural Anthropology and the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative at Duke University. Ed’s specialties include advertising and media history, international advertising and media, and media theory and research methods. His work focuses on the role of advertising and media in shaping how different cultures understand and imagine each other.
Wenyue (Lucy) Gu is an undergraduate engineering student at Duke University. She has contributed to the Circulating American Magazines Project by completing data entry and preparing the many charts found in this blog post.