Saying Goodbye to Good Housekeeping

After almost half a century, I’m quitting Good Housekeeping, but I’m pretty sure it’s them, not me

I’m bad at leaving. Because I’m afraid I’ll miss something, I’m often the last one out of meetings and parties.

A few months ago, I cancelled my subscription to Good Housekeeping. I’d been a reader for more than 45 years and a subscriber for 39. I think it was the same fear of missing something that kept me subscribed the last few years.

I was about 11 when I started reading my mother’s copy of Good Housekeeping. It was the fiction that first attracted me. Back then, each issue included a couple of short stories and a book excerpt. I was introduced to a number of authors whose books I went on to read.

But it wasn’t just the fiction that kept me coming back and made GH the first magazine I subscribed to after I got married. Each issue had stories about women doing interesting and important things, as well as women reflecting on their lives long before anyone had heard of “mommy blogs.” While there were celebrity stories, they usually weren’t just fluff, but tended to dig a little deeper to try to show the real person inside the celebrity.

I don’t want to sound like the guy who says he reads Playboy for the articles. GH also had household tips and recipes (and back then, patterns for needlework) and fashion, beauty and decorating advice. But they were a small part of the content.

I pulled the oldest issue I have off the shelf to compare to the issue that finally prompted me to cancel. (Why do I have 39 years of magazines on my shelves? See that part up top about being bad at leaving.) Aside from being twice as long (272 pages) as the recent issue (140 pages), that September, 1977 issue had nine non-fiction articles including one by Joyce Maynard and another by Nancy Friday, two pages of a Stan and Jan Berenstain cartoon, two short stories and an excerpt from a Victoria Holt novel. There were advice columns (including two full pages of Q&A from Elizabeth Post — much of it seems surprisingly harsh today); an 8-page section called The Better Way that included an article about women and alcohol, a look at bottled water, and much more; and a comparison of the nutrition in different brands of baby food.

For a long time, I thought of Good Housekeeping as a guilty pleasure. Surely no modern feminist would admit to reading a magazine with “housekeeping” in the title. Then, I learned a little about its history. The magazine started evaluating products in 1900; what was then called the Good Housekeeping Experiment Station eventually became the Good Housekeeping Institute. That testing led to the creation of the Good Housekeeping Seal; the magazine stands behind the products that earn the seal, promising a replacement or refund up to $2,000 if a product “proves to be defective within two years from the date it was first sold to a consumer by an authorized retailer.”

The magazine was one of the organizations whose advocacy led to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the agency that became the Food and Drug Administration. Good Housekeeping ran articles as early as 1887 about the adulteration of food products, including watered milk and candy contaminated with asbestos. In 1901, the magazine launched a campaign for a law to make such things illegal.

A 1928 article warned readers about the dangers of smoking. It included this (run-on) sentence: “Cancer of the lips, tongue, and throat is much more prevalent among men than among women, I consider this due to the use of tobacco, particularly smoking.” Good Housekeeping prohibited cigarette ads in 1952, twelve years before the Surgeon General’s report.

The Good Housekeeping Institute helped establish industry standards for clothing care, which led to the law requiring care labels on clothes.

Good Housekeeping’s recipes started including nutrition information in 1990.

The Institute was also among the leaders in calling for standards for crib sheets, bike helmets, and more. It continues to do good and important work.

So what happened to the magazine? To get some idea, I pulled more issues off my shelves. The magazine has been shrinking for some time. The September, 1997 issue was 216 pages. August, 2007 only 192. (There were definitely exceptions along the way, though; the October, 2007 issue was 300 pages!)

The content changed over the years, too. Needlework disappeared sometime in the mid-1980s. No more knitting, crocheting or sewing patterns.

The role of fiction started shrinking around the same time. My early issues have a novel excerpt and two short stories. By 1987, I see the excerpted novel and one short story. A 2001 issue has only an excerpted novel and one from 2005, just one short story. By 2007, there’s no fiction at all; the section called “Good Reads” contains essays and book suggestions.

One of the sections that always appealed to me was called “My Problem and How I Solved It.” The problems were serious, from fighting with a spouse about money, to being battered, to giving marijuana to a child with a serious illness. The solutions weren’t just magic wands, and the problems weren’t always entirely solved. For example, in the February, 1995 issue, a mother talks about how to let her husband know their adult son is gay and in a relationship with another man. By the end of the piece, the husband knows and is working to accept it, but he’s still struggling.

By 2007, “My Problem” was gone. So was the Better Way section.

That September, 1977, issue devotes a little more than 27 pages to fashion, beauty, and home decorating, if you count generously. (The “home decorating” article is a peek inside Lucille Ball’s home, and more than 3 of those 27 pages are actually about how to choose and care for various clothing items.) All together, those articles take up just about 10% of the magazine. More tellingly, in the Table of Contents, among all those articles, only the three classified as Beauty are on the first page. Fashion, Home Building and Decorating, and Textiles all come on the second page. Most of the first page of the Table of Contents lists harder content and fiction. In the August, 2016 issue that finally caused me to cancel, the top featured story in the Table of Contents is “A Week of Awesome Outfits.” Altogether, 34 pages out of 140 are fashion, beauty or decorating; that’s nearly 25% of the magazine.

More than once after I started feeling disappointed by what arrived, I wrote to the editor or filled out the magazine’s online survey. Never did I receive a reply, not even an acknowledgement that my note had been received. When I finally cancelled, I sent a long email to the editor and the customer service department; again, no response.

So I’ll live without Good Housekeeping from now on. I’ll continue to make the wonderful Carrot Cake from October, 1982 (though I prefer it as a layer cake with cream cheese frosting). And I think I may spend some time rereading some of the issues in my home library.

I don’t know for sure why this one-time giant of a periodical became simply another fashion, beauty and home magazine. I’m sure the Internet and the decline of paper publishing as a whole played a role, while an article in Ad Age hints at a need for younger readers. But I can’t help thinking that somebody somewhere forgot what made Good Housekeeping so good for so long.