Ten months after Mrs. Curtis took the helm, the supplement became so popular with female readers of Tribune and Farmer that it was spun off as an independent publication: The Ladies Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper. With Mrs. Curtis serving as editor and chief writer, the magazine quickly dominated the field of publications aimed at a female audience. The title was soon streamlined to Ladies’ Home Journal, and for the first time an apostrophe was added after Ladies. At five cents per copy and fifty cents for a year’s subscription, the magazine was becoming a true American success story.
By 1889, the job of editing the publication became so demanding that Mrs. Curtis told her husband she could no longer serve as full-time editor. Mr. Curtis decided to keep control of the magazine in the family, naming his twenty-six-year-old son-in-law, Edward W. Bok, as editor. The move was a huge gamble, but it paid off handsomely, as the young man began to show unexpected business acumen as well as promotional ingenuity. Beginning with his first issue in January of 1890 and continuing until his retirement thirty years later, Bok took the magazine to a level its founders only dreamed about. By the end of the century, Ladies’ Home Journal was America’s best-selling magazine. In 1903, it became the first magazine in publishing history with a paid circulation of more than a million copies.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the magazine reflected every major trend in American culture, and created a number of them as well. As you sit in your living room tonight, you can thank Edward Bok for the term. When he took over as editor, drawing room and parlor were the preferred terms for a formal room that was used only on Sundays and special occasions. In proposing the idea of a “living room” that would be used daily to replace “drawing rooms” that were expensively furnished and used only rarely, Bok wrote:We have what is called a “drawing room.” Just whom or what it “draws” I have never been able to see unless it draws attention to too much money and no taste.
Despite its commercial success and influential role in American culture, Ladies’ Home Journal did not have a steady and reliable slogan for the first sixty-three years of its existence. That all changed in 1946, however, when the October issue hit the stands with a lushly designed cover containing the words:
Never Underestimate the Power of a Woman.
While this now-legendary saying was declared an official slogan with the publication of that historic issue, it was first created in 1939, when a copywriter at N. W. Ayer & Son, America’s first advertising agency, proposed it as a possible advertising slogan. The idea was batted around for a while before being tossed aside. That is, until it was resuscitated in a fascinating tale of serendipity.
A few weeks before the meeting in which the never underestimate slogan was rejected, an Italian émigré named Leo Lionni had been hired by Ayer as a graphic designer. A few years earlier, Lionni had abandoned his training as an economist (he had a degree from the University of Genoa) to pursue his interest in art and design. And even though he had no formal artistic training, he was able to secure a position as a graphic designer for a firm in Milan.
The growing Nazi threat was looming, however, and in 1938 Lionni and his wife became alarmed by the deteriorating political situation in Italy. In 1939, he left his wife and two young children behind as he boarded an ocean liner bound for New York City (they would join him several years later). After failing to land a job in Manhattan, he headed to Philadelphia, a city he had lived in briefly as a boy. Lionni was thrilled when he was soon offered the position at N. W. Ayer. Founded in Philadelphia in 1869, the firm was an industry powerhouse, responsible for scores of successful advertising campaigns and such legendary advertising slogans as “I’d walk a mile for a Camel” and “When it rains it pours” for Morton Salt.
Two weeks into his job, Lionni was chatting with Betty Kidd, a veteran copywriter at the firm, when his eyes spotted a crumpled piece of paper in a nearby wastepaper basket. He could make out only a few words, but he was intrigued enough to reach down and snatch it from the basket. As he smoothed out the paper on his lap, he began reading the words “Never underestimate . . .” when Kidd interrupted to say, “Oh, that! It was an idea for Ladies’ Home Journal, but hopeless to illustrate.” Nobody knows for certain who first suggested the slogan a few days earlier. It might have been Betty Kidd, or possibly Charles Coiner, the firm’s art director. But this much is clear. As often happens with ideas that are floated in brainstorming sessions, this one had been briefly considered, rejected as unworkable, and then—quite literally—dumped.
As his conversation with Kidd ended, Lionni folded the piece of discarded paper, tucked it into his shirt pocket, and promptly forgot about it. Several days later, when the crumpled piece of paper resurfaced, he started doodling with his pen. Almost immediately, he began constructing a series of two-panel drawings just under the Never underestimate the power of a woman saying. The first panel showed a man failing at an activity and the second a woman succeeding at the same task. Believing he might be on to something, he sent the doodles to Betty Kidd along with a note that said:
Never underestimate the power of a cartoonist.
Kidd loved the drawings and asked Lionni to produce a final set of six cartoons. A week later, when the campaign was formally pitched to the editors and art director of Ladies’ Home Journal, it was enthusiastically received and approved for an immediate launch. Over the next three years, Lionni drew nearly a hundred of the cartoons for advertisements in The New Yorker and other leading magazines. His final drawing, done late in 1942, was never formally published, but it was clearly the most dramatic. Under the magazine’s advertising slogan was an image of Adolf Hitler giving a “Heil Hitler” salute juxtaposed against an image of the majestic Statue of Liberty proudly lifting her Torch of Freedom high.
Leo Lionni, 1942. Used with permission from the Lionni family.
Lionni’s pivotal role in the Ladies’ Home Journal advertising campaign served as a springboard for a spectacular career. He went on to become an influential art director, an acclaimed fine artist, and, later in life, an internationally renowned author of children’s books. It all started in 1939, though, with what he described in his 1997 autobiography Between Worlds as, “My legendary stroke of luck when I rescued a line of copy from a wastepaper basket.”
It is because of Leo Lionni’s efforts that Never underestimate the power of a woman became a successful corporate slogan. But what was it about the saying that made it an American catchphrase? Perhaps it simply reflected the increased role women played in American life after the 19th Amendment gave them the vote in 1920. Or perhaps it was a concrete way of honoring the many pioneering role models—like Amelia Earhart, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Eleanor Roosevelt—who were often featured in the pages of the magazine. Or maybe it was simply a case of perfect timing. The saying, after all, became popular at the time many women—like “Rosie the Riveter”—contributed to the war effort by taking jobs that had previously been held only by men. Like so many popular advertising slogans, there was a delightful vagueness about the precise meaning of the saying—and that vagueness may have helped to boost its popularity.