Shaping the Life of the New Woman: The Crusading Years of the Delineator

Few periodicals have had such an illustrious history as The Delineator (1873–1937), yet few publications are more obscure. It began as the brainchild of tailor/pioneer pattern designer Ebenezer Butterick to market his paper sewing patterns and provide fashion news to post-Civil War middle-class American women (Figure 1). The Delineator quickly became the flagship publication of the Butterick Publishing Company (not officially organized until the year 1902). Patterns soon became secondary in importance to the magazine itself, whose circulation leaped from 30,000 in 1876 to 480,000 by the turn of the century. By 1920 it numbered more than a million subscribers, and the number doubled again by the time of the Great Crash.¹

A key to The Delineator's success was its focus on the changing roles of women themselves and women's gradual, though not total, move away from home and hearth into colleges, clubs and organizations, the professions, and into the large arena of municipal reform during the so-called Progressive period of the early decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, however, the female middle-class readership of The Delineator could perform valuable patriotic and civic duties in policing morals, expanding its role in supervision of child welfare, and Americanizing the millions of "new" immigrants who seemed to threaten old-stock America. The Delineator's pages championed both women's reform-minded involvement in eradicating social ills in city and state and their important job as traditional conservative protectors of family values in a rapidly changing America. As with the Progressive movement itself, there are sometimes mixed messages, paradox, and irony in Delineator coverage of women's redefinition of themselves as the nineteenth century came to an end and a new millennium dawned.

Figure 1.

Ebenezer Butterick, tailor and founder in 1863 of the pattern company that still bears his name. Butterick withdrew entirely from the organization in 1899 at which time the Butterick Publishing Company was capitalized, a separate entity from the Butterick Company specializing in men's, women's, and children's patterns.

The Delineator was but one component of a rapidly expanding Butterick empire, and by the turn of the twentieth century the eighteen-story Butterick Building commanded the skyline of lower Manhattan. Billed as "The Home of the Delineator Family," the structure at the corner of Spring, Macdougal, and Vandam Streets served as "the world's largest printing plant," but for the Government Printing Office (Figure 2). Three floors housed eighty-six printing presses, which churned out the thirty-two periodicals of the Butterick Publishing Company, one of the largest magazine publishing companies in the United States. The electric sign which glowed nightly atop the west wall facing the East River, with the single word "Butterick" (billed as the largest electric sign in the world), symbolized the modern American business success story.²

The Delineator occupied a special niche as one of the "Big Six" magazines which defined women's traditional duties and responsibilities of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the standard editorial departments on sewing, cooking, child care and fancywork. Its key competitors, however, can be narrowed to Edward Bok's Ladies Home Journal and occasionally William Randolph Hearst's Pictorial Review. "One year the Journal would lead the field, then Delineator would be tops and vice versa," remembered Philip Tucker, a veteran of forty years with the Butterick organization, but the Pictorial Review was "consistently … substantially behind."³

Figure 2.

The Butterick Building, known as "The Home of the Delineator Family," dominated the skyline of lower Manhattan.

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, Butterick was publishing the English-language edition of The Delineator in the United States, England, and Canada. The company also had foreign language editions in France, Spain, and Germany and four foreign offices to go along with six in the United States. The black-and-white fashion lithographs from the beginning years of...