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WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, Volume 38, Numbers 3 & 4, Fall/Winter

2010, pp. 25-41 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2010.0011

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/wsq/summary/v038/38.3-4.weaver.html

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“Such a Congenial Little Circle”:
Dorothy Parker and the Early-Twentieth-Century
Magazine Market

Angela Weaver

Not long after a young Dorothy Parker sought work in New York City after
her father’s death in 1913, she was hired to write for Edna Chase’s Vogue.
By 1917, the writer soon to be famous for her scathing wit was a staff writer
at Vanity Fair. In 1919, Parker joined the infamous Vicious Circle as they
began their “ten year lunch” at the Algonquin Hotel. The next year, in 1920,
prohibition settled in, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, and Park-
er’s quick wit got her fired from Vanity Fair. Soon after, Parker divorced
her World War I–veteran husband (whom she had married hastily before
the war) when he returned from Germany addicted to barbiturates. Amid
this turmoil, she contracted to write a series of sketches for Ladies’ Home
Journal, an opportunity to tap a market of nearly two million American
women. Parker’s work provides a useful starting point for understanding
the ways in which women magazine writers, an often invisible category of
authorship in American literary studies, constructed, situated, and circu-
lated their professional identities in the first American mass media market.
At Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Ladies’ Home Journal, Parker marketed herself
as a journalist-observer, building trust with her audience while employ-
ing satire as a rhetorical strategy to distance herself from her subjects.
When magazines showed conflict and contradiction in social ideas about
gender identity, Parker consistently sorted it out as an observer, identify-
ing faults and problems with the constructions, especially those linked to
magazine culture. During a time when American consumer culture shifted
identity toward image and personality, Parker took on the primary images
of women circulating in the magazine market. Targeting iconographic
categories of women in each publication’s audience, Parker revealed that

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 38: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2010) © 2010 by Angela Weaver.
All rights reserved.
25
26  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

the magazine market’s advertising and conflicting values-based messages

aggravated deep American cultural debates about gender and consum-
erism and forced female readers into self-deception. Parker’s method of
investigation and critique and the repetition of categories across years of
poems, sketches, and essays indicates that she saw little promise for an
authentic state of happiness and self-awareness for American women, her-
self included.
It isn’t surprising that Parker took her critique directly to the maga-
zine market. As American’s first mass market, magazines changed the way
Americans did business and the way people understood work, family, and
gender. At the center of these changes were dozens and dozens of female
writers like Parker vying for publication opportunities in one of the only
venues open to them—popular magazines. To be successful, female writers
had to walk a fine line between expectations of femininity and the renun-
ciation of strict gender roles that their status as paid writers implied. In
the 1910s and 1920s, a rapidly expanding magazine industry cashed in on
(and often exacerbated) readers’ fears and confusion, fears that often cen-
tered on changes in gender roles, changes exacerbated by advertising and
consumerism. Rapidly developing printing technologies and reduced-cost
postal services supported the professionalization of the advertising indus-
try in the United States. In turn, advertising financially supported large-
scale distribution of magazines. A single page of advertising in the Ladies’
Home Journal in the early 1920s, for example, cost an advertiser upward of
nine thousand dollars (Mott 1938, 551). As the resulting commercial cul-
ture grew, debates about gender roles, sexuality, race, and class inevitably
raged within the pages of the country’s ongoing magazine “revolution,” to
use Richard Ohmann’s phrase (1996). Magazines were numerous, quickly
produced, and often ephemeral. Their heavy reliance on imagery opened
new avenues for the construction of meaning. As hybrid publications, they
included multiple print genres alongside advertising. The heterogeneity of
the form allowed it to embody contradictory meanings, and those mean-
ings shifted with time. Parker’s work is just one example of the ways female
writers in the early twentieth century used the newest available means to
both critique and reinforce social norms. Parker’s magazine work reveals
an American culture in flux, its men and women struggling for answers
amid a rapidly growing and increasingly contradictory popular culture.
Simon Weil Davis points out that magazines and advertising revealed
an essential conflict: the need to present the self bound with an increasingly
 Angela Weaver  27

