ABSTRACT
A woman's magazine may seem merely a powdery bit of fluff. This chapter examines women's experiences with the developing consumer culture of the early twentieth century as reflected in the most popular women's magazine of the day, the Ladies' Home Journal. The Ladies' Home Journal was not the first popular magazine for women, and its editors and owner took some of the cues for success from the Journal's early nineteenth-century predecessors. Internal differences divided groups of women, as did the larger culture, of which women's magazines were just one part. Political in a largely nonpartisan sense, the Ladies' Home journal and other magazines obscured fundamental differences among women in every issue, creating in the consuming woman an amalgam defined and limited by race, class, and ethnicity but promoted now as "average.".
