Edward W. Bok Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Beth Dalia Snyder

Critical Essay by Beth Dalia Snyder

SOURCE: “Confidence Women: Constructing Female Culture and Community in ‘Just Among Ourselves’ and the Ladies' Home Journal,” ATQ Vol. 12, No. 4, December, 1998, pp. 311–25.

In the following essay, Snyder describes the creation of a female community in the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal while the periodical was under Bok's editorship.

… how much greater response would there be to a magazine of higher standards, of larger initiative—a magazine that would be an authoritative clearing-house for all the problems confronting women in the home, that brought itself closely into contact with those problems and tried to solve them in an entertaining and efficient way; and yet a magazine of uplift and inspiration: a magazine, in other words, that would give light and leading in the woman's world.

—Edward Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok

The Journal is the most welcome periodical that finds its way to my table....
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