Advertisers found a ready audience for their products in women’s magazines. The combination of a growing and increasingly literate and affluent population, cheap newsprint, and improved printing technology that allowed for color and photographs made the magazines a perfect vehicle for promoting all the new consumables of the age. As the economics of magazine publishing changed from a subscription-based model to one wherein almost all the revenue came from advertising, it became profitable to publish many more titles. Such magazines as Ladies’ Home Journal, Women’s Home Companion, and Good Housekeeping flooded the market with their combination of home advice and advertising. Between 1890 and 1905 the monthly circulation of American periodicals increased from 18 million to 64 million, and by 1900, magazines often exceeded one hundred pages of advertising an issue. Syrups H. K. Curtis, the founder of Ladies’ Home Journal, made the point explicit in an address to a gathering of manufacturers. “Do you know why we publish the Ladies’ Home Journal?” he began. “The editor thinks it is for the benefit of American women. That is an illusion, but a very proper one for him to have…. The real reason, the publisher’s reason, is to give you people who manufacture things that American women want and buy a chance to tell them about your products” (Norris, 1990, p. 36).
