ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how three popular mail-order magazines—Comfort, Home Life, and The People's Home Journal—approached working-class concerns through a rhetoric of domestication, a frame that encouraged readers to focus on personal space—home or inner self—as places to transform in order to live a more fulfilling life. It provides special issues claiming to be of particular interest to their female readers. Dissent was brought home and domesticated along with the individuals who would potentially engage themselves in public protest. Collective action and protest in real life, "sunshine" activities in the magazines. As the Industrial Workers of the world's message of solidarity reached ever greater and greater numbers of factory, mill, and mine workers, popular journals that targeted these individuals were advocating a turn inward, to home life and self-improvement. In essence, the ideology of domestication was a rhetoric that effectively circumscribed working-class readers' political and economic experiences by privatizing them.
