The Press: A Well-Bred Magazine

Fresh from a New Jersey village, the young Quaker girl seemed hopelessly out of place at the snobbish weekly. But from her very first day in 1895, the trim, bright-eyed mail clerk named Edna Woolman Martin somehow felt "a proprietary interest" in the affairs of Vogue as it chronicled the genteel caprices of New York society rounding out a comfortable century of progress and optimism.

"As we were staffed by ladies and gentlemen," she recalled when she had become the famous Edna Woolman Chase, "no one worked very hard and anybody who wanted extra...

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