Introduction

Summary

In the first place, this magazine, as a whole, stands for and expresses through its printed pages the highest ideals of womanhood – culture, refinement, education […] [It] will give any woman, even though her reading be limited to this one magazine, splendid assistance in her natural vocation of building that greatest of institutions, the Home.

– Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1922

The appeal of the Canadian Home Journal lies primarily in the facts [sic] that it is devoted to the interests of the home, and that it is thoroughly Canadian.

– Canadian Home Journal, June 1926

In March 1922, the Ladies’ Home Journal published a letter from Mrs. Irene Darnell-Hartwick, of Low Moor, Virginia. Introducing the letter, Editor Barton W. Currie stated, ‘We doubt that any of us could, so ably, in such brief space, state our aims and objectives’ (26). Throughout the letter, Mrs. Darnell-Hartwick flatters the characteristic range of content within the magazine; its ‘editorials and special articles by men and women especially qualified to write on upon these subjects’, its ‘clean and wholesome’ fiction and its fashions which are ‘conservative and of good taste’. Taken together with the editorial endorsement, the letter represents a rare example of an explicit statement of intent on the part of the Ladies’ Home Journal (1883– 2014), confirming its attitudes towards modernity and femininity, its priorities in terms of content and – perhaps most crucially – the centrality of the home. The home is of equal importance in a full-page statement in the June 1926 issue of the Canadian Home Journal (1905– 58). Untitled and unsigned, it too describes the magazine's range of content; its ‘entertaining, wholesome and clean-cut’ fiction, the ‘very latest creations and styles’ in fashions which offer also ‘practical information’ and features ‘relative to the home and home life’ (66). Where it differs from the piece in the Ladies Home Journal however, is its consistent emphasis on national identity: ‘There is no doubt that the Canadian who is truly Canadian at heart, should know the preference for Canadian achievements and Canadian enterprise’ (66). These magazines were, in their respective countries, among the most successful and enduring women's titles of the twentieth century.