The Butterick Publishing Company played a significant role in helping to shape the homemaking and consumerist direction in which the 1920s developed. The Butterick name was associated then, as now, with sewing patterns, which allowed women of modest means to save money by making clothes at home, or, if they could afford it, to have clothes custom-made for them by others. In addition, the Butterick Publishing Company published two mass-circulation magazines for women, The Designer (not included in this collection) and The Delineator.
Christine Frederick was Home Economics editor and head of the Home Management Department at the Butterick Publishing Company's magazine The Designer which, beginning with the November 1926 issue, merged with Butterick's household magazine The Delineator, under the latter name. (DETAIL NOTE Christine Frederick) The Delineator, like many homemaker magazines of the period, carried fashion sketches and sewing patterns (in this case, Butterick patterns) that offered women the opportunity to have the Paris designer look in their own wardrobe. The January 1926 issue includes an article on how to furnish a house and how much it costs, room by room, at three different income levels. Again like other women's magazines, The Delineator organized a "Beauty Service Institute" for the guidance of consumers, to answer questions about women's toiletry goods and test products.
According to Paul K. Edwards in The Southern Urban Negro As a Consumer (1932), The Delineator was one of a relatively small number of "white magazines" to which African-American households subscribed (p. 179). (Good Housekeeping and Country Gentleman were others.)
In addition, Butterick published Midas Gold. A Study of Family Incomes, "Overselling" and Time-Payments as a Broadener of Markets (1925), which cast installment buying in a favorable light, and The Story of a Pantry Shelf: An Outline History of Grocery Specialties (1925), which provides background on the segment of the consumer economy devoted to foodstuffs. (DETAIL NOTE Home Economics)
Butterick may be most important, however, for the fact that the Better Homes Movement began in the offices of its magazine, The Delineator. As the Better Homes in America Plan Book for Demonstration Week, October 9 to 14, 1922, published by The Delineator, explains, Marie Brown Meloney, editor of the magazine, was secretary to the Advisory Council for the Better Homes Campaign when it was initiated in 1922. She served on the Board of Directors of Better Homes in America with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who was himself a prime mover in the organization's formation. (INTRO NOTE The Home)