prevalent desire to hide flaws and doubts (2000). To respond, magazines

used the image of the “average” woman to inscribe gender differences, nat-
uralize whiteness, and erase class and ethnic divisions (7). As the industry
grew, so did its influence on American culture. As Carolyn Kitch notes, “In
1865, there were nearly 700 titles with a total circulation of about four mil-
lion; forty years later, in 1905, there were some 6,000 magazines with a total
audience of sixty-four million, averaging four magazines per household”
(2001, 4). Among these titles, mass circulation women’s and mixed-gen-
der periodicals (American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Ladies’ Home Journal)
had enormous audiences, sometimes exceeding two million readers. To
engage such a large readership, they presented widely contradicting mes-
sages and images. While they were the most likely to employ the image of
the married domestic woman, they did not ignore the feminist, the intel-
lectual, or the flapper in their pages. Large-circulation magazines directed
at a slightly more select audience (Vanity Fair, Vogue) were able to narrow
their messages more specifically. Trying to be cosmopolitan, these maga-
zines purported to reject domestic models of womanhood but were often
unable and unwilling to shake this ideology completely. “Little” magazines
(The Little Review, Poetry) were aesthetically driven endeavors, and when
they included women, they presented them as “intellectual.” The African
American press (Southern Workman, Crisis) reached midlevel circulations,
but its influence was profound. Often focused on political achievement,
these magazines frequently present African American women as caretak-
ers, rather than actors in the public sphere. Many magazines employed
scores of women, despite the articles and editorials in the pages of their
publication denouncing women’s paid work. Jennifer Scanlon notes the
irony that such juxtapositions created: “Advertising women, in writing ads
that provided a narrow definition of women’s lives, a definition confin-
ing women to the home and market—secured their own independence,
financial and otherwise” (1995, 193). Into this contradictory maelstrom
of messages, Dorothy Parker entered with a satiric journalist-observer aes-
thetic, and she directed her investigative critiques at everything from cur-
rent hair treatments to the Women’s Pages.
In essays such as “Are You a Glossy” and such poems as “The Lady
in Back” (1916a) and “Women: A Hate Song” (1916b), Parker focused
her sarcastic lens on the very readers many magazines wanted to attract—
female consumers. Frank Luther Mott noted about Ladies’ Home Journal
editor Edward Bok: “He was inclined to idealize the average woman of his
28  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

period; and perhaps it was because he made a magazine for what women
wished to be rather than for what they actually were that he achieved great
success” (1938, 540). Parker reversed the idealizations saturating the
magazine, focusing on the ways the “average” woman suffered as a result
of consuming the image of the ideal woman. Between 1915 and 1920,
Parker published profusely, using her maiden name (Rothschild) until her
marriage to Edwin Parker in 1917. In this five year span, she published
sixty-two pieces in Vanity Fair (thirteen poems, eleven essays under the
pseudonym Helen Wells, fourteen prose essays, and twenty-six monthly
theater reviews); seven signed essays in Vogue (also dozens of long cap-
tions, many unsigned); and four sketches in Ladies’ Home Journal. When
Parker wrote for magazines, even in offbeat nonfiction essays such as “The
Christmas Magazines and The Inevitable Story of the Snowbound Train”
or “Life on a Permanent Wave” (1917), she presented herself as objective,
patiently watching and experiencing life for the benefit of her readers. “Life
on a Permanent Wave,” for example, is a full-page, first-person account of
Parker’s (then Rothschild) experiences at a salon receiving a popular 1917
hair treatment, the permanent wave. She presents her persona as a charac-
ter type and employs irony, understatement, and humor to challenge the
very social ideals that Vogue relied on for profit. At the salon, the narrator
is put into a white garment that makes her look “startlingly like a char-
ter member of the Ku Klux Klan.” The attendant “seized me and sham-
pooed me so efficiently that every thought was washed out of my mind.”
The chair for the procedure, the narrator explains, was a “sort of modified
Iron Maiden.” Parker presents the procedure as a method of erasure, and
at the end, she “motors home, a new woman.” In a Paris Review interview,
Parker recalled that Vogue’s writers “wore funny little bonnets and in the
pages of their magazine they virginized the models from tough babes into
exquisite little loves” (1956). “Life on a Permanent Wave” satirizes the
“virginized” models, revealing that Parker preferred “tough babes.” Parker
offers no solutions about how to end women’s participation in the “torture
chambers” of beautification, but she does masterfully draw attention to the
devices by which the magazine’s images of beauty are constructed. Experi-
menting with her style and with how far she could push a venue’s expecta-
tions of writers, Parker, in her work for an upper-class female audience at
Vogue, expresses frustration with society’s expectations for women, and
with women’s reactions to those expectations.
In her first magazine publication, “The Lady in Back,” we can see the
 Angela Weaver  29

