About McCall's

McCall's

McCall's was a monthly American women's magazine published in New York, New York, for well over a century. It was established in 1873 as The Queen, a small fashion journal created to promote the sewing patterns of Scottish immigrant James McCall, renamed McCall's Magazine — The Queen of Fashion in 1897, and grew into a large-format glossy that stood among the "Seven Sisters" of American women's service magazines. At its peak in the early 1960s it reached a readership of about 8.4 million. It published major fiction, Eleanor Roosevelt's advice column, and the Betsy McCall paper dolls; it passed through a rapid succession of owners after 1973; and in 2001 its publisher, Gruner + Jahr, renamed it Rosie under entertainer Rosie O'Donnell. Rosie ceased publication at the end of 2002, ending one of the longest runs in American magazine history.

James McCall and The Queen, 1873

The magazine began as advertising. In 1870 the Scottish tailor James McCall began designing and printing his own line of dressmaking patterns in New York. To promote them he founded a four-page fashion journal, The Queen: Illustrating McCall's Bazaar Glove-Fitting Patterns, dated from 1873 in the magazine's own history and in library records. In an era when American women who wanted fashionable clothes often had to make them, a pattern company that could show its designs in an attractive journal, with homemaking and handiwork information alongside, had a powerful marketing tool.

McCall died in 1884; his widow became president of the McCall Company and appointed Mrs. George Bladsworth as editor, a post she held until 1891. Under her the journal remained mainly a vehicle for patterns but expanded its homemaking content, reaching about twelve pages by 1890. In 1891 it was renamed The Queen of Fashion and sold for thirty cents a year. James Henry Ottley, who took over the company in 1893, raised the price to fifty cents, expanded issues to between sixteen and thirty pages, and added articles on children, health, beauty and foreign travel — the beginnings of a general women's magazine inside a pattern catalogue.

Becoming McCall's Magazine, 1897

In 1897, to reflect that widening range, the journal became McCall's Magazine — The Queen of Fashion, a name later shortened simply to McCall's. For many years pattern information still filled an average of about twenty percent of its pages, and the McCall pattern business remained the company's foundation even as the magazine outgrew it editorially. In 1913 the banking firm White, Weld and Company bought the business and organized the McCall Corporation, with Edward Alfred Simmons as president; in 1917 the magazine's price rose to ten cents an issue.

The First World War era brought stronger editorial leadership. Bessie Beatty, appointed editor in August 1918, had just returned from seven months covering the Russian Revolution, after years working for Fremont Older in San Francisco. In 1922 Harry Payne Burton became editor and began publishing fiction by well-known popular novelists such as Kathleen Norris, Harold Bell Wright, Zane Grey and Booth Tarkington — the first step in a literary expansion that would define the magazine's middle decades.

Otis Wiese and Three Magazines in One

The magazine's most consequential editor arrived young. Otis Wiese, a 23-year-old associate editor, was promoted to editor in 1928. Convinced that women readers were ready for more substantial fiction than the magazine had been buying, he proposed selling off its stock of popular fiction purchases — and was fired repeatedly in his first year, by his own later account at least six times, and always rehired. He survived to remake the magazine. In 1932 he reorganized it into a format he called Three Magazines in One: sections for News and Fiction, Homemaking, and Style and Beauty, each with its own cover and its own tailored advertising.

A reader survey convinced Wiese that fiction was a major attraction for women readers, and in 1937 McCall's became the first women's magazine to print a complete novel in a single issue. Through the 1930s the magazine published full-length fiction and the work of writers who would anchor its literary reputation, including, over its long history, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Anne Tyler, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Adams and Tim O'Brien, among many others. The pattern pages that had created the magazine shrank to a few pages an issue as it became a general magazine for homemakers who were also citizens and readers.

The War Years and Postwar Reinvention

When Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, Wiese immediately remade the February 1942 issue then in preparation: a frilly Valentine cover was replaced by a woman wearing an "I've Enlisted" consumer pledge button, and readers were invited to sign a pledge to buy carefully, care for what they had and waste nothing in the defense of democracy. Within three weeks about 150,000 readers had returned the coupon, and McCall's won wide press attention as the first magazine to mobilize its readers in this way. A Washington Newsletter section followed, explaining rationing and conservation.

After the war, reader tastes shifted from fiction toward articles and picture spreads, and Wiese hired two former Look editors — Daniel Danforth Mich as editorial director and Henry Ehrlich as managing editor — to supply lively nonfiction. The Three Magazines in One format was discontinued in 1950. In 1954 Wiese recast the magazine around a "Togetherness" theme, aiming it at the whole family rather than women alone, when paid circulation stood at about 4.5 million. Meanwhile financier Norton Simon had been buying McCall Corporation shares since 1953 and his group took control in 1956.

