In the mid-1860s, the Harper house was already an established, prosperous publisher of books and magazines. Thanks to their cultural capital and financial acumen, the house survived the Civil War, unlike many other publishers and papers that went under when their demand evaporated and distribution halted. In fact, the house had not merely prevailed but thrived. Two flagship periodicals, Harper’s Monthly and Harper’s Weekly, had grown in circulation during the war, despite the loss of Southern readers, the interruption of circulation networks, and general economic precarity across the nation. Both periodicals were under the direction of Fletcher Harper, the youngest of the four original Harper brothers who still owned and operated the firm.
In the early 1860s, Fletcher had an idea. He wanted to start a third magazine modeled after the publication Der Bazar from Berlin. Der Bazar was a general interest publication not unlike the other Harper house magazines, but it included a healthy dose of fashion articles and woodcuts, which neither Harper’s Monthly nor Harper’s Weekly expressly covered. Fletcher believed that there was sufficient demand from middle- to upper-class women in the United States who formed a new leisure class and wanted a guide to living well in the modern world.
The other Harper brothers—John, James, and Wesley—were not moved by Fletcher’s idea. They felt they “already had their hands full and that they were too far advanced in years to undertake the launching of a new enterprise.” Fletcher only swayed them when he told them, “Well, I wish we could go into it as a firm, but if we cannot I will publish it myself.” John gave in, and Fletcher got to work on a periodical that would prove profitable for the house and ultimately endure for over 150 years.[1]
Fletcher travelled to Germany in 1864 to arrange a deal with Der Bazar. He secured a contract to import cliches, the metal casts of the original wood engravings, that would allow the illustrations to be reprinted in Harper’s Bazar in entirety. The contract Fletcher negotiated was also extremely beneficial to his periodical: by receiving effectivelyduplicate plates of the illustrations in advance, Harper’s Bazar was able to publish them simultaneously with Paris and Berlin—and, perhaps more importantly, before any other periodical in the United States.
Fletcher solicited Mary Louise Booth to become the first editor of Harper’s Bazar—a role she held for more than two decades until her death in 1889. Booth was thirty-six at the time of her hiring and already had an impressive array of publication credentials under her belt: she had translated dozens of works from French, including an antislavery tract that President Lincoln himself had praised, and had served as one of the first woman reporters for the New York Times.
The Harpers and Booth released the first issue on November 2, 1867. A reviewer for the Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, self-identified as “a stupid masculine editor” claimed that the new periodical is “devoted…to mysteries far beyond our comprehension,” including lace, ribbon, and hair arrangements.[2] Unfortunately, this general opinion of Harper’s Bazar expressed by its contemporary papers has held true all the way through until today’s scholarship. The periodical remains thought of as a package of fashion and fun for middle- and upper-class urban women with newfound time and expendable income on their hands. In fact, the larger genre in which Harper’s Bazar falls, women’s periodicals, has historically been simplified to that “light and agreeable reading matter” and not given the same study as more highbrow literary endeavors like the Atlantic, more politically powerful newspapers like The North Star, or more mainstream general interest magazines like the Century.[3] With the notable exception of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which has received significant but often oversimplified study, women’s fashion magazines, particularly in the United States, are seen as inscrutable to anyone outside of a woman’s world filled with pretty things.
Remembering women’s magazines solely as commercial enterprises tasked with selling femininity and its accompanying accessories to women eager to make their homes ship shape is simply inaccurate. Highly regarded authors published serialized novels and essays within their pages. Groundbreaking techniques in newspaper illustration and engraving became viable at scale thanks to large subscriber bases. Plus, the women’s magazines themselves became places to employ women editors, authors, translators, and illustrators in the rapidly professionalizing publishing world, presenting career and wage growth unimaginable to educated women just a few decades prior. It is not just the gems of work with accepted literary merit that are worth recovering, though. Even the domestic and fashion content can come into rich focus, particularly when analyzed with attention to the queer implications of the gender dynamics at play in their creation and consumption. Subtitled “A Repository of Fashion, Pleasure, and Instruction,” Harper’s Bazar was surely a publication of woman-oriented imagery. Women created images of women for women, exercising a female gaze on the female form. In turn, those women readers gazed on the same images and could develop a queer attachment to the objects or see their own queer attachment to other women mirrored in the periodical’s pages.
Booth introduced Harper’s Bazar to its readers in its first issue with an unsigned editorial. She drew on the physical space of a bazar, explaining that the periodical was to become “a vast repository for all the rare and costly things of earth—silks, velvets, cashmeres, spices, perfumes, and glittering gems; in a word, whatever can comfort the heart and delight the eye.” The women wearing the clothes, usually in groups, were posed to show off new bulging bustles, flowing skirts, sculpted hairstyles—and the womanly figures carrying them.
