Judy: A Magazine, Greenwich Village, 1919

By Karen Leick

Figure 1: from the first cover of Judy: A Magazine, June 1919.

Judy was a short-lived, witty feminist magazine published by a group of literary and artistic women at 158 W. 11th Street in Greenwich Village in 1919; a total of four issues appeared that year. [1] Although many “little magazines” from this era have been digitized and extensively discussed,  Judy has not been the focus of any critical study or discussion and is mostly unknown to scholars (there is no mention of Judy on the influential Modernism Journals Project website, or the Index of Modernist Magazines). One could argue that it was not a culturally significant publication, since there were so few issues, and the names of the editors are not well-known today. And yet: the editors of Judy all had fascinating, creative careers as writers and artists, and many became household names in the 1920s and 30s.  Furthermore, the magazine presents a unique, memorable vision: subversive, humorous, smart and, of course, female.

These editors were listed in the first issue, as seen in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Judy: A Magazine, June 1919, p. 2.

Anne Herendeen (1888 -  ? ) and Brenda Ueland (1891- 1985) were members of the Heterodoxy Club, a Greenwich Village group for women founded in 1912 that met at Polly’s for lunch twice a month and is the subject of a lively, recent book by Joanna Scutts, Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club That Sparked Modern Feminism (2022).  Members of Heterodoxy included suffragist Crystal Eastman (1881-1928), who was president of the New York City branch of the Women's Peace Party (NYC-WPP), playwrights Susan Glaspell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and other activists, writers, and artists.

Herendeen and Ueland were roommates in New York, and knew Betty Shannon at Every Week, a New York magazine published from 1915-18, where they worked on the editorial staff together; the managing editor was Edith Lewis, Willa Cather‘s partner for many years. Every Week did not promote radical views or experimental literature, but many of the editors were activists who lived in Greenwich Village and promoted progressive causes. In 1917, Herendeen also worked as an editor at Four Lights: An Adventure in Internationalism, a feminist, anti-war magazine published by the NYC-WPP; Four Lights published twenty issues in 1917 and then ceased publication as a result of the Espionage Act of 1917. [2]

The work of this complex network of activist women extended to the other (much more well-known) radical, feminist, pacifist Greenwich Village magazine, the Masses (1911-1917), which was edited by Max Eastman (Crystal’s brother) and also was shut down due to the Espionage Act. Mary Carolyn Davies (1888-1974), also on Judy’s editorial board, regularly published poetry in the Masses and other prominent periodicals at the time, including Century magazine, Harriet Monroe’s Poetrymagazine in Chicago, and Alfred Kreymborg’s avant-garde Others, known for publishing the work of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens.

The founders of Judy were frustrated that many of the most innovative magazines in New York were dominated by men, and that publications for women, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal, exclusively focused on homemaking and motherhood. An editorial note in the fourth issue described the inspiration for Judy:

“Last winter Anne Herendeen said to Mary Carolyn Davies “Wouldn’t it be nice if we girls had a magazine where we could print things that we like, but that editors don’t?” The more they thought about it, the more they decided that there was a real need for such a magazine. Other girls in New York were interested, and willing to give some of their time. And they called her JUDY.”

Judy was the new, hilariously feminist magazine, named as a complement to the long-running British magazine, Punch; as a review in the Minneapolis Tribune noted: “‘Punch,’ the famous comic weekly published in London, has at last seen equal rights bestowed upon his sister ‘Judy,’ who sprang to magazine life last week in Greenwich Village.” [3]

Herendeen was the president and, in addition to Ueland, Shannon, and Davies, the original editorial board also included three other ambitious, creative women: Margaretta Schuyler, Miriam Gerstle, and Phyllis Duganne. Schuyler (1894-1976) was a well-known activist who began her career in 1916 as assistant to the President of the New York branch of the National Woman's Party (NWP) and participated in many suffrage protests; in the 1920s she worked in Paris as a correspondent for the Liberator, the magazine that Max and Crystal Eastman founded to replace the Masses in 1918. Phyllis Duganne (1899-1976) was a prolific, successful short story writer for decades, regularly publishing in Ladies’ Home Journal, Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and McCall’s in the 1920s - 40s. Originally from San Francisco, Miriam Gerstle (1898-1989) had an art studio in New York in the late 1910s, published drawings in Vanity Fair and Vogue, and was a cousin of Gertrude and Leo Stein; she moved to Paris and then London in the 20s, where she was well-known for designing striking textile and wallpaper patterns. Margaret Sangster had a productive career writing a column for the Christian Herald, working as an editor for Smart Set (starting in 1929, when the magazine merged with McClure’s), and writing popular soap operas for radio.

The editorial commentary in Judy may be the most extraordinary aspect of the publication (certainly, the most entertaining). One can imagine these young, dynamic women, discussing the best way to frame their vision for the magazine. The youngest, Gerstle and Duganne, were only 19 or 20 years old; the eldest (Herendeen, Ueland, and Davies) were around 29 or 30. What new perspective should the magazine present? Who was the ideal reader? The first hilarious issue appeared in June 1919, with this introduction:

Figure 3: Judy: A Magazine, June 1919, p. 2.

The editors’ comment about “mens’ inordinate capacity for hearing themselves talk” in conjunction with the reference to the Big Four at the Peace Conference in January 1919 introduced an interesting political argument:  that women might be superior negotiators of foreign policy and peace (there are some parallels with Virginia Woolf’s 1938 argument in Three Guineas).  The editors further considered the political role of women in an editorial statement in issue 2, “Alice Breaks the Looking Glass.” They argued: “so long as women are a minority power in the world, for the most part denied direct participation in guiding the policies of governments, they can only protest. … Let us chronicle the first crack in the mirror.” (Women had been granted the right to vote in New York State in 1917, but the Nineteenth Amendment was not passed until 1920).

In this same issue, the editors revisited the problem of “mansplaining,” which they called “man talk.” Some readers had suggested that they had been too “timid and apologetic about coming forward with the Great Facts of Life” in the premiere issue. They explained the style and tone of the magazine:

“(for men only) … Man-talk is a kind of noise like distant (but not distant enough) blasting, punctuated by poundings on the table. Emphasis, over-statement, intolerance and bullying of the hearer characterize man-talk. Judy will not talk man talk and she cannot be judged by man-talk standards….”

The ambitious manifesto that concludes the first issue may have led readers to believe that the magazine would have a more combative tone, but the editors were clear from the start that they wanted to reach all receptive readers, even men. Unlike the woman-only Heterodoxy Club, Judy was radical in its efforts to engage with male readers to show them a new, authentic female point of view:

Figure 4: Judy: A Magazine, June 1919, back cover (p. 30).

Some of the more amusing parts of this declaration were quoted in the press. Fanny Butcher, literary editor at the Chicago Tribune, explained that:

““Judy” is “very specially for thoughtful business women, wary bachelors, ambitious college girls, disapproving fiancés, restless matrons, suppressed fathers, racy grandmothers, young men with futures, cynical debutantes, young men with pasts, mental actresses, and husbands.” That ought to corner the market of readers all right!” [4]

The contents of the magazine included poems, stories, plays, and essays; most were about gender relations, but not all presented radical views. Anne Herendeen’s poem, “Emancipation,” for example, does not offer a clear vision of freedom: 

Figure 5: Judy: A Magazine, June 1919, p. 15.

Does the poem suggest that if women were finally given freedom, they would not know what to do with it? Perhaps it shows that men do not understand women; the man with “a tender heart” cannot imagine the lives of women, does not ask them what they want, and is surprised at their behavior when he imposes his idea of “freedom” on them. Or, further, there is no “freedom” for women in the current state of our world.

Judy did include some work by men, including one wildly sexist essay about the differences between the morality of men and women, “Man-Morals and Woman-Morals” by J. George Frederick in issue 3; it is followed by a spirited critique of its many faults signed by P.D. (Phyllis Duganne): “My Dear Mr. Frederick: …. JUDY attempts to deny – does deny in fact – the conflict which you say is going on. We hate to be inelegant, but ‘Rot’ say we. JUDY is a post-feminist. That means that we have left – or are in the process of leaving – that stage where ladies say, “I am a woman. I have standards thus and so. You are a man. You have such-like standards. (Inferior to mine, of course).”

Judy also printed letters of encouragement. One came from Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, who wrote: “I hear that eight girls are going to publish a magazine named Judy that will sound the death knell of The Ladies’ Home Journal. Of course, that is a very sad outlook for me, but since as Editor of this magazine, I have asked some of you to be my contributors, I hope that when your magazine puts this magazine out of existence you will ask me to become a contributor to yours.” [5] Other editors who wrote funny and encouraging letters, subscribing to the magazine and buying stock, included Frank Crowinshield (Vanity Fair), Hutchins Hapgood (New York Evening Post), and John O’Hara Cosgrave (The World). 

Two editors were added to the board after the first issue, Katharine Hilliker and Mary Kennedy. Hilliker was a film critic for the New York Morning Telegraph and wrote celebrity profiles for Vogue and Vanity Fair; she then moved to Hollywood, where she worked as a production editor and title writer for many silent films in the 1920s. Mary Kennedy was a playwright and poet, a close friend of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a well-known actor on Broadway in the 1920s.

Instead of a manifesto, the third issue starts with a “CONFESSION!”:

Figure 6: Judy: A Magazine, Number 3, p. 2.

As this commentary suggests, there were significant changes in the Village at this time, as many writers and artists moved to Europe after the war. Furthermore, once women had won the right to vote in New York, some of the feminist cohesion in the Village dissipated. And, as the editors noted, those who remained in the New York had demanding careers. The work at Judy was, of course, unpaid labor. The board consistently emphasized: “nobody, except the printer, gets any money from JUDY.”

In May 1919, a long, amusing article appeared in the New York Morning Sun to promote Judy’s premiere, with excerpts from a candid interview with the board. The journalist was interested in the marital status of the women and how it might relate to their anti-capitalist editorial policy. “Has it been mentioned that the nine editors and incorporators have several husbands among them? … Likewise all the nine have jobs, or else they are earning money free lancing around, because they don’t want to be supported by their husbands and they would not dream of making money by their work for Judy, not if it had a million subscribers … Judy, as the prospectus states, is to be kept clean from all commercial taints, and nobody save the printers will get one cent from it.” [6] The careers of each are briefly outlined, and yet the contradiction of Judy’s desired financial independence, enabled by various mass-market publications, is not explored here. The continued professional successes of these women, extending into the 20s, 30s and 40s, were never free from the market, but their prolific output is a testament to their remarkable talent, ambition, and creativity, first demonstrated in Judy, a forgotten archive of authentic feminist ideals.

In the last issue of Judy, the editors revealed that the magazine was in need of financial support. The last page of the magazine, where the exuberant manifesto had appeared in the first issue, explained:

“We’re not rich, because the people who are most interested in JUDY are apt to be young – and broke. But we want JUDY to succeed. She can’t, unless you want her, —many of you.

If you really like JUDY – feel that she fills the long-felt want (and you must make allowances and realize that she will be better as she grows older) – subscribe and make other people subscribe. Buy stock – a share is ten dollars.” [7]

Sadly, Judy did not grow older and develop into a more culturally significant and financially stable feminist voice. The goal was original: these women were familiar with the gendered expectations of the many periodicals where they regularly published – from radical magazines like the Masses to the conventional Ladies’ Home Journal. Although there were influential women editors at the time (Harriet Monroe, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, to name a few), no other publication promised to disrupt the status quo in order to present the candid perspective of women. Even if Judy did not have long-term success, the youthful ambition of these women led them to a variety of creative accomplishments and careers in film, radio, the visual arts, journalism, and literature; these media provided other venues for them to privilege the perspective of women.

Karen Leick is a modernist scholar who teaches in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include Gertrude Stein and the Making of an American Celebrity (Routledge 2009) and an essay collection about the FBI files of modernist writers and artists; she is currently writing a biography, Mary Carolyn Davies: The Cowgirl Poet of Greenwich Village (under contract with SUNY Press).

[1] Office copies of all four issues have been preserved: see the Phyllis Duganne Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, SSC-MS-00052, Smith College Special Collections, Northampton, Massachusetts. The first three issues are digitized and available through the Nineteenth Century Collections Online database.

[2] There were many social bonds and tensions among this group; Brenda Ueland had a long affair with Crystal Eastman’s husband, Wallace Benedict, and eventually married him in 1916.

[3] “Minneapolis Girls Foster New York Comic Monthly,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 8 June1919, p. 36.

[4] Fanny Butcher, “Tabloid Book Review,” Chicago Tribune, 13 July 1919, p. 67.

[5] These letters appeared in Judy: A Magazine, July 1919: Edward Bok, p. 27; Frank Crowinshield p. 29; John O’Hara Cosgrave, p. 29; Hutchins Hapgood, p. 30.

[6] “Nine Village Girls Plan Own Magazine: ‘Judy,’ So Called Because It Has Punch. Out About June 1,” New York Morning Sun, 15 May 1919.

[7] Judy: A Magazine, Number 4, (back cover) p. 32.