The First Magazines Written for Career Women Reveal a Portrait of Immense Creativity and Hope

Publications including “Mademoiselle,” “Glamour” and the long-forgotten “Charm” first emerged in the 1930s to satisfy an emergent force in the workplace

Carol Kino

September/October 2025

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Sometime during the Great Depression, a high school student named Helen Ralston complained to her father that she and her friends were fed up with Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The French couture and luxurious lifestyles promoted in their pages were unattainable, she said, while the articles did not speak to the interests of young women or girls her age. There were another 40-odd women’s magazines on the market, but all were aimed at housewives. 

Luckily for Helen, her father, Henry W. Ralston, a vice president of the New York publishing company Street & Smith, was in a position to address her concerns. Since the 19th century, his firm had been turning out men’s and boys’ fiction by authors like Horatio Alger and Bret Harte, plus pulps and comic books like Detective Story and Buffalo Bill. Fired by this bracing wisdom from his daughter, in February 1935, Henry and his colleagues introduced Mademoiselle, the country’s first magazine for young women, which also became the first “career-girl” magazine in the United States. 

The extraordinary early history of Mademoiselle, and of the similar publications it inspired, is little known. A close study of their archives reveals an era of remarkable advancements for American women—poignant, as it proved so fragile. Nonetheless, these women writers and editors helped write an early and important draft of 20th-century American feminism. And they did it in style. 

Mademoiselle’s first issue, conceived by a primarily male editorial team, got off to an inauspicious start. Later a newsagent told the editors that its few buyers were mostly men who, drawn by the saucy French name—and perhaps also by the cover photo, of a woman in a backless evening gown—mistakenly assumed it was a “girlie book.” Instead, the issue contained a grab bag of material concocted for a youthful female reader, including fashion sketches, girls’ adventure stories and overwrought tales of romance, one concerning a Southern gent who shocks himself by falling for a Yankee at a ball. Humiliated by low sales, the editors swiftly withdrew the sorry experiment from newsstands and halted publication for a month to regroup. 

Thankfully, by then they had hired Betsy Talbot Blackwell, a 29-year-old journalist with more than a decade’s experience in fashion reporting and marketing. Blackwell also had an adolescent stepdaughter, an impressive bullpen of writer friends on whom she could call and above all a keen sense of what young women wanted: something totally unlike their mothers’ magazines. 

Mademoiselle originally targeted women between the ages of 18 and 30, all of whom had come of age knowing they could vote. “What nobody seemed to have noticed was that women had changed,” Blackwell later reflected. “Younger women were in revolt. Their ideas were different from their mothers’....They were not interested solely in recipes or babies. They were going to college. They were getting jobs.” 

She went after college women, publishing first-rate writing by authors like the wildly popular French writer of the day known as Colette, and pulling together an advisory “College Board” of students, who sent in tips about fashions and social trends. The magazine drew more eyeballs with an annual August “Guest Editors” issue, also assembled by students. This gambit, for which Mademoiselle is best remembered today, later helped launch literary stars like Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion. 

Other attention-getting ploys included a series in which a Hollywood makeup artist revealed beauty tricks used by actresses, adapted for home use. When a self-described “homely” nurse wrote in, begging Mademoiselle to transform her “from ugly duckling even into a pale pink swan,” the editors created the first makeover. Nurse Barbara’s metamorphosis made national news, winning a page of admiring coverage in Time magazine. 

While more makeovers followed, Mademoiselle’s early success was born of Blackwell’s radical notion that women were thinking, independent-minded beings, not mere domestic helpmeets. From the very first issue, she also championed the cause of what she later termed “a fast-growing, forgotten minority group, the career girl.” Not long before, unemployment had been so dire, overtaking a quarter of the population in 1933, that school boards and banks and many other employers fired married women to ensure jobs went to men, says Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “They said, ‘We’re defending the family,’” Lichtenstein observes of these employers. “They weren’t ashamed.” 

Now came Mademoiselle, offering frank advice about where and how savvy women could find work. Its career column, flippantly titled “I Don’t Want to Play the Harp,” was aimed at those who “would rather fly an ocean, split an atom, set a style” than stay home cultivating feminine charms. Written by Helen Josephy—a well-known journalist, like most Mademoiselle contributors—the first offered a deeply reported account of how to break into radio. Josephy covered a different profession each month. 

Practical advice was balanced by lively discussions of social concerns newly relevant to young women competing in the concrete jungle. The magazine’s advice column, lightheartedly called “What to Do Before the Psychiatrist Comes,” was written by Dorothy Dayton, a witty, hardboiled city desk reporter at the New York Sun. Dayton addressed issues like how much kissing was too much (she advised learning to hold one’s liquor, the better to make clearheaded decisions in the moment), or whether it paid to maintain one’s virtue (“some moderns would say it pays only the psychiatrist,” she joked). 