The Harper house received their illustrations directly from Der Bazar, which was published by Louis Schäfer, a European publisher on par with Adolphe Goubaud in Paris and Samuel Beeton of the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine in London.[4] The reach of Der Bazar was impressive: in 1863, there were 105,000 copies circulating in German, plus another 50,000 in English, 32,000 in French, and 15,000 in Spanish through foreign language “editions.”[5] In 1869, just a couple of years after Harper’s Bazar grew its network even more, Schäfer called Der Bazar a “Weltblatt” with a “Weltruf”—a global journal with a global reputation.[6] In 1873, Schäfer dubbed his magazine “die verbreitetste Zeitung der Welt”—the most widespread journal in the world.[7]
Regular columns about European style (particularly French) filled pages alongside instructions for elaborate embroidery and trendy home decoration. The literary content in Harper’s Bazar was also impressive: George Eliot published her last book The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins jointly authored “No Thoroughfare,” and Mary Wilkins Freeman published “Two Friends”’; plus, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, among others, published chapters of The Whole Family within Harper’s Bazar. In political intrigue, it is worth noting that Booth was an avid suffragette who reined in her more progressive stances in an overtly nonpolitical periodical. Nonetheless, part of being fashionable, broadly construed, is being forward-thinking—knowing about what cultural trends and ideas are in style. True to form, the periodical endorsed suffrage for women on June 12, 1869, writing that expanding the vote would be “the awakening of the public conscience.”[8]
Under Booth’s consistent leadership, the magazine performed well, reaching a circulation 150,000 twelve years after its launch, which was the peak circulation that Godey’s Lady’s Book had reached in 1861.[9] Unlike many of its early peer publications, Harper’s Bazar has endured for over a century and a half. The periodical has gained color printing, photography, a new owner in Hearst Media, and an extra “a” in its title since the end of the nineteenth century. In July 2020, the magazine for the first time hired a first woman of color as its editor in chief, Samira Nasr. She sees “fashion [as] a tool for building identity,” and hopes to reach readers of Harper’s Bazaar by contextualizing their interest in fashion their “a broader intellectual curiosity.”[10]
Notes:
[1] J. Henry Harper, House of Harper: A Century of Publishing in Franklin Square (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1912; London: Forgotten Books, 2016), 253. J. Henry’s bias demands that parts of The House of Harper be read with scrutiny, but his intimate knowledge of the house provides a valuable service.
[2] “Book Notices,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Home and School Education, November 1867, 406, American Periodicals.
[3] For work on the Atlantic, see Susan Goodman’s Republic of Words: TheAtlantic Monthly and Its Writers: 1857-1925 (Hanover, Connecticut: University Press of New England, 2011) and Ellery Sedgwick’s The Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). For work on The North Star, see Todd Vogel’s edited collection The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001) and Benjamin Fagan’s article “The North Star and the Atlantic, 1848,” African American Review 47 no. 1 (2014): 51-67. Finally, for work on the Century, see Mark J Noonan’s Reading The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine: American Literature and Culture, 1870-1893 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2010).
[4] Many of these entrepreneurial publishers had deals to share fashion plates like Der Bazar and Harper’s Bazar; Beeton got his plates for the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine from Goubaud, for example.
[5] “Der Bazar,” Wöchentliche Anzeigen für das Fürstenthum Ratzeburg, December 11, 1863. It is worth noting that many of those foreign “editions” that Schäfer included in his count, including the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, were entirely separate periodicals that reprinted content from Der Bazar. The foreign periodicals might have advertised their French connections but kept their ties to Der Bazar mum in their publications and would have balked at the idea of being counted towards Der Bazar circulation figures.
[6] “Zum Beginn des neuen Jahrgangs,” Der Bazar, 1 Jan. 1869.
[7] “Der Bazar.” Supplement to Illustrirte Zeitung, March 29, 1873.
[8] “The Champion of Women’s Suffrage,” Harper’s Bazar, June 12, 1869.
[9] Paula Bernat Bennett, “Subtle Subversion: Mary Louise Booth and Harper’s Bazar (1867–1889),” Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910, edited by Sharon M. Harris and Ellen Gruber Garvey. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 225.
[10] Robin Givhan, “Samira Nasar, a fashion first at Harper’s Bazaar: ‘I just want to bring more people with me to the party,” Washington Post, February 19, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/02/19/samira-nasr-harpers-bazaar/.
