Day we tested sex aids at Good Housekeeping
As Britain’s best-selling glossy turns 100, an ex-editor celebrates its fearless features — and insists that in this feminist age, women still want to know how to be domestic goddesses
SOMeTIMe in the early 2000s, I was sitting in my corner office overlooking London’s Carnaby Street when my PA announced a call from New York. It was midday in London, 7am in New York.
This wouldn’t be good news. A very senior executive at our parent company — think Gerri in the TV show Succession — came on the line.
‘I’m seeing a story on the internet, must be fake news, but it says that Good Housekeeping has been testing,’ — there was a pause — ‘items of a personal nature.’ ‘Vibrators,’ I confirmed. ‘We’ve been road-testing sex aids?’
There was a transatlantic intake of breath.
‘It’s a health issue,’ I replied. ‘Cheap imports are arriving in the UK untested and made of inferior materials that could be highly damaging to women who use them. Our readers rely on us to give them information on all electrical appliances used in the home!’
There was a long silence, then: ‘You do know this isn’t Cosmopolitan?’
Of course I knew. Good Housekeeping — GH to all of us who worked there — had been tackling hitherto unmentionable
topics for decades before her baby sister Cosmopolitan arrived on the scene. And I am delighted it is still doing so, with an impressive 100th birthday coming up in March which will be celebrated, I believe, with record sales figures.
To millions of women, it is a trusted source on everything from health and fashion to beauty, how to make the perfect Victoria sponge, the optimum way to stack a dishwasher and, yes, the best method for an orgasm.
It has such a reputation for integrity that star potter emma Bridgewater produced a range of coffee mugs decorated with the words: ‘I’ll believe it when I read it in Good Housekeeping.’
The original Good Housekeeping launched in the U.S. more than 135 years ago, aimed at pioneer women in the Midwest. It featured traditional recipes and home-spun advice.
When it came into the ownership of media mogul Randolph Hearst, he decided to launch the title in Britain, too. The first UK editor
was — inevitably for the times — a man, James McPeake, who decided British Good Housekeeping would have a different ethos from the ‘Mom’s apple pie’ of the American original.
McPeake’s first editor’s letter promised: ‘The burning questions of the day will be reflected each month in articles by women in the public eye, known for their sound grasp of their subject — by women who can lead women and who are fearless, frank and outspoken.’
It was an instant success, offering more realism than high-fashion Vogue, launched not long before. Sadly, after only two years as editor, McPeake died and the mantle passed to his assistant, Alice Head, 27 years old and burning with ambition. The effects of World War I were still being felt. Working-class women who had gone into the munitions factories discovered they preferred it and refused to return to their roles as maids and cooks. Middle-class women who had previously rarely ventured into the servants’ quarters were now responsible for cooking, cleaning and running their own homes. Alice understood this and imported an idea from America — a Good Housekeeping Institute that tried and tested all home appliances on the market: early vacuum cleaners, irons and washing machines, awarding the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval to those that met its high standards.
Alice’s creation went from strength to strength. She combined the Good Housekeeping Institute consumer advice and recipes with articles by Virginia Woolf and the suffragist Millicent Fawcett.
Nothing was off-limits, and titles included Should Wives Have Wages?, Some Questions On Divorce and, as early as 1927, Sex And The Single Woman.
Alice edited the magazine for 15 years, becoming, even more unusually in those days, managing director of the company. She was rumoured to be the highest paid woman in Britain.
Her successors were equally redoubtable. But the Swinging Sixties and 1970s saw the magazine’s influence start to wane and be overtaken by Cosmopolitan, which arrived in the UK in 1972.
Nevertheless, Good Housekeeping continued its appeal among ‘women who lead women’.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, was a guest at the 65th anniversary party. In the 1990s, Myanmar’s opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi told columnist Maureen Lipman that it was the arrival of the magazine each month that kept her going during house arrest.
Then, in 1999, I was invited to become Good Housekeeping’s 11th editor. With the majority of women now working outside the home, few
believed a magazine about housekeeping could survive. Should we change the name to GH?
I decided the vision of James McPeake and Alice Head was as relevant today — times change, people don’t — as it was then, and that most women, far from being perfect housewives, just wanted practical advice to ensure the best for their families and themselves.
It has always been easy for feminist radicals to decry the very idea of housekeeping while ignoring the fact that households — families — need to be supported. Our feminism was about the reality that women — then and now — do most of the emotional, and actual,
labour in the home and that many can’t or don’t want to abandon their families in pursuit of their own goals.
In the absence of a completely equal world, a balance must be sought and this is what Good Housekeeping offered.
A specially commissioned survey revealed the vast majority of working mothers were so busy, they were unable to find any time at all for themselves. One woman told me: ‘If I am ironing but can watch TV at the same time, then I call that me-time!’
I don’t think a man would ever say that. Our research was later used by the Labour government to help make employment laws more family-friendly.
We TOOK risks, such as the vibrators test, and in the 2000s, circulation was going into the stratosphere and no one talked about changing the name to GH, or housekeeping being old-fashioned.
In 2014, Good Housekeeping regained its rightful place as the biggest-selling monthly glossy, a
position it holds to this day, and we opened a purpose-built institute and cookery school as well as launching a website that immediately gained millions of visitors.
I edited Good Housekeeping for 18 years and loved it. But staying at No 1 was taking its toll. My second marriage had broken down and in the ensuing divorce, I temporarily lost my home . . . so much for my own housekeeping skills!
When redundancy came, many got in touch to wish me well, including one of the magazine’s most loyal fans: the Duchess of
Cornwall. Not long after, I received an MBe (for services to journalism
and equal opportunities) from Prince Charles.
He told me that, after campaigning for women to find time for
themselves, it was now time for me to concentrate on my own writing, which I am doing, with a novel and a memoir in the works.
I still read Good Housekeeping. My daughter, Hope, is 28 and about to be married, and when she asks me which are the best kitchen appliances for the flat she is doing up with her fiance, I tell her to check the Good Housekeeping website, reminding her that, ‘You can believe it when you read it in Good Housekeeping.’
Many women can’t abandon families to pursue their own goals