Mademoiselle Magazine

Overview

Mademoiselle Magazine was an American magazine for young women, published in New York from 1935 to 2001. Launched by Street & Smith in February 1935 and acquired by Condé Nast in 1959, it is remembered as the first American magazine aimed specifically at young women and as the first career-girl magazine in the United States. For much of its sixty-six years it combined fashion and beauty with unusually strong fiction and nonfiction, an annual college issue assembled by student guest editors, and a deliberate appeal to women who were going to college and getting jobs rather than following only the domestic path assumed by their mothers' magazines.

Under its defining editor, Betsy Talbot Blackwell, who led the magazine from 1937 to 1971, circulation rose to nearly a million. Mademoiselle published writers including Colette, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin and Flannery O'Connor, printed Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood in full, and gave early encouragement to Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion through its college programs. Its final issue was dated November 2001.

A Difficult Launch in 1935

Mademoiselle was introduced in February 1935 by Henry Smith and his colleagues at Street & Smith, a New York publisher long known for men's and boys' fiction, pulp magazines and comics. The new title was the country's first magazine for young women, aimed broadly at readers aged eighteen to thirty — the first generation of American women who had come of age knowing they could vote. Its first issue, conceived by a primarily male editorial team, was nonetheless a failure. It mixed fashion sketches, girls' adventure stories and overwrought romance, and its cover presentation misled some newsstand buyers about its character. Sales were poor, the editors withdrew the issue from newsstands, and publication paused for a month while the magazine was rethought.

The rescue came with a new hire. Betsy Talbot Blackwell, a twenty-nine-year-old journalist with more than a decade of experience in fashion reporting and marketing, joined as fashion director on the magazine's establishment in 1935, also working as beauty editor under an assumed name. She understood, as the founding team had not, that the intended reader existed and was waiting to be addressed correctly. The regrouped magazine, built around her judgment, became one of the durable successes of American women's publishing.

Betsy Talbot Blackwell and the Career-Girl Idea

Blackwell became editor-in-chief in 1937 and remained in the role until 1971, signing herself “BTB” and known to staff by those initials. Her background shaped her editorial convictions. Educated at the Academy of Saint Elizabeth in Convent Station, New Jersey, she had worked as a comparison shopper for Lord & Taylor, then as a fashion reporter and assistant fashion editor at Charm, the Bamberger's department-store magazine, from 1923 to 1928. Her first marriage ended, by her account, over disagreements about her continuing to work; she married lawyer James Madison Blackwell in 1930, kept her maiden name professionally, and spent five years raising a son while taking special assignments from a fashion service before joining Mademoiselle.

Her famous retrospective summary of the magazine's opportunity was that younger women had changed without publishers noticing: their ideas differed from their mothers', they were not interested solely in recipes or babies, and they were going to college and getting jobs. Blackwell acted on that insight systematically. She pursued college women as readers, recruited an advisory College Board of students who sent in reports on fashion and social trends, and filled the magazine with first-rate writing. She also staged the first magazine makeover, inviting a Boston nurse, Barbara Phillips, to be depicted receiving new clothes, new hair and a glamorous transformation — an early example of the reader-centered features that became standard in women's magazines. Under her leadership circulation climbed toward a million, and by 1953 it stood at more than 500,000.

The College Board and the Guest Editor Issue

Mademoiselle's most celebrated institution was its college program. The College Board drew students from campuses across the country as advisers and correspondents, keeping the magazine in contact with how young women actually dressed, studied and socialized. Each year the program culminated in the August guest editors' issue, assembled by about twenty young women selected from colleges across the United States who came to New York for a month to work on the magazine. Guest editors stayed at the women-only Barbizon Hotel, received assignments according to their interests — fiction, shopping, fabrics and other departments — interviewed notable figures, attended industry events, and saw their work published for a national readership.

The program functioned as a talent pipeline of remarkable reach. Sylvia Plath, who had won the magazine's fiction contest in 1952 with a five-hundred-dollar prize for her story “Sunday at the Mintons,” served as a guest editor working on the August 1953 issue and later fictionalized the experience in The Bell Jar, where the magazine appears under a thin disguise. Joan Didion was also among the guest editors in her college years, as were, over time, Ann Beattie, Mona Simpson, Diane Johnson, Francine du Plessix Gray, Meg Wolitzer, actress Ali MacGraw and designer Betsey Johnson. Fern Mallis, later a central figure in New York fashion, likewise recalled that her publishing career began at Mademoiselle and that she was the only one of twenty guest editors in her group asked back for a full-time job, remaining for six years.