way Parker negotiated the images and ideals put forward by the magazines
in which she published. Vogue relied on theater, urban life, and fashion
for its content. “The Lady in Back” is a poem exposing the unsatisfying
nature of this urban identity. The speaker complains that the woman sit-
ting behind her (at plays, movies, or the opera) is anonymous. No one
knows if she is a “widow, maid, or wife.” The poem begins:
I don’t know what her name is, for you see, we’ve never met;
I don’t know if she’s dark or if she’s fair;
I don’t know if she’s young or old, or rich or poor,­­­—and yet,
Whatever place I chance to go, she’s there. (128)

The implied anonymity of urban entertainment venues prevents social

interaction, and the dim lighting blocks the obvious physical cues that
had begun to mark people’s identities in the city. On the same page as the
poem, advertisers vie for readers’ attention. A Dagget and Ramsdell’s Per-
fect Cold Cream advertisement reads, “Your complexion is part of your
attire; social affairs demand painstaking attention.” In other words, to com-
municate social and class standing, what should speak for you is your attire
and your complexion—not the moral values or family history that would
have preceded you in a small town. Many of these advertisements tar-
geted single women, who had to tread very carefully in an urban environ-
ment and were expected to seek engagement quickly. An advertisement
for Kohn and Son Diamonds promises to help get your wedding rings in
order. Throwing a soiree? Higgins and Seiter can provide the crystal serv-
ing sets, conspicuously displaying your leisure time and money to friends,
neighbors, and colleagues. Parker critiques women’s desire for defined
identity and community even as the advertisements attempt to shape that
identity and provide a structure for such community.
The context on this page provides insight into the specific demands
suffered by women. It also shows Vogue trying to push a construction of
female identity based on outward appearances and consumption at the
same time that Parker’s poem reveals the futility of this construction. At
their most interesting moments, Parker’s negotiations unsettle fixed gen-
der, racial, and class identities in potentially creative and positive ways.
Parker’s “The Lady in Back,” for example, conflates the play, the opera, and
the “humble picture show” while pointing out the impossibility of know-
ing whether the subject of the poem is “dark” or “fair,” “rich” or “poor,”
single or married, from a good family or not. Couched in humor, Parker’s
30  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

poem highlights the insignificance of fixed social, racial, and gender iden-
tities. Of course, all writers, male and female, must balance their desire
to communicate a specific worldview with their desire to be published.
However, Parker dealt with the specific pressures on the female writer to
balance femininity with the challenge that her employment represented to
gender roles. Dorothy Parker used Vogue—a primary fashion magazine—
as a venue to critique the ways standards of beauty and conduct constrict
women’s choices and limit their means of self-expression.
Today, however, fans and literary critics alike tend to miss the astound-
ing complexity of Parker’s engagement with her culture. In part, biographi-
cal details such as Parker’s bouts of depression and alcoholism and several
failed suicide attempts continue to overshadow her literary work in the
public imagination. Films such as the 1994 Mrs. Parker and the Vicious
Circle testify to the strength and longevity of Parker’s negative reputation
as a celebrity. Contemporary scholarship focuses primarily on her 1928
monologues “A Telephone Call” and “The Waltz,” and her longest short
story, “Big Blonde,” winner of the 1929 O’Henry Award. Marion Meade
in her 1988 biography What Fresh Hell Is This? goes so far as to quote “Big
Blonde” at length to narrate portions of Parker’s life. While Meade greatly
admires Parker’s later work, she dismisses Parker’s 1920 writing as “fluff.”
In a similar vein, Arthur Kinney (1998) sees Parker’s period of magazine
writing as an apprenticeship. Recent studies such as Dettmar and Watt’s
Marketing Modernisms (1996) have begun to analyze the ways men such
as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound used the market. But without adequate work
on women and the literary market, old formulations about the corrupting
influence of consumer culture on susceptible women continue to keep the
focus on how the market used women. To recover women’s contributions
to modernity, we must turn our attention to the places where women were
publishing with the greatest success. In the eighty or more magazine pieces
Parker produced through 1920, she took on the first incarnation of Ameri-
can mass media, assailing its contradictions and hypocrisies as no female
writer had previously, and she did so with a characteristically scathing yet
observational aesthetic.
While writing for the magazines, Parker was aware that a male-
dominated culture—print or otherwise—did little to encourage women
to develop their potential beyond fashion and the home. Ladies’ Home
Journal, for example, focused on marriage and children, while Vanity Fair
presented women as merely fashion obsessed and money driven. Even at
 Angela Weaver  31

