SOURCE: “The Editor's Aims, Strategies, and Risks,” in Reformer in the Marketplace: Edward W. Bok and The Ladies' Home Journal, Louisiana State University Press, 1979, pp. 50–74.

In the following essay, Steinberg details Bok's editorial policies, reform efforts, and influence over the readership of the Ladies' Home Journal.

Edward Bok's personal qualities, especially his dedication to the humanistic values of his generation, profoundly influenced his conduct as editor. Although he often preached from his own experiences, he liked to insist that he had to repress his own personality, which he called Edward William Bok, to allow his persona, Edward Bok, the middle-class model for his generation, to edit the Journal.¹ The pages of the Journal do not bear him out, however. The man underestimated the editor; indeed, he judged him too severely. The editor accomplished most of what the man endorsed. The man of sixty, conscious of his age, remembered...