ABSTRACT
The Ladies' Home Journal struggled with readers and writers and even with large political bodies, but although it finally acknowledged that votes could be for women, it never joked either that stoves might be for men or that stoves might not be for all women. Although the Journal approached women's political involvement not only as a menacing but also a recent development, historians have documented the wide variety of reform efforts engaged in by middle-class women during the nineteenth century and through the Progressive era. Nancy Cott has argued, the nineteenth-century women's movement left middle-class women with a difficult legacy and three possible directions. Political independence for women threatened the very existence of a women's homemaking magazine, and on some level Bok must have been responding to that.