Vogue, where Edna Chase called the shots, Parker was limited to writing
about women’s fashions—clothes, interior design, and dogs. In part, this
reflects the dominant gender ideology that was still circulating in the early
twentieth century, the image of the “True Woman.” In the nineteenth cen-
tury, major transformations in the American experience, such as the devel-
opment of industrial capitalism, shifted gender roles and the ideology of
True Womanhood emerged. It prevailed well into the twentieth century.
Women’s roles as the moral compasses and caregivers of the family intensi-
fied, while their roles as producers in a household economy (such as on a
farm) decreased. In this system, piety, purity, domesticity, and submissive-
ness became the publicly acceptable values for women; the proper expres-
sion of these values was through a well-ordered, Christian home. For the
Ladies’ Home Journal, this ideology represented the very values it used to
sell subscriptions. However, magazines were also saturated by a variety of
opinions on the “Woman Question.” The opening stanza of “Women,” a
poem by Zona Gale published as the frontispiece to a 1913 issue of Ameri-
can Magazine, for example, revealed a darker side of domesticity:

They looked from farmhouse windows

Their joyless faces showed
Between the curtain and the sill—
You saw them on the road.
They looked up while they churned and cooked
And washed and swept and sewed.
Some could die and some just lived and many a one went mad.
But it’s “Mother be up at four o’clock,” the men-folk bade. (9)

Highlighting the “joyless faces,” Gale questions the efficacy of domestic

ideology in women’s everyday lives. Magazines, because of the hybrid, con-
tradictory nature of their iconography, advertising, and content, opened
up a public space for the expression of heretofore private questioning and
resistance.
Many women seeking life beyond the “joyless faces” at the window
frequently turned to the figure of the New Woman. Denoting an alternative
to the ideology of True Womanhood, “New Woman” was a popular phrase
describing women who were active in the public sphere. Martha Patterson
describes the dominant image of the American New Woman as a “white,
well-educated, frequently single, and politically progressive woman” (2005,
19). While less than 1 percent of American women attended college by
32  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

1900, by 1930 10 percent of American women aged eighteen to twenty-

one were in college (Brown 1997, 133). Many female college graduates
searched for outlets for their intellectual passions after college, which fre-
quently led them into politics. As a mass medium, periodicals—women’s
magazines, men’s magazines, family magazines, modernist little magazines,
and political magazines; “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow”—were
the leaders in the debate over how a woman should live her life in Amer-
ican society. Collier’s, for example, ran an advertisement in Vogue for its
November 18, 1916, issue with the large bold heading: “Should a wife be
paid a salary?” The full-page announcement advertises “a charming story
about a young social leader who suddenly learns that she can earn money
by teaching other people’s children. Her husband’s horror when she sug-
gests that he should pay her a salary for taking care of her own children is
easy to understand—or perhaps it isn’t. Decide for yourself ” (146).
Despite Vogue’s professed disinterest in the Woman Question, Col-
lier’s advertising department knew its market and felt that Vogue’s readers
were interested but perhaps undecided on the issue of women’s rights,
as evidenced by the advertisement. The Collier’s ad encompasses many
of the major themes of this discourse—female “social leader[s],” moth-
erhood, work for pay, and differing opinions between men and women.
The magazine page—for women—was a space associated with domestic
instruction, traditional patriarchal family constructions, and the various
constructions of female youth (the Gibson girl, for example) that allowed
for brief flirtations and paid work before marriage. However, while con-
servative magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal promoted middle-class
domesticity, they simultaneously exposed the shortcomings of that value
system. In many magazines, everyday issues such as domestic cleaning or
cooking advice shared space with articles about public political activism.
Overall, advertisers embraced what Lears has called the “therapeutic
ethos,” presenting a vision of self-realization not through social change
but through consumption, and most Americans came to accept this vision
quickly (1983). By 1920, modernity for women had been “translated”
by magazines into romance, home, and consumption (Woloch 2006).
Carolyn Kitch claims that women’s fight for freedoms—political, sexual,
and personal—had been co-opted and reduced to the freedom to con-
sume, ostensibly for the betterment of one’s family (2001). In magazine
advertisements, women were pictured on shopping trips, buying pack-
aged foods for the baby, razors for the husband, and Arco Wand Vacuum
 Angela Weaver  33

