''My wife," said Bruce Gould, "has a true appreciation of women. She likes women. Curiously enough, so do I. We have always believed that women are not only women but are people. They're not special creatures. They're up to their elbows in life. We just treated women as people." As editors of the Ladies' Home Journal, Charles Bruce and Beatrice Blackmar Gould wove'this simple and sympathetic creed into every issue of their magazine.
They were a remarkably effective team.
Nothing went into the Journal that did not please them both, though Bruce often bowed graciously to his wife's instinct for what was right. "I don't think that men edit women's magazines very well," he once said. "They always take a superior attitude toward women." The Goulds looked upon the Journal's readers as part of the family, and chatted amiably in print about the places they had visited, the people they had seen. Last week they sadly bade their huge family goodbye.
After nearly 27 years, the Goulds were leaving the Journal and passing its custody to other hands.
Emancipated Tastes. The Goulds are gentle people, and they came to the Journal in a gentler time. Both Iowa-born, they met as students at the University of Iowa, were married in New York in 1923, and embarked on careers in journalism and writing. Man's Estate, a play they wrote together, ran 56 performances on Broadway in 1929—and paid for their 120-acre farm, Bedensbrook, near Hopewell, NJ. In 1934 Bruce Gould, who had already sold eight stories to the Saturday Evening Post, one of the magazines printed by Curtis Publishing Co. in Philadelphia, joined the Post as an associate editor. The following year Post Editor (and Curtis Chairman) George Horace Lorimer offered the Goulds joint editorship of Curtis' women's magazine, the Journal.
The Journal was then an undistinguished second in an equally undistinguished field of six women's magazines,* all of which took the patronizing view that a woman's interests were largely confined to the home. The Goulds did not share this view. Guided by Beatrice's sure feeling for the emancipated woman's tastes, it invited its readers to plunge up to the elbows not only in bread dough but in life. The Journal, which once opposed woman suffrage, broke out in passionate campaigns for purity in politics as well as in maternity wards. It crusaded against venereal disease (a famous Journal ad showed a pretty girl with the caption "Of course I'll take a Wassermann"), hotly recommended flogging for child beaters.
The new editors filled the pages with provocative articles, e.g., "Why Do Women Cry?", and fiction from some of the world's bestselling writers: John P.
Marquand. Isak Dinesen, Rebecca West.
The magazine considered feminine health problems with an obstetrician's candor, nourished the dreams of fat girls everywhere with an endless array of case histories ("I Lost 160 Pounds and I Am Just Beginning to Live").