Americanization of Edward Bok Book

This is a very odd book, one that certainly wouldn't have won the Pulitzer Prize today, as it did back in 1921. It's an autobiography, albeit, told in the third-person, of the editor of the Lady's Home Journal, for a time the biggest magazine in America, which sold over 2 million copies a week. The LHJ was not a supermarket "women's magazine," like Cosmo today, but a magazine that published Rudyard Kipling, Bret Harte, ex-President Benjamin Harrison, Jane Addams's "Fifteen Years at Hull House," and some of the most important investigative reporting of the early 20th century. And its campaigns had real political effects. Bok's campaigns against the use of egret's maternal feathers for women's hats led to the passage of the state and then federal "Lacey Act," banning interstate shipment of illegally captured animals in 1900. His campaigns for the modern "open plan" house, featuring work by Frank Lloyd Wright among others, helped define early 20th century American vernacular architecture, just as his campaigns against billboards, where he paid prizes for people showing the removal of signs, reshaped American cityscapes.

Bok himself had a fascinating backstory. His semi-noble but unsuccessful father moved from the Netherlands to Brooklyn when Bok was six. After his father died, leaving the family in dire straights, Bok embarked on an almost too-perfect Horatio Alger tale of upward mobility. He began cleaning windows and hawking water and then lemonade at horsecar stops to women who could not leave teh cars (unlike men). His journalistic sense manifested early, when he went to the Brooklyn Eagle with stories of local kids' parties, understanding that everyone at them would buy the newspaper just to see their name in print. He began a side-career in writing famous people and receiving their replies, starting with Republican presidential nominee Rutherford Hayes, and then turned it into one of the largest signature collections in the country. In the process, he met almost everyone that mattered in America before he was 15, and got to work directly with Jay Gould at Western Union, as well as publishers Henry Holt and Charles Scribner (where he worked under Frank Doubleday in advertising, before Doubleday started his own magazine). He started his own Brooklyn Magazine, as well as a literary newsletter, and newspaper syndicate, which especially shared women writers and began the earliest "women's pages" in newspapers, usually as side gigs when he was no more than a stenographer. His work attracted the attention of Cyrus Curtis, who put in charge of LHJ at the tender age of 26, after which Bok married Curtis's only daughter and made a roaring success of his life. He accomplished much and accomplished it quick.

The word that will doubtless come to modern minds, however, when reading this book is "mansplaining," and there is much that rings fatuous and hollow to modern ears. Bok railed against women for failing in their "maternal instinct" when they didn't support his feathers campaign, or slighted their understanding when they continued frequenting French fashion houses. He attacked women's clubs for their insufficiently intellectual lectures, and railed against women's suffrage. Many of his campaigns, such as his work to "improve" the cluttered look of Pullman Cars or Americanize women's dress, seem mere pettifogging now. Nonetheless, his self-important but occasionally insightful book offers a personal vision of a forgotten world, one where women's magazines were among the most important publications on the planet.