Cleaners for themselves. No longer reifying the submissive, pious True

Woman, these images emphasized the value of domesticity as a modern
phenomenon linked to a woman’s role as companion and consumer. For
Parker, these ideological changes were a catalyst for her desire to explore
women’s psyches, internal landscapes influenced heavily by the contradic-
tory nature of advertising iconography and magazine content.
Her first sustained effort to develop an observational, sarcastic aes-
thetic as a means to challenge the iconic representation of women’s roles
came at Vanity Fair, a magazine whose content was 50 percent advertis-
ing. Parker was recruited from Vogue by Vanity Fair editor Frank Crownin-
shield, who saw advertising as a tool to help him replicate the aesthetic and
spirit of little magazines while keeping his upper-class readership socially
and culturally up-to-date and thoroughly entertained. Short “playlets”
printed sporadically in the magazine often showcased conservative values
by mocking changes in gendered social structures, despite the magazine’s
editorial promise to “spare you the agony of sex discussions” (Vanity Fair
advertisement, 1916). A July 1916 problem play, for example, grieved for
women’s loss of motherly instinct. In the playlet, two children decided to
adopt new parents because “well, you see my mother has nothing but her
clubs, and ideas, and settlement work” (Dorrian 1916, 57). The magazine’s
content focused on art and society, reproducing works by Picasso, Gau-
guin and Matisse and publishing Eliot, Cummings, and Stein alongside
articles on modernism, primitivism, cubism, dancing, vorticism, travel,
dog shows, and real estate. The magazine was highly visual, printing fifty
full pages of advertising in every issue. Often the advertising and content
blended in surprisingly seamless ways. In a brief editorial sketch, for exam-
ple, that served as an advertisement for Vanity Fair itself, characters attend-
ing a high-class society party are actually popular advertising icons—the
Redform Corset Girl, the Cough Drop Twins, the Onyx Hose Girl (1916).
The story ends with the fictional speaker, who believed he had stumbled
into a society party, very slowly coming to the realization that “This isn’t
Newport—this is only an advertising page in Vanity Fair!” Society, fiction,
reality, and advertising combined powerfully in the magazine, the adver-
tising icons serving as the visual representations of female identity that
Parker challenges in her work.
In “Women: A Hate Song,” the 1916 poem that convinced Vanity
Fair’s editors to hire Parker as a full-time staff writer, Parker challenged a
whole range of representations of women circulating in periodical culture,
34  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

a move that has caused some critics to label the poem misogynistic (Helal
2004). Afraid the poem would offend readers but still excited enough to
publish it, Crowninshield suggested she use a pseudonym and the poem
was published under the name “Henrietta Rousseau.” Parker would even-
tually write nearly twenty Hate Songs on a variety of types, including men,
actresses, slackers, husbands, college boys, and bohemians. In “Women:
A Hate Song,” Parker is direct, employing less subtlety and understate-
ment but still admitting the irresolution of identity and image. Vanity Fair
provided a seamless outlet for Parker’s use of humor as a challenge to the
ideologies restricting female identity, even as the mood in the country
became darker with the approach of US involvement in World War I. The
poem begins, “I hate Women; They get on my nerves” (italics in the original).
What follows are six free-verse stanzas, each of which treats one kind of
identity that is available to women in the pages of popular magazines: the
domestic ones, the bundles of nerves, the ones with husband trouble, the
well-informed ones, the ones “who simply cannot Fathom/Why all the
men are mad about them” and the cheerful ones. Parker’s first stanza sets
up an “us versus them” tone; it reads:
There are the Domestic ones.
They are the worst.
Every moment is packed with Happiness.
They breathe deeply
And walk with large strides, eternally hurrying home
To see about dinner.
They are the kind
Who say, with a tender smile, “Money’s not everything.”
They are always confronting me with dresses,
Saying, “I made this myself.”
They read Woman’s pages and try out the recipes.
Oh, how I hate that kind of woman. (61)

