By dint of its very title, Good Housekeeping magazine stands as a symbol of a past era in American life. Along with Redbook, Woman's Day, Ladies' Home Journal, and others, Good Housekeeping belongs to what is known in industry parlance as the "Seven Sisters" of women's service magazines, and achieved its most pervasive success in an era when the bulk of middle-class women stayed at home and focused their energies on cooking, cleaning, and their children. Good Housekeeping and its cohorts "gradually built up the power of the matriarchy," wrote John Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman in The Magazine in America, 1741-1990. "Mom was … a figure of responsibility, dignity, and authority in the magazines." Good Housekeeping, however, differed from the other women's service magazines in its slightly elitist air; clearly aimed at women running economically stable households, in its heyday the periodical featured articles on how...