Top Women’s Magazine Family Circle Magazine
In the early 1930s Life Magazines managing editor Harry Evans teamed with Charles E. Merrill, an investor with an interest in grocery chains, to start a magazine that would be distributed for free. At the time, Merrill was a member of Merrill, Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, & Smith, which controlled the Safeway Stores grocery store chain.
The new magazine was dubbed Family Circle and would be targeted to women and would be a practical guide and teaching tool that informed the housewife how to cook economically, how to bring up her children, how to clothe them and herself, and how to take care of her house. To the budget-minded, this makes good sense.”
Family Circle’s initial circulation of 350,000 was distributed through grocery stores in Richmond, Baltimore and Manhattan. These stores were Piggly Wiggly, Sanitary, and Reeves. Evans wrote most of the articles featured in the first issue of the 24 page tabloid weekly, which contained recipes and articles on beauty, fashions, food, humor, movies and radio. By the end of 1933, its circulation was nearly a million and in 1934 it was slightly over a million.
Family Circle magazine is considered one of the seven sisters, a collection of womens magazines that include Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Garden, and Woman’s Day, that have popularized expert knowledge about children, home organizing and family issues. The sister magazines have also made a major contribution to the awareness and promotion of parent-education curriculum.
For a time in the beginning of its history in the 1930s and 1940s Family Circle magazine had no real competitors. It survived the Great Depression and prospered in the 1940s though it stopped being free and became a monthly. At this time it also began printing in color and began being distributed nationwide.
While Family Circles content focused on home-making the magazine did use a now standard magazine practice of featuring celebrities as either authors or on its covers. Covers of early issues featured now legendary stars Bing Crosby, Joan Crawford, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Other early covers featured political figures like Mussolini, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart. During Franklin D. Roosevelts presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt contributed articles to Family Circle magazine and its rival Woman’s Day magazine.
In the 1950s magazines like Woman’s Day, TV Guide and Reader’s Digest were formidable rivals. Still, Family Circle magazine was a large success. By 1952 it was available in 8,500 grocery stores and grew to a circulation of 5.1 million by the end of the 1950s.
As the new consumer culture of the 1960s and 1970s took over America, Family Circle magazine smartly evolved with the times and began to assume its present form. By the end of the 1970s, its circulation was more than 8 million. At the end of the 1980s, its readership was more than 21 million. It was then dubbed “World’s largest women’s magazine.”
Today, Family Circle continues its historical success and it is still a family-oriented magazine with articles on all kinds of family interests like exercising, communication, cooking, organizing, gardening, traveling and parenting to name a few. Some recent features include Extreme Makeover Tech Edition, Dollars & Sense and End Closet Clutter.