Literary Ambition: Fiction, Poetry and Drama

What lifted Mademoiselle above a fashion title was its literary department, shaped for fifteen years by managing editor Cyrilly Abels. Abels was credited in her New York Times obituary with playing a major role in transforming the magazine from a fashion publication for young women into an important medium for young and talented writers. She brought the work of Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, James Baldwin, Hortense Calisher, Eugene Ionesco, Flannery O'Connor and James Purdy to a mass audience, and she arranged the magazine's publication, in its entirety, of Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood, a coup that helped establish Thomas's American reputation.

The magazine's 1953 coverage of Thomas shows the method in action: a feature on Thomas's daily life in Laugharne, Wales, was commissioned to accompany the planned publication of the play, and Plath herself was featured in a 1959 Mademoiselle article on four young poets alongside her husband Ted Hughes. In the 1960s the magazine described its reader plainly in its own editorials: despite its youthful name it was not aimed at young teenagers, but at the smart young woman — college students, new graduates and young workers, some married — confronting serious literature and the moral complexities of the atomic age. That self-definition, fashion alongside Faulkner, Williams, Munro and Thomas, was Mademoiselle's editorial signature.

Fashion, Covers and the Postwar Reader

Fashion remained the magazine's commercial engine. Blackwell had begun as a fashion director, created the makeover format, and used the College Board to keep coverage close to campus and first-job realities rather than couture fantasy alone. Through the 1980s and 1990s the magazine continued to feature top models on its covers and in its editorial pages, competing for the same reader as Glamour and the other young-women's titles that Mademoiselle itself had inspired. Carol Spencer, who became the fashion designer for the Barbie doll, and a long-serving astrology column by Barbara Birdfeather belong to the wider staff history, as does assistant editor Svetlana Lloyd, who served the magazine for fifty years — a span that itself testifies to the title's institutional continuity.

The magazine also preserved a practical, career-minded service tradition from its founding idea. Its reader was assumed to be choosing courses, entering work, managing a first salary and building an adult wardrobe, and fashion, beauty and advice were framed for that reader rather than for a debutante or a homemaker alone. That framing, novel in 1935, had become the common sense of the young-women's category by the time Mademoiselle's imitators multiplied after the war.

Editors After Blackwell

The magazine's founding editorship was brief — Desmond Hall and F. Orlin Tremaine in 1935, then Tremaine alone until 1937 — before Blackwell's thirty-four years began. She was succeeded by Edie Locke, who edited Mademoiselle from 1971 to 1980, and then by Amy Levin Cooper from 1981 to 1992. Gabe Doppelt held the role in 1992, Elizabeth Crow was appointed editor-in-chief in 1993 and served until 2000, and Mandi Norwood edited the magazine in its final period, from 2000 to 2001. Ninety-three employees were on staff at the end.

Ownership had already changed mid-century: Condé Nast acquired Mademoiselle from Street & Smith in 1959 and published it for its final forty-two years. The later editorial history is one of repeated efforts to refresh a venerable title for successive generations — efforts the company's own closure assessment judged insufficient, citing an editorial inability to update the magazine to appeal to a sufficient audience alongside an industry-wide decline in advertising revenue.

Closure in 2001

Condé Nast announced on October 4, 2001, that Mademoiselle would suspend publication with its November 2001 issue. President and chief executive Steven T. Florio called it a difficult decision and attributed it to current economic conditions, saying that despite the efforts of Norwood, publisher Lori Burgess and the editorial and business staffs, the magazine was no longer viable. Subscribers were transferred to Glamour, also a Condé Nast title, beginning with the January 2002 issue, and Glamour's advertising rate base rose accordingly, from 2.1 million to 2.2 million. Some of Mademoiselle's employees and features moved over to Glamour as well.

The November 2001 issue was therefore the last of a magazine that had begun in the Depression, defined the college reader in the postwar years, and outlived most of its contemporaries. Its demise was placed by the company in the context of poor economic conditions across the magazine industry in the autumn of 2001, when advertising contracted sharply. A sixty-six-year run ended not with a merger or a digital continuation, but with a clean transfer of subscribers to a sister title.

Legacy

Mademoiselle's legacy operates on three levels. In publishing history, it established that young, college-educated, working women were a magazine audience in their own right, and its College Board and guest editor system invented a form of reader participation that later magazines, and later media, repeatedly borrowed. In literary history, its pages and prizes form part of the biographies of Plath, Didion and many others, and The Bell Jar preserved its 1953 guest-editor summer as a permanent reference point in American fiction. In social history, recent scholarship on the first career-women's magazines reads Mademoiselle's early decades as an early draft of twentieth-century feminism produced inside a commercial fashion magazine — fragile, as that scholarship notes, but real.

In the WorldNM directory, Mademoiselle Magazine is recorded as a New York, New York publication of 1935 to 2001, founded by Street & Smith, defined by Betsy Talbot Blackwell's editorship from 1937 to 1971, and published by Condé Nast from 1959 until its closure. Its name promised youth; its achievement was seriousness — a magazine that sold fashion by respecting the intelligence of the young women buying it.