In this first stanza, Parker focuses on the ideology of domesticity legiti-

mated by the “Woman’s pages.” Parker indicts all “domestic ones” in this
poem—there are no individualizing characteristics here. A woman who
proudly makes her own dresses and happily tries out recipes from the
Woman’s page, Parker’s work suggests, must recognize that her values are
being manipulated by a market desiring to sell magazines and advertising.
Parker accomplished this critique by using an observational tone, position-
ing the speaker as a sharp-eyed observer of human behaviors. In this way,
 Angela Weaver  35

she identifies, then critiques, the values that advertisers encouraged. These
values, Parker’s poem implies, require intense self-deception to achieve
false happiness. Parker saw that True Womanhood had been transformed
by the fight for women’s rights and by consumerism and urbanization, and
now required women to be domestic, sensitive, deeply feeling, desirable,
up to date on culture, and cheerful.
Parker walks through each stereotype—or available female role—and
indicts the way it forces women to take the role in serious and self-involved
ways. Vanity Fair was full of sketches, plays, theater reviews, and adver-
tisements reinforcing women’s roles as up-to-date, fashionable wives and
mothers. Parker sets readers against these roles (even as the readers per-
formed those roles in their day-to-day lives). Although her tone is biting,
she uses the dialogic structure of the final question to bring her readers
into agreement with her so that a conspiratorial tone overrides the satire.
The poem ends, “I sometimes yearn to kill them./Any jury would acquit
me” (61). The women in Parker’s poem have been exposed before a jury of
their peers, and the verdict is not good. Parker uses generic character types
to challenge the roles offered to women within magazines. She uses rep-
etition, humor, and irony to indict the frameworks shaping female iden-
tity. One story’s juxtaposition with “Women: A Hate Song” reveals how
Parker’s categories overlap with the magazine’s “ideal” woman. Parker’s
poem shares a page in Vanity Fair with a nonfiction story about a Haymar-
ket anarchist, recluse, and writer who believed a mysterious ideal woman
watched over and protected him (Van Eden 1916). The essay explains that
the man has culled his “ideal” from the illustrations, fiction, advertising,
and stories of magazines. The ideal is a woman who is sought after yet
domestic, the same qualities Parker satirizes in “Women: A Hate Song.”
After a negative theater review drew too much attention from Van-
ity Fair’s advertisers in 1920, Parker was fired. She quickly contracted to
write for an entirely different kind of market—that of Ladies’ Home Jour-
nal. Parker’s tenure with Ladies’ Home Journal began in a watershed year
for the magazine. In 1920, antisuffrage editor Edward Bok left the Journal,
and female suffrage and Prohibition went into effect. As a result of Bok’s
influence, the magazine was one of the few that did not shift its stance on
suffrage in the late 1910s to reflect the growing certainty of its passage.
In much the same way that Vanity Fair served elite classes, Ladies’ Home
Journal served as a handbook for aspiring middle-class readers. Its audi-
ence was geographically and economically diverse, encompassing new
36  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

immigrants, rural readers, and urban women. It imitated the aesthetics of

upper-class publications and encouraged upward-mobility aspirations in
its readers. Ladies’ Home Journal also desired to elevate the public’s tastes
and morals through consumerism, blurring the distinctions between high
and low culture that publications such as Vanity Fair actively worked to
preserve.
Even after much mainstream media began to focus on the modern con-
suming woman, Ladies’ Home Journal remained heavily invested in models
of womanhood that promoted piety, purity, and domesticity. Short sto-
ries and serial stories nearly always centered on a woman’s quest for hap-
piness—eventually found in marriage, motherhood, or housekeeping. In
these stories and articles, and in the dozens of advertisements endorsing
domesticity, submissiveness, and family, readers saw this ideal endorsed
as the ultimate expression of womanhood. Articles such as “Dishwashing
as a Fine Art” (Reed 1920) and “Why I Hate My Independence” (March
1920) reinforced such ideas. Scanlon claims that the stories in Ladies’
Home Journal “promise happy lives through traditional means, but expose
those means—and those ends—as less than satisfying for women,” show-
ing us that middle-class definitions of womanhood didn’t really fit middle
class women’s lives (1995, 142). For example, one September 1920 Libby’s
canned food advertising campaign in Ladies’ Home Journal warned women
that they were too absorbed by cooking—“Perhaps this is why your hus-
band doesn’t talk to you” (61). Another article, however, warns women not
to be “can-opener cooks” (September 1920, Ladies’ Home Journal, 105). “A
Woman’s True Preparedness” advises women to learn a profession secretly
so they will be ready in case of the abandonment, divorce, or the death
of their husbands (Richmond 1920). A contradictory ideology of thrift
and consumerism also pervaded the magazine and reflected the opposing
goals of the mass-circulation magazine market—moral and social edifica-
tion, entertainment, and profit.
Parker’s first publication for Ladies’ Home Journal, “Our Tuesday Club”
(1920), uses an observational tone to indict several categories of women
reflected in the magazine’s content and advertising images. Much like
the aforementioned articles, “Our Tuesday Club” focuses on domestic-
ity, marriage, household maintenance, and women’s work. While the title
of the piece implies a first-person narrative, Parker’s sketch is in the third
person. There is an implied speaker providing the insider information and
character details in each character overview, but the voice maintains an
 Angela Weaver  37

