Maxine Davis wrote about plenty of tough topics during her long career in journalism, but none of them frightened her as much as the assignment she received in the spring of 1940. Her editors at Good Housekeeping wanted her to cover cancer, a disease so cloaked in stigma that Davis, like many other Americans, was afraid to say its name out loud.
The sweeping series of articles she produced that year changed her thinking. “My research has dispelled that terror,” she wrote in an article that appeared in Good Housekeeping’s April 1940 issue, declaring that cancer could be cured especially if it was caught early through education and hypervigilance. Cancer, she explained, was “sneaking, insidious. Only you and you alone can guard yourself against it.”
At the time Davis wrote these words, cancer was a taboo topic. The term itself wouldn’t be spoken on the radio until 1945. Rumors about its causes were rampant. (Many Americans at the time believed it to be contagious or a sign of poor character.) Physicians routinely withheld cancer diagnoses from patients to spare them shame. Although it wasn’t always a death sentence, the treatments we rely on today were nascent or nonexistent. And yet, the editors at Good Housekeeping still decided to devote pages and pages to in-depth coverage of the disease.
This is one example of how, during the 1940s and 1950s, women’s magazines played a vital and largely forgotten role in educating average Americans about burgeoning efforts to prevent and treat cancer. It was a pivotal era for modern medicine thanks to scientific advancements and increased attention to public health. Cancer was among the leading causes of death, and rates were increasing in part because people were living longer. Print media in all its forms played a major role in normalizing public conversations about cancer, but women’s magazines took a unique approach. They made disease prevention personal, calling upon women to become cancer watchdogs for themselves and their families.