On May 2, 1885,
Clark W. Bryan founded
Good Housekeeping in
Holyoke, Massachusetts, as a fortnightly magazine. The magazine became a monthly publication in 1891. The magazine achieved a circulation of 300,000 by 1911, at which time it was bought by the
Hearst Corporation. It topped one million in the mid-1920s, and continued to rise, even during the
Great Depression and its aftermath. In 1938, a year in which the magazine advertising dropped 22 percent,
Good Housekeeping showed an operating profit of $2,583,202, more than three times the profit of Hearst's other eight magazines combined, and probably the most profitable monthly of its time. Circulation topped 2,500,000 in 1943, 3,500,000 in the mid-1950s, 5,000,000 in 1962, and 5,500,000 per month in 1966. 1959 profits were more than $11 million.
Good Housekeeping was one of the "
Seven Sisters", a group of women's service magazines, Famous writers who have contributed to the magazine include
A. J. Cronin,
Robert Graves,
Betty Friedan,
Clara Savage Littledale,
Edwin Markham,
Somerset Maugham,
Edna St. Vincent Millay,
Evelyn Waugh, In 1909, the magazine established the Good Housekeeping Seal. Products advertised in the magazine that bear the GH Seal are tested by GH Institute experts and are backed by a two-year limited warranty. About 5,000 products have been given the seal. In April 1912, a year after Hearst bought the magazine,
Harvey W. Wiley, the first commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (1907–1912), became head of the Good Housekeeping Research Institute and a contributing editor whose "Question Box" feature ran for decades. Beginning with a "Beauty Clinic" in 1932, departments were added to the Institute, including a "Baby's Center", "Foods and Cookery", and a "Needlework Room". Some functioned as testing laboratories, while others were designed to produce editorial copy. In 1924, the British Good Housekeeping magazine set up its own Good Housekeeping Institute at 49 Wellington Street in Covent Garden, London. Its first director was
Dorothy Cottington Taylor who ran the "a highly organised laboratory for testing and investigating every kind of household appliance, method, and recipe" for sixteen years. After the passage of the
Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell sought to promote a government grading system. The Hearst Corporation opposed the policy in spirit, and began publishing a monthly tabloid attacking federal oversight. In 1939, the
Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against
Good Housekeeping for "misleading and deceptive" guarantees including the Seal, and "exaggerated and false" claims in its advertisements. The publisher fought the proceedings for two years, during which time competing editors from the
Ladies Home Journal and ''
McCall's testified against Good Housekeeping''. The FTC's ultimate ruling was against the magazine, forcing it to remove some claims and phraseology from its ad pages. The words "Tested and Approved" were dropped from the Seal. But the magazine's popularity was unaffected, steadily rising in circulation and profitability. In 1962, the wording of the Seal was changed to a guarantee of "Product or Performance", while dropping its endorsement of rhetorical promises made by the advertisers. In its varying forms, the Seal became inextricably associated with the magazine, and many others (e.g., ''McCall's
, Parents, and Better Homes and Gardens'') mimicked the practice. ==International editions==