Dayton’s musings on virtue, published in 1938, the year after birth control was legalized in all but two states, summoned up a world that sounds surprisingly contemporary. Couples living together out of wedlock “is not uncommon among young people in the large cities,” she wrote, adding that under some circumstances, “there is much to be said for it.” 

Mademoiselle published its first all-career issue that same year. By 1940, the magazine—now bearing the tagline “for smart young women”—had boosted its circulation from 37,000 in 1936 to more than 300,000, far exceeding that of the more fashion-focused Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. It also carried more advertising than any other women’s magazine.

It also inspired competitors, starting with Glamour. Created in 1939 by Vogue’s publisher, Condé Nast, as Glamour of Hollywood—the only magazine Nast himself created from scratch—the publication initially covered the aspirational lifestyles of movie stars, but spurred by Mademoiselle’s continued success, Glamour swiftly refocused on serving a readership of young urban women. Soon it was filled with job and career advice, as well as fashion suited to the “rising star”—as the magazine termed smart young career girls. Its tagline became: “for the girl with a job.” 

In 1941, Street & Smith one-upped Condé Nast by launching its second young women’s magazine, Charm, this one aimed at what the magazine termed the “business girl.” Although America hadn’t yet entered the war overseas, Charm’s rah-rah style anticipated the patriotic fervor that was to come. “You like to pay your bills? Of course you do!” one column read. “That’s typically American—that spirit of independence.” Career girls would soon be asked to go to work for the country’s good. 

By 1943, nearly 7.3 million American men had gone to fight in World War II, and the figure would rise to more than 10 million by war’s end. Women had to take over the jobs they left behind, and magazines became part of the government’s campaign to persuade more of them to go to work. Starting in late 1942, the Magazine Bureau of the U.S. Office of War Information distributed a bimonthly guide filled with story ideas to editors and writers around the country. The first issue focused on “womanpower,” which the guide termed “the big story for 1943.” A supplement listed the many ways women could serve Uncle Sam. Amid this flag-waving, career-girl magazines began running stories about young women who had joined different branches of the armed services, and about those volunteering at home. Mademoiselle started a series on jobs of particular importance to the war effort, ranging from statistician to personnel manager to farmhand.  

In many ways, it was a shock when the war ended and the shift to a peacetime economy began, as women were expected to relinquish many of the positions they’d attained while men were gone. “If you’re holding down a job which once belonged to a service man,” one 1945 Charm story explained, “there’s a good chance you may have to give it up to him when he gets back.” 

Young women were further discouraged from working by a rising tide of anti-feminist books and articles. Most notorious among these was the 1947 best seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, which ascribed many modern ills—including a postwar uptick in divorces, and even the war itself—to the idea that women had ventured too far beyond their biological destiny. Written by the sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg and the Freudian psychoanalyst Marynia F. Farnham, it argued that modern women were “the pivot around which much of the unhappiness of our day revolves.” 

Farnham, the book’s spokesperson, disseminated its claims in newsreels and articles. In an eight-part series in Glamour, of all places, she insisted that rather than working, women must rededicate themselves to raising the next generation of young men who would rebuild the world, aided by psychotherapy if necessary. (Betty Friedan, in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, later blamed widespread melancholia among mid-century American housewives on the book’s malign influence.) 

As Glamour bent to Farnham, other career-girl magazines made a sudden about-face, focusing on brilliant men instead of smart young women—the idea being that young women should now primarily concern themselves with the careers of the men in their lives. Emblematic of the trend was a 1947 Glamour story that profiled men working in exciting areas like radio or industrial design—all “professional fields with the kind of future that might interest your man.” In Mademoiselle, an article called “The Men on Their Minds” discussed some of America’s most popular college professors, offering nostalgic adulation where once they had enjoined young women to think for themselves. Charm sank lower. “You’ve a head on your shoulders, remember?” it burbled, in a 1948 piece dedicated not to brains but to hairdos. By the 1950s, magazines that had once served “career girls” were now targeting women who considered raising children the best—and seemingly only—job available. 

Yet despite these pressures, many women stayed in the workforce: As Lichtenstein notes, after a slight decline in the late 1940s, more women were working by the early 1950s than at the peak of World War II, although their jobs were often clerical, in contrast to the more varied and responsible positions they’d held before. 

And some, like Blackwell, continued to find success long before feminism returned. In 1949, she became a director of Street & Smith—the first woman in its history to rise to that role. That same year, the company killed off its original boys’ and men’s pulp and dime-novel business in order to focus on its more lucrative women’s magazines. Blackwell also continued editing Mademoiselle until she retired in 1971. 

“I don’t believe in equal pay for women,” she said ten years later, when she was honored at an event in New York. “They should get more.” 

Editors' notes, September 11, 2025: This story has been updated to reflect that Nelson Lichtenstein no longer heads the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Carol Kino | Read More

Carol Kino is a journalist and the author of Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines.