Family Circle, Living and Prima

‘Miss S. S. (aged 13)’ of Maidstone, Kent, wrote in to Family Circle magazine in January 1980 to remind readers that the gender divide was very real. Ads, she pointed out, were ‘forever showing women in the kitchen and cleaning the house, while the men always seem to be out at work or mending the car’. How right she was. 

With that in mind I can confidently say that Family Circle was a magazine for women, to ‘help’ them in their chores around the house. We’ve just come into a collection of Family Circle – from 1973 and with only a few missing all the way to 1996. This magazine was all about cooking, budgeting, furnishings, sensible clothing for the family, flower arranging and knitting. The target audience was the baby boomer, now grown up and with a house and family all of her own. Starting in 1964, Family Circle was a spectacular success in its time, selling up to a million copies per issue at its peak. From the 1980s it had to fend off stiffer competition and went into steady decline, closing in 2006. It was also a four-weekly, with thirteen copies each year. 

Family Circle had a sister magazine, Living, covering similar themes and starting up in 1967. In the same donation we have acquired a good run of Living from 1979 to 1987 (but with a scattering from 1970 to 1978). This too was a four-weekly (although in 1981 and 1982 it seemed to go monthly before returning to four-weekly). We don’t have the earliest edition with an editorial to tell us how it would complement Family Circle, but the publisher was confident it would. A glance through it suggests to me much the same themes and target audience – maybe women bought both? Actually, I’m not sure if Living still survives – there is a series of Living magazines available in digital form, but I’m not sure of their lineage. 

The donation also included the upstart Prima magazine. We have a good run from the very first copy in 1986 up to 1994, and scattered copies up to 2000. This is a monthly and is still going as a print magazine. With the masthead saying ‘Features – Beauty – Crafts – Gardening – Cooking – Fashion – Knitting’, the editor-in-chief assures us it is ‘quite unlike any other magazine’. No wonder Family Circle and the rest were looking a bit 1970s.

The ads in all the magazines are superb, many in colour and full page. I’ve included Prestige’s saucepan from 1970 (Living), which they couldn’t call ‘non-stick’ because it wasn’t; and the all-new wonder product of nylon, marketed as Crimplene, Terylene and Bri-Nylon with pictures of smiling girls in their coats. The ad for Customagic nylon seat-covers is a bit of an indulgence, as it is set in a very trendy sitting room, full-length curtains, black-and-white telly and all. The Hotpoint ad (‘You deserve a tumble dryer’); and the one for British Pork is from Family Circle in 1980, while the one for Mothercare is from Prima in 1986. I notice that cigarette advertising becomes more prominent with the later magazines too.

There is a clear trend on front covers for all of these magazines too – up until the mid 1980s the cover picture tended to be of a spread of food, or flowers, or puddings, that is, inanimate objects. Thereafter they were of a photogenic female figure. There’ll be a reason for this…