Judith Crist on Magazine Fiction

A recent graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism named Judith Klein had a feature story that week analyzing the fiction to be found in the April issues of four leading women's magazines, which she did not name. Klein is better known today as veteran film critic Judith Crist.

She found the heroines of the short stories, novellas and serials that month were “at least three steps further along the road to realism than their soap-opera counterparts.” Illegitimate children, illicit affairs and cases where true love did not triumph were found this month along with the surprising presence of unmarried career women apparently satisfied with their lot. In the latter case, however, it was usually indicated that “Miss Career did have a true-love who either jilted her, was killed overseas, or was one of those Byronesque people who came and went without forwarding addresses,” according to Klein.

Not that the old cliches had disappeared. Newlyweds made cute couples and children and old ladies were uniformly adorable. She noted in nine of the 23 stories a marital spat was patched up by a “wise maiden aunt or incipient pregnancy.” She contrasted two stories with African American characters. In one story with “a Southern plantation attitude,” a selfless cook employed by a selfish family stayed on for the sake of a five-year-old child who needed attention. The other more realistically showed the effect of a white family's intolerance on the friendship of two boys, one white and the other “Negro.”

She quoted three editors who agreed that “our readers want the familiar....They want to recognize the characters.” But, Klein wrote, “Life must be curious if not beautiful for the four magazine's 13,584,837 readers if they are familiar with twelve-year-old girls who arrange funerals for kind old ladies, fascinating young women who declare “Dogs and babies are ham and eggs—they go together,” and versatile murderesses like Cynthia who 'started a fire out of old cobwebs and a few hairpins and was heating water for tea.' "