re-counter, or the mails. These will sooner or
later--and much sooner than later--supplant the practical portions of
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 a