Peak Years: First Magazine for Women

Corporate politics ended the Wiese era: when Simon named Arthur B. Langlie president in 1958, Wiese, who had expected the job, resigned with a number of staff. His successor, Herbert Mayes from Good Housekeeping, dropped the Togetherness approach, adopted the slogan "First Magazine for Women," added color pages and restored emphasis to fiction. Under editor John Mack Carter, from 1962 to 1965, circulation rose to about 8.4 million, making McCall's, by the accounts of its historians, the most popular magazine in America after Reader's Digest.

The features of those peak years are still remembered. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the column "If You Ask Me" from June 1949 until her death in November 1962, answering readers' questions in the magazine. From May 1951 until at least 1995, most issues printed Betsy McCall paper dolls, which children cut out or ordered on cardboard for a small fee; Betsy McCall became popular enough to be produced as vinyl dolls by Ideal and American Character. The Berenstains' cartoon panel It's All in the Family ran for years, illustrators Jessie Willcox Smith and Neysa McMein drew dozens of covers, and from 1951 to 1967 the magazine presented the Golden Mike Awards with American Women in Radio and Television, honoring women's public-service broadcasting. Film critic Pauline Kael worked at McCall's in 1965 and 1966 — and was, by the standard account, dismissed after panning The Sound of Music.

Decline and the Revolving Door

After Carter left in 1965, editors succeeded one another rapidly — Robert Stein, James Fixx and others — and in 1969 the magazine made headlines by appointing Shana Alexander, a Life columnist with no editing experience, as editor; she left in 1971. Robert Stein returned as editor from 1972 to 1986, the magazine's longest late tenure, during which McCall's carried the subtitle "The Magazine for Suburban Women" — an accurate description of its market and, to critics, a measure of how far its literary ambitions had narrowed since the 1930s.

Ownership churned in parallel. Norton Simon sold the magazine to the Pritzker family in 1973, keeping the pattern business, which continued separately under different ownership. In 1986 the McCall's Publishing Company was bought by Time Inc. and Lang Communications; in 1989 it was sold to The New York Times Company; and in 1994 the German publisher Gruner + Jahr moved to acquire the Times Company's magazine business, taking McCall's into its American women's magazine portfolio. Each sale brought strategy changes without restoring the magazine's former position against Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day and Family Circle, its Seven Sisters rivals.

Rosie: Renaming and Cancellation, 2001 to 2002

In 2000 entertainer Rosie O'Donnell became editorial director of McCall's, and in 2001 Gruner + Jahr renamed the 128-year-old magazine Rosie, after her. O'Donnell said she wanted a magazine that celebrated real women and recognized that they cared about more than waistlines, makeup and fashion. The relaunch drew enormous publicity, but the partnership deteriorated over editorial control. In 2002 O'Donnell withdrew, stating that she could not participate in a magazine bearing her name when she could not be assured it would reflect her vision, values and editorial direction. Rosie ceased publication at the end of 2002.

A highly publicized legal battle between O'Donnell and Gruner + Jahr followed in 2003; the court ultimately ruled against both sides and dismissed the case. Gruner + Jahr exited the American magazine business in 2005, selling its women's portfolio to Meredith Corporation. With the Rosie cancellation, the continuous magazine founded as The Queen in 1873 came to an end — though the separate McCall pattern company, the business that had created it, continued under other owners, its later corporate history extending even to a 2025 bankruptcy filing by its then parent.

Place and Identity

The batch listing places McCall's in New York, New York, and that is correct: James McCall's pattern business and its magazine were New York enterprises, and the magazine was published from New York throughout its life under the McCall Corporation and its successors. In directory listings it should be distinguished from the sewing-pattern company of the same name, which survived the magazine, and from Rosie, which was legally and editorially the magazine's final form rather than a separate magazine founded in 2001.

Legacy

McCall's legacy spans three distinct achievements. It pioneered the manufacturer-supported magazine, proving a pattern catalogue could grow into a national institution. It demonstrated, under Wiese, how seriously a mass women's magazine could take fiction, service and wartime mobilization at once. And at its peak it was, for millions of suburban American women, a monthly common room — Roosevelt's advice, Betsy McCall's paper wardrobe, novels in single issues and practical homemaking between the same covers. Its long decline and abrupt, litigious end under another woman's name closed a history that had begun, 129 years earlier, with a tailor's four-page giveaway in New York.