ironic distance from the narrative itself. The sketch is divided into eight
sections, each labeled with a woman’s name and focused on one aspect
of the woman’s personality—what editors called “characters you ought
to be able to identify in your own community.” Even more than in her
work for Vogue and Vanity Fair, Parker uses this space to expose the social
construction of gendered behavior to reveal the self-deception required
to maintain a loyal adherence to traditional domesticity. The piece opens
with Miss Harriet Meeker. Parker writes, “For the last decade, now, every
time that Miss Meeker’s friends are gathered together—in the absence of
Miss Meeker—someone is certain to ‘wonder why it is that Hettie Meeker
has never married; she’d make such a splendid wife for some man.’ From
constant repetition the speculation has rather lost its initial zest; in fact,
the remark has come to be delivered a bit perfunctorily.”
The first section of “Our Tuesday Club” is representative of the other
seven sections. Parker introduces a woman from the club, focusing on one
particular aspect of their lives, personalities, or both. Here, it is Miss Meek-
er’s inability to find a husband. Miss Meeker represents a type of woman,
one who is overly excited by her domestic possibilities. The reason she
hasn’t found a husband, the speaker asserts, is that Miss Meeker is sim-
ply too enthusiastic. She would be “the most enthusiastically exemplary of
helpmates, almost aggressively contented with her home, resolutely good-
humored, violently proud of her spouse, fiercely faithful, breathlessly inter-
ested in his every concern.” The overwhelming power of the adverbs in this
description undermine the professed positive attitude about Miss Meeker,
hammering home the reality that Miss Meeker is herself overwhelming. In
this narrative, her powerful desire to serve and love a man is more than a
little frightening.
Ladies’ Home Journal decided to position “Our Tuesday Club,” Parker’s
first publication for the periodical, on the magazine’s “joke page”; while
her work is indeed witty, this placement missed the point of the piece.
Most humor magazines, such as Punch, Judge, and the New York Life, were
directed at men, but Ladies’ Home Journal included several humor pages in
each issue, always beginning on page 4. The June 1920 issue publicized the
sketch’s location on its “Looking Forward with the Editor” page. In large
type, the announcement reads: “Another noteworthy feature is the amus-
ing anthology whose characters you ought to be able to identify in your
own community. our tuesday club, by Dorothy Parker. Appearing next
month for the first time in the Home Journal; to be on page 4” (1).
38  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

M. L. Bloomenthal, the illustrator for the usual joke page, also pro-
vided the images for Parker’s sketch—a lighthearted illustration of seven
older women and a male butler at the top and an inset of an amused
woman playfully covering another woman’s eyes toward the bottom of
the page. The direct address to the reader in a caption—“We meet once
a week, my dear, and we have such a congenial little circle”—draws read-
ers into the sketch with both colloquial diction and implied intimacy. The
June announcement, the placement of the sketch on the typical joke page,
and the illustrations and captions prepare readers to encounter Parker’s
sketch as a truthful and humorous first-person account of a middle-aged,
middle-class woman’s experience with her “Tuesday” friends. Women pre-
paring to read Parker’s sketch would expect to recognize themselves and
their friends in the pages to follow, and to laugh at the recognition.
Considering the ideology that the Ladies’ Home Journal has invested
in, Parker took a risk by claiming a woman can be too overwhelmingly
excited about the prospect of serving those around her. As a 1920 Journal
article, “What the Newest New Woman Is,” insisted, “the most modern
expression of feminism” is when “the newest New Woman deifies not her-
self, but through her new freedom elects to serve others.” Miss Meeker,
however, is especially off-putting because she is like an “overzealous sales-
man,” intimidating “potential customers” with such a “lavish display.” Her
friends, too, happened to head up an “injudicious advertising” campaign.
Parker used the market-based rhetoric of dating and marriage to expose
how the system of profit and exchange promoted by Ladies’ Home Journal
and other entertainment venues was harmful to women. Reading advice
manuals, stories about marriage, and pages of advertising, Miss Meeker
has internalized a set of ideologies that require intense self-deception to
maintain. Her friends, for example, recognize that “the reason for her celi-
bacy is as well known to them as it is to Miss Meeker herself.” Nonetheless,
they still make certain to “wonder why it is that Hettie Meeker has never
married” (4). The sketch of Miss Meeker is typical of each of the eight
sketches, as each woman is unhappy in some way, deceiving herself, iso-
lated from other women despite the expected camaraderie and intimacy
of a weekly club. The “publicity campaign” for Miss Meeker is one example
of how women are taught to reinforce, rather than challenge, mainstream
representations of women, part of the process of self-deception Parker
highlighted in her work.
Members of the Tuesday Club are also overzealous, overly self-effac-
 Angela Weaver  39

