The Ladies National Magazine

This issue of Peterson's Ladies National Magazine is a wonderful snapshot of life and style in America during the late nineteenth century. It contains a wealth of articles on fashion, cooking, home decor, and other topics of interest to women of the time. Anyone interested in the history of American culture and society will find this magazine to be a fascinating and informative read. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Throughout the twentieth century the ready-to-wear industry, fashion journalism, and mass-media advertising fueled one another’s success by identifying an ever-widening consumer class and fanning the desire to be fashionable. Through more than six hundred fashion ads that appeared in Vogue from the magazine’s debut in 1893 through the next ten decades, Hill documents not only this symbiosis but also an evolution in American fashion, society, and culture.In rich progression, the images document metamorphoses: from alabaster Victorian homemaker to painted flapper in just a generation, from conformist fifties mom to miniskirt-clad iconoclast only a decade later, from power-suited yuppie of the eighties to the techno self-stylist of the new millennium. In this long view of interactions that shaped much, much more than the fashion, Hill offers a comprehensive examination and resource for students and professionals in fashion and business history, popular culture, advertising, marketing, and women’s studies.

Largely ignored in American literary history, the magazine novel was extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, with editors describing the form as a virtual "necessity" for magazines. Unlike many previous studies of periodicals that focus often exclusively on elite literary magazines, Social Stories treats a variety of magazines and authors, ranging from Ann Stephens's novels in fashionable magazines for women to William Dean Howells's anxious investigation of modern mass culture in A Modern Instance. William Gilmore Simms's pro-Southern antebellum novels, the publication of Martin Delany's Blake in an African American magazine, Jeremy Belknap's investigation of the racial and national politics of the early national period, and Rebecca Harding Davis's efforts to make sense of race during Reconstruction all receive Patricia Okker's careful attention. By exploring how magazine novelists addressed audiences that differed from one another in terms of race, region, class, and gender, Social Stories offers a narrative of the American magazine novel that emphasizes its direct engagement with social, political, and cultural issues of its day. Rejecting the association of novel reading with notions of the private, Okker convincingly argues that nineteenth-century magazine novels were indeed fiercely social. Created collaboratively with readers, editors, and authors, and read among a community of readers and other texts, the serial novel of the 1800s proved to be an ideal form for exploring the strategies Americans used and the obstacles they faced in forming and sustaining a collective sense of themselves. They are, in short, novels that tell stories about how--and whether--individuals can come together to form a society. Patricia Okker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and the author of Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors.