Several years ago, I was involved in some research that led me to the back catalog of Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping. Flipping through every issue of both magazines published between 1949 and 1960, I was often startled by jump-scare recipes for savory Jell-O salads. Few things are more terrifying to me than the phrase “man-pleasing molded salads.” Epidemic polio is one of them, and as evidenced in the magazines’ pages, the 1950s had plenty of that, too.
Polio, short for poliomyelitis, infects the intestinal tract. It can then travel to the brain stem, where it halts lung function and causes paralysis and death. As historian David Oshinsky describes in his 2005 book Polio: An American Story, the virus began breaking out in the United States at the end of the 19th century. Chances of a serious case of polio were relatively low, but the consequences could be devastating. “There was no mistaking the sight of a child struggling in leg braces, or sitting in a wheelchair, or laid out flat in an iron lung,” as Oshinsky puts it. By the 1940s and ’50s, outbreaks had worsened, reaching a high of 52,000 cases in 1952. Prior to the rollout of the Salk polio vaccine in 1955, polio regularly killed and disabled American children and, occasionally, adults, too.
Founded in 1885 and 1922 respectively, Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens were in the 1950s decidedly mainstream magazines, aimed at the “average” white American consumer. As the late scholar Nancy A. Walker relays in her introduction to the 1998 collection Women’s Magazines: 1940-1960: Gender Roles and the Popular Press, the longtime Good Housekeeping editor Herbert Mayes described his readers — somewhat condescendingly — as “middle Americans. Middlebrow. In every way middle.” To a modern reader, the magazines can be sort of mind-numbing: full of peppy discussions of new cleaning products, advice about failing marriages, and images of smiling, dimpled children in ads for pajamas and soaps. Some contemporary readers found them vapid, too. In a satirical 1950 Atlantic article, the writer Marghanita Laski quipped, “It is as much a source of amazement as of income to me that readers of the women’s magazines have such an insatiable thirst for reading the same information over and over again.” A year’s worth of issues, Laski thought, “must inevitably give enough information about the technique of being a woman to see one through a lifetime.”
Consuming a full decade’s worth of banal content, I was struck by how these magazines show, in aggregate, shifts in daily life. Over the course of ’50s, styles morphed, and new products emerged. As televisions became more and more common in American homes, the decorating spreads in Better Homes and Gardens began orienting sofas toward walls rather than facing couches to accommodate the new technology. Amid all the fluff, the polio content stands out for its painful urgency. Readers of these domestic magazines, who tended to be housewives and mothers, may have been particularly taken by an affliction that primarily affected children and failed to yield to their militant cleaning regimes, infiltrating their idyllic middle-class homes. As Oshinsky notes, the virus had come to be associated with “small towns and the neatly groomed suburbs, more likely to strike the children of the well-to-do.” In the golden age of promoting the nuclear family and household cleanliness, polio, from these magazines’ angle, presented an existential threat to a heavily advertised American dream.
The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, founded by polio survivor Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938 and more commonly known as March of Dimes, led funding efforts for polio research and treatments. Ads for the charity appeared in Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens alongside banal articles about how to clean linoleum and ads for garden hoses, clothing starch, and deodorant. A January 1950 Good Housekeeping advertisement titled “While Terror Takes Its Holiday” invited readers to donate to March of Dimes, describing how “every mother followed the thin red line on the graph” that tracked polio outbreaks during the summer months, when the disease was most prevalent, and moved with “agonizing slowness” to its January low point. Keeping a vigilant eye on polio was presented as a day-to-day motherly duty. Because March of Dimes funded polio research through private donations rather than government dollars, McCarthy-era readers, skeptical of socialized medicine, could feel that their donations contributed to a patriotic project without sacrificing free-market ideals.
The firsthand accounts of polio victims and their families are particularly poignant. The July 1951 edition of Better Homes and Gardens includes an essay by James Liston, whose wife, Dorothy, came down with polio. He recounts how he sobbed in the car on his way home from the hospital, fearing Dorothy would die, then watched her undergo agonizing treatments for nerve damage, only later to learn while smoking a cigarette with her doctor that she might never walk again. “I hope it will never touch your family,” Liston wrote.
Even among families that avoided getting sick, “psychologically,” Oshinksy writes, “the impact of polio was profound.” One May 1950 Good Housekeeping article, “Your Child’s Camp and Polio,” advises parents agonizing over whether to send children away for the summer. “[I]f there should be another polio epidemic this year,” it asks readers, “will your child be safer in camp? or in greater danger? Should he be taken out of a camp at which a case of polio has developed? Is a camp that had a polio outbreak in some previous year any more or less likely to have another?” The article’s author, Richard Frey, describes panicked parents receiving telegrams that campers had come down with the virus, and narrates how his own 11-year-old suddenly returned home from camp after two of the boy’s teenaged counselors died of the disease. “We learned that throughout the first night of his illness, the first counselor to die had lain in a room attended by his brother and a girl counselor … he had begged my son to get up from the adjoining bed and rub his back because it felt so sore.” A brush with polio, the article reminded readers, could turn summer vacation into a parent’s worst nightmare.
These days, the brittle, tissue-thin pages of Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens, steeped in the conservative and often discriminatory ethos of the 1950s, seem antique in many ways. Images of domestic life abound, but few illustrations of people of color appear anywhere: suburban life, as represented in these pages, was homogenous and white — and indeed, as scholar Richard Rothstein describes in his 2017 book The Color of Law, discriminatory federal and local housing policies had effectively segregated suburbs by systematically excluding African American home buyers. Gender roles, too, were strict and naturalized: the readers of Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens were frequently treated to content like Marjorie Holmes’ April 1949 article “Are You Training Your Daughter to be a Wife?” which claims that “just being a wife is the best and freest state ever devised for a woman.” Poems like 1953’s “Woman at work,” by the prolific poet Richard Armour, romanticized housewifery, comparing “a woman's dressing table,” with its makeup and hair products, to “a workman’s workbench.” The freaky gender roles that begot these magazines would turn today’s trad wives green with envy.
What you’ll find scarce in these pages, however, is the kind of vaccine skepticism that circulates today. When large-scale trials for Jonas Salk’s vaccine began in 1954, critics certainly existed: most notably, radio broadcaster Walter Winchell stoked fears that the killed-virus vaccine might contain live virus. But Americans were inclined to trust science in the wake of recent medical breakthroughs, like the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s, which vastly improved public health. Fear of the disease itself may also have trumped concerns about new technology; as Paul Offit relates in his 2005 book The Cutter Incident, a national poll showed that the atomic bomb was the only thing Americans feared more than polio. And Salk himself came across well in the American media, charming audiences on CBS and the cover of Time Magazine.
The magazines’ writers expressed relief and joy that Salk’s invention might vanquish a ferocious childhood ailment. A March 1954 Better Homes and Gardens article titled “No More Polio after ’54?” described the series of medical breakthroughs that led to the vaccine’s development and reveled in the possibility that mass vaccination could eradicate the virus. The author, Henry Lee, called the vaccine “the biggest, costliest — and most heart-warming — experiment of its kind in medical history,” and anticipated it leading to “the probable eradication of infantile paralysis as the crippler-killer of our young.”
Even in the wake of a tragic mistake in April 1955, in which a tainted batch of the vaccine from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley reached the public and induced cases of polio, magazine writers continued to express confidence in the public health benefits of vaccination. In an August 1955 article, Dr. L. Emmett Holt advocated for “more rigorous testing standards” as the Salk vaccine underwent mass production, but blamed pharmaceutical manufacturers for the Cutter Incident rather than the vaccine itself. He didn’t mince words about the importance of continued vaccination in fighting the disease: “let no one belittle Dr. Salk’s achievement. To have developed a successful immunization against poliomyelitis is a medical milestone.”
In the following decade, when the measles vaccine received a somewhat cool reception from the public in the 1960s, Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens continued to advocate for vaccination. A July 1965 Good Housekeeping article decried “The National Disgrace of Measles Neglect,” while a September 1979 Better Homes and Gardens article instructed parents not to let “complacency and misinformation lull you into neglecting your responsibility for having your children immunized.” Only in the 2000s did the magazines start to entertain full-blown vaccine skepticism as a legitimate fear, as articles like the September 2000 issue of Good Housekeeping’s “How safe are kids’ vaccines?” and the October 2000 Better Homes and Gardens’ “Childhood Vaccines: A blessed rite of passage or cause for concern?” reported growing rumors about the possibility of nasty vaccine side effects.
After making my way through dozens of back issues, I remember feeling an aching sympathy for these long-ago readers in their fight against a virus now condemned to history — or so I believed. Since 1979, when the World Health Organization declared that polio had been eradicated in the U.S., parents have rested easier. A whole suite of diseases that once killed American children — including rubella, measles, and mumps, vaccines for which rolled out in the 1960s — have abated thanks to mass vaccination and vaccine requirements for schoolchildren. As a result of global vaccination efforts, polio still circulates in only a few countries in the world. In the pages of Good Housekeeping, we no longer read about polio causing paralysis, and air fryer recipes have replaced Jell-O advertisements — though there’s still plenty of advice on childrearing and how to best clean the floors.
On February 13, however, the Senate confirmed vaccine-skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the role of Department of Health and Human Services secretary. Kennedy has consistently spread false information about the polio vaccine, suggesting that it has not meaningfully improved childhood health and causes soft-tissue cancers. Kennedy’s lawyer, Aaron Siri, has petitioned the U.S. government to revoke the vaccine’s approval. Meanwhile, cases of preventable childhood diseases are reappearing. An outbreak of measles in a Texas town sickened at least 22 unvaccinated children and two adults in the same week as Kennedy’s confirmation.
Today’s hyper-politicized vaccine discourse feels a world apart from that of early 1950s suburbia. But with vaccine skepticism on the rise, we may be inching closer to return of the preventable childhood diseases that plagued postwar Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens readers. A November 1957 Better Homes and Gardens feature writer, advocating for parents to follow vaccination schedules carefully and avoid complacency about the disease, put it best: “Don’t take immunity for granted.”