Family Circle

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Erwin V. Johanningmeier

One of the most widely circulated magazines in the United States, Family Circle, like its sister magazines--Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Garden, and Woman's Day--, has not only disseminated and popularized expert knowledge about children, but has also been a major contributor to the nation's parent-education curriculum, a vehicle for the transfer of culture, and an exporter of American culture. It has been a medium through which information and ideas about children, adolescents, parenting, and the family have been transmitted to parents, especially, but not exclusively, to mothers, for over half a century. It has served, especially during the post-World War II era, as a guide and manual for families trying to make a comfortable home for themselves and their children with the limited resources at their disposal. Its readers were early proven to be good users of price-off coupons. Through most of its history it has been distributed in a way that has made it accessible to a very wide segment of the population, perhaps to a population that did not have easy access to other such media. When it first appeared, it was not available by subscription and was confined to chain grocery stores--whoever bought groceries in a supermarket all but inevitably saw it at the checkout counter.

In large measure Family Circle, like Woman's Day, has been overlooked by scholars and not received the attention they deserve, perhaps because they were started and continued for many years as magazines found only in grocery stores. Yet, their circulation has been greater than virtually all other similar magazines. While each has been described as belonging to the seven sisters--Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Garden (at times not included in this grouping), and Cosmopolitan--it may be more appropriate to view them as stepsisters. Family Circle, like Woman's Day, may justly be described as a store-distributed magazine, but neither is insignificant. There is no doubt that distributing magazines at the supermarket checkout stand was successful. In the 1930s and 1940s that spot was the exclusive domain of Family Circle and Woman's Day. They were joined there by TV Guide and Reader's Digest in the 1950s. By the early 1950s, according to Business Week, they were "hard on the heels of the big women's service magazines." Subsequently, others wanted their place there too.

Family Circle began to assume its present form when the United States was in the midst of its new consumer culture, rearing the children who would express themselves as young adults in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and when the American household was, as historian William E. Leuchtenburg observed in A Troubled Feast: American Society Since 1945, adopting "a style of consumption that was more sophisticated, more worldly [and] more diversified" than ever before. As Landon Y. Jones recorded in Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, it was the era during which the United States became a "vast maternity ward." By the end of the 1950s, 40 million new babies had arrived, and the number of children between ages five and 13 was increasing by a million a year. Family Circle provided the parents of those new babies with information on how to feed, bathe, educate, entertain, and how not to spoil them. Indeed, from its very beginning, Family Circle offered parents advice about children's development and behavior. Its first issue (September 1932) included both Dr. Julius D. Smith's "Judging the Health of Your Baby," information about baby's health, and what Dr. Arnold Gesell said they could expect from a child at six months.

The ways in which Americans lived changed significantly between the end of World War II and the beginning of the 1960s. The places and the social-economic context in which American children were reared were radically transformed. Those who gave birth to the baby boom were mostly born in the 1920s and experienced the Great Depression and World War II. Those to whom they gave birth had no such experiences, and many were brought up in what some believed would be an increasingly affluent society presided over by the organization man. A new culture was being made. Parents who were reared in either an urban neighborhood or a small town now lived and reared their children in a new kind of living place and dwelling, the developer's house in the suburb. Family Circle served as an inexpensive and handy directory and manual for families who were adjusting to and embracing the new way of life the affluent society seemed to be promising. According to Business Week, magazines such as Family Circle told "the housewife how to cook economically, how to bring up her children, how to clothe them and herself, and how to take care of her house. To the budget-minded, this makes good sense." It was a "good formula for many new and young housewives who want[ed] help at their new job."

Family Circle's appearance in September 1932 was, as Roland E. Wolseley reported in The Changing Magazine, the beginning of "the big boom in store-distributed magazines." Of the many store-distributed magazines founded since the 1930s--perhaps as many as a hundred--Family Circle, like Woman's Day, is one of the two that have survived and prospered. In Magazines in the Twentieth Century, Theodore Peterson reported that "when the old Life was undergoing one of its periodic readjustments, its managing editor, Harry Evans, joined with Charles E. Merrill, a financier with an interest in grocery chains, to start a magazine that would be distributed free but that would carry advertising." At the time, Merrill was a member of Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, & Smith which controlled Safeway Stores. Evans reasoned that since radio programs were broadcast to listeners without charge, it should be possible to secure advertisers for a magazine for which the reader did not pay. His hope that Family Circle would reach a circulation of 3 million (almost ten times greater than the initial circulation) was soon realized. By the end of 1933, its circulation was nearly a million (964,690); it was slightly over a million (1,068,106) a few weeks later (February 9, 1934).