Louisa Knapp Curtis

Written By Daisy Zeijlon

Written by Daisy Zeijlon

Source: Find A Grave

Source: Find A Grave

 
 

b. October 21, 1851 | d. February 25, 1910 

Louisa Knapp Curtis was the co-founder and first editor of Ladies Home Journal, one of the most popular magazines in American history. She was a trailblazing presence in early publishing for the way she used the Journal to create an engaging and empowering community for women. 

 

Bio

Louisa Knapp Curtis (referred to here by her maiden name, Knapp) was born into a wealthy family in Boston, but we know few details about her early life before she married publisher Cyrus Curtis in 1875. In 1879 he founded the Tribune and Farmer, a weekly four-page newspaper (Scanlon). Needing to fill space, in the late 1870s he started a “Women and Home” column where he combined short articles clipped from other publications and advertisements in an effort to appeal to women readers (Brazeau). Knapp reportedly laughed at her husband’s attempt for how out of touch it was with women’s real interests and offered to take over. 

As Curtis’s biographer later noted: “Mr. Curtis never dreamed for a moment that in his wife’s laugh was hidden his first great success” (quoted in Damon-Moore). Under Knapp’s editorial leadership the column became so popular with women readers that it expanded first to a full page, then to a monthly insert and in 1883 to its own monthly magazine: Ladies Home Journal. It was Knapp’s brainchild, and she worked as its editor until 1889, in partnership with her husband, who served as its publisher. Under her tenure, it became the best-selling magazine in the United States: in 1883 it had just 25,000 subscribers, and by 1889 it had reached 400,000 (Scanlon; Damon-Moore and Kraestle). In 1904, it became the first magazine to reach a circulation of one million readers (Patterson). 

Knapp was no longer working at the magazine by 1904, which has meant that this benchmark achievement is typically accredited to her editorial successor Edward Bok. However, her contributions to the Journal are worthy of their own examination. She was able to build the magazine as an encouraging and even empowering tool for women who were reckoning with their changing place in American society. It is, though, important to note that these women were not representative of the population as a whole: the Journal’s readers were primarily white, native-born women from across social classes (Damon-Moore). 

The Role of Women’s Magazines

As we have discussed elsewhere in this project, these women were navigating social uproot. The Industrial Revolution had changed family life: at the start of the century the home had been a center of primarily rural production, where men, women and children worked together to perform domestic labor. By the 1880s, industrialization and urbanization had prompted many families to migrate to cities where this dynamic shifted. Men became the principal breadwinners, engaging in paid work outside the home, while women continued the unpaid labor of housekeeping. The domestic science movement was in many ways a response to this change, as evidenced by its primary goal of imbuing this feminine labor with the same importance assigned to masculine paid work. In this mission, magazines were one of domestic scientists’ most important tools. Many of them—including Maria Parloa, Marion Harland and Catharine Beecher—were frequent magazine contributors who regularly penned articles on every subject from cooking and cleaning to child rearing. In this sense, women’s magazines acknowledged their readers, by recognizing housework as hard work and offering tips to excel at it.

In Support of Paid Work for Women

Knapp, however, had bigger goals than simply alleviating housework’s strain. She believed that, if they chose to, women had a right to enter the paid workforce (Damon-Moore). She herself had begun working well before she got married, as a personal secretary to a doctor in Boston. This was an unusual move for the daughter of a wealthy businessman and indicates that she engaged in paid work for pleasure, rather than out of necessity. After she married she continued working; in fact, she was the business manager for Curtis’ Tribune and Farmer (Damon-Moore). In this role she began introducing some of the aggressive advertising tactics for which the Journal—and the publishing industry as a whole—later became known. Under her leadership, the Tribune and Farmer hired an advertising manager to approach companies with promotional opportunities—an innovation that later underpinned the tremendous financial success of the Journal which, by 1903, was running more than $1 million in advertising annually (Damon-Moore and Kraestle).

A Discursive Tool

More important still is the way she engaged her readers. Whereas Bok turned the Journal into a “helping” magazine focused on tips and tricks for housewives, Knapp treated it as a discursive tool. She prioritized corresponding with her readers; for example, by 1889 the magazine was employing between 7 and 10 people just to open letters (Damon-Moore). This kind of communication was hugely important to Knapp, who made a point of publishing as many letters as she could and employing women to work as writers. Her editorial staff was all women, as were the majority of the contributors she hired. She was creating paid work opportunities for women, and during her editorship the magazine also subtly promoted paid work as an option for women. Put differently, for Knapp it was not simply a given that all women were housewives. She encouraged her readers to aspire to careers outside the home by introducing a “Distinguished American Women” column that featured doctors, lawyers, ministers and lecturers (Damon-Moore). From 1885 onwards she also printed “Hints on Money-Making”, a series that offered tips for women on how to earn and manage their own income (Damon-Moore). In these ways she was not only building opportunities for women via her hiring practices but working to make paid work a viable option for those who wanted to pursue it. 

Bok’s Impact

Bok took over as editor in 1889 and undid this portion of Knapp’s work. He hired more men as feature writers and adopted a more authoritative, condescending tone (Brazeau). He was unsupportive of paid work for women and wrote in 1894 that “it is in the home…that women’s influence is most potent, and where her greatest success is possible” (Patterson). While he did introduce measures that were supportive of women—including, for example, a dedicated section for young mothers in which women physicians led correspondence courses in infant care—he treated the magazine as an educational institution (Brazeau) and operated under the assumption that women would not succeed in their roles as wives and mothers without his help. Knapp, by contrast, believed that women should have the ability to choose their place in society even if she wasn’t always able to do that herself. She stepped down in 1889 as editor to focus on her duties as a wife and mother after her daughter said to her, “‘Oh mamma, whenever I want you, you have a pen in your hand” (Curtis Bok). Despite her support of paid work, the reality of the gendered ideological framework she lived in made it impossible for her to be successful as an editor and a mother—a complicated reality women are still navigating in 2021. 

Sources

Daisy Zeijlon
Previous

Janie Porter Barrett
Next

Lucy Craft Laney