the woman's
magazine, leaving only the general contents, which are equally
interesting to men and to women. Hence the field for the magazine with
the essentially feminine appeal is contracting rather than broadening,
and it is likely to contract much more rapidly in the future.

The field was altogether different when Edward Bok entered it in 1889.
It was not only wide open, but fairly crying out to be filled. The day
of Godey's Lady's Book had passed; Peterson's Magazine was breathing its
last; and the home or women's magazines that had attempted to take their
place were sorry affairs. It was this consciousness of a void ready to
be filled that made the Philadelphia experiment so attractive to the
embryo editor. He looked over the field and reasoned that if such
magazines as did exist could be fairly successful, if women were ready
to buy such, 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.

The method of editorial expression in the magazines of 1889 was also
distinctly vague and prohibitively impersonal. The public knew the name
of scarcely a single editor of a magazine: there was no personality that
stood out in the mind: the accepted editorial expression was the
indefinite "we"; no one ventured to use the first person singular and
talk intimately to the reader. Edward Bok's biographical reading had
taught him that the American public loved a personality: that it was
always ready to recognize and follow a leader, provided, of course, that
the qualities of leadership were demonstrated. He felt the time had
come--the reference here and elsewhere is always to the realm of popular
magazine literature appealing to a very wide audience--for the editor of
some magazine to project his personality through the printed page and to
convince the public that he was not an oracle removed from the people,
but a real human being who could talk and not merely write on paper.

He saw, too, that the average popular magazine of 1889 failed of large
success because it wrote down to the public--a grievous mistake that so
many editor