ing (what Parker called a “Good Soul” in a June 1919 Vanity Fair piece),
overly exhausted without reason, overly afraid of germs, overly morbid,
and overly youthful-acting. One woman has finely wrinkled eyes “as if
from the effects of a constant glare. It comes, perhaps, from looking too
persistently on the sunny side” (much like the “Cheerful” woman in
“Women: A Hate Song”). Importantly, it isn’t the individual personality
trait that is most significant to Parker. Instead, it is the self-absorption and
self-deception required by ideologies promoting young women to marry
at any cost that she is criticizing. Most of the characters Parker includes in
her sketch are caught up in the deception, unable to recognize the blind
spots in the ideologies legitimated by magazines. The edgy line Parker
drew in the sand between acceptable and unacceptable female behaviors
likely left some readers unsure how they were supposed to react to the por-
trayals. The ideal of a woman who subsumes herself to the needs of others
that Ladies’ Home Journal and other venues set forth was represented in a
very unflattering light in Parker’s sketch. Leaving readers to contemplate
their own alternatives signifies Parker’s belief in the power of women to
learn how best to survive and thrive in a changing world. Men garner only
a passing mention in the sketch, leaving it to women themselves to shape
their worlds as best they can.
In Parker’s texts, however, there is little room for escape. The repeti-
tion of iconic categories culled from the pages of magazines across years
of poems, sketches, and essays indicates that Parker saw little promise for
American women. Her modern aesthetic of irony, repetition, understate-
ment, humor, and dialogic structure was sturdily in place by 1920, as was
her thematic focus on the intense alienation and self-deception character-
istic of Progressive Era women’s lives and language choices. Parker honed
these skills against the sharp edge of a heavily circulated conservative
value system in early twentieth-century mid- and mass-circulation print
culture.
Parker used the values of her market as a jumping-off place from
which to begin her narratives. She first observed her subjects as would a
journalist, identifying and explaining each one. Only then did she use her
satire and the trusting tone created by the observational aesthetic to chal-
lenge those subjects. Focusing on fashion for Vogue, the stage for Vanity
Fair, and women’s clubs for Ladies’ Home Journal, Parker dared women to
recognize the socially constructed nature of their behaviors. Only then,
Parker’s work suggests, could women begin to resist, or even transform,
40  “Such a Congenial Little Circle”

the representations available to them. In the end, Parker’s work indicated

that Progressive Era culture, with its confusing amalgamation of social
ideas, gender roles, and change, required a level of self-deception new to
American culture to survive. The change, confusion, conflict, advertising
rhetoric, and consumer culture that burgeoned during the 1910s, Parker’s
work implied, led to this intense self-deceptive happiness, especially for
women. Under the polished images of advertisers lay unhappiness, resent-
ment, and struggle. Her work was compelling to early twentieth-century
American women because she presented the effects of popular culture’s
restrictive social categories on women, allowing women the chance to take
a step back from the categories and explore their own alternatives.

Angela Weaver is an assistant professor of English at Lakeland Community College,

where she teaches composition and literature. Her research interests concern the liter-
ary and social thoughts of young women publishing their first works as modernism and
print culture converged in the early-twentieth-century United States. This essay is part
of a larger project devoted to women’s magazine culture.

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