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267 “The Woman’s Magazine” Jeannette Eaton R Born in Columbus,Ohio,Jeannette Eaton (1886–1968) earned a bachelor’s degree from Vassar and, in 1910, a master’s degree from Ohio State University. It appears that she first spoke publicly in support of women’s suffrage after college. In 1915, working as a “vocational investigator” under the auspices of the Co-operative Employment Bureau for Girls in Cleveland, she co-authored Commercial Work and Training for Girls, which examined the working conditions of a thousand women office workers. In August of that year, in Harper’s Weekly, she argued that neither suffrage nor education was the “best friend” of women’s freedom but rather modern inventions—electricity, washing machines, ready-made clothes, typewriters—spurred women’s liberation. By the late 1920s, she had become well known as an author of biographies for young adults, writing about such wellknown figures as Gandhi, Louis Armstrong, and Eleanor Roosevelt. She also served as an editor for the children’s magazine Story Parade. In the 1930s, she wrote for the feminist periodicals AWA [American Woman’s Association] Bulletin and Woman’s Journal, edited by Virginia Roderick.1 The Eaton article reprinted here was first published in the Masses, an illustrated monthly magazine founded by Piet Vlag in 1911. Throughout its relatively short life, the magazine was a cooperative, with artists and office workers maintaining full control but receiving no pay. Under the editorship of Max Eastman, the Masses became a major socialist literary and political magazine, although it published a range of socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist perspectives. With an average monthly circulation of 14,000, the ten-cent magazine heralded anarchists , the Industrial Workers of the World, Freudians, birth-control advocates, free love proponents, and feminists.2 Masses, Nov. 1915, 19. american new woman revisited 268 For additional information about the Masses,see the introduction to Dorothy Weil’s“A New Woman?”in part V. It has glorified the work-basket and the egg-beater and has infinitely stretched woman’s belief in the miracles which may be wrought with them. It has taught her what to do for the baby, what is the right way to puff her hair and why she should win her daughter’s confidence. Think of the old tomato cans made into pretty pincushions, the thread lace collars , the embroidered scarfs, the hand-painted match receivers, the linen pin-trays, the discarded boxes converted into “what-nots”! If not for this perennial adviser, it would be hard to imagine how a woman could get up a dinner party, mind her manners, keep her beauty or her husband’s love. While, on the other hand, if she were not thus usefully absorbed, a chivalrous man dreads to think how often a woman might nowadays be tempted to engage in activities outside the home. It is a great service that these widely-circulated publications are performing for America to-day, whether they are sent to the great apartment building or to the old farm-house. It is a service to men, a fundamental service to the established order. For their message to women is one of domesticity and contentment. Confess now!! Which kind of woman would you rather have pour out your morning coffee for you—a complacent or an eager-minded woman? Do you not feel uneasy in the presence of a woman who is filled with turbulent desires for experience, life, work—self expression, power, responsibility, independence, and freedom? Once the impulse in woman to be a personality is let loose, the comfort of man is doomed. The woman’s magazine is the savior of society, man’s best friend, the final hope of our chivalric civilization. Woman’s ambitious, her independence, the assertion of her own free personality are gradually but certainly inhibited by a few years of such reading. It is the one sure antidote to feminism. ...

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