From Assisting Shut-Ins to Sisterly Guidance, Mail-Order Publications
“Little skip Fannie Allison Troutsmans writes that this woman is lonesome and want to hear from Comfort visitors,” the line begins. “She claims she’s the youngest of ten young ones of who four just you live, and adds that her earliest sibling, a conductor in the Southern Railroad, ended up being killed by a train at Spartanburg, S.C.”
The appeal to other visitors showed up at the opening for the July 1907 “Comfort Sisters’ Corner,” a basic of Comfort Magazine. The columnist includes skip Fannie’s own terms, as well as a target in new york where “sisters” could address letters. In identical pages, one girl asked for souvenir post cards and letters, while another requested “seeds of the very variety that is popular or any antique plants, such as for instance our grandmothers adored.”
The line went for numerous pages, quick paragraphs in small font sandwiched among the list of many adverts. Comfort, most likely, wasn’t merely a woman’s journal; it had been a mail-order mag whose primary function would be to bring customer tradition to rural America by marketing kitchen appliances, clothes, medications as well as other products. The publisher that is original William Gannett, really developed Comfort in an effort to market their neurological tonic to women. Yet as it is obvious in columns like “Comfort Sisters’ Corner,” those quasi-catalogues was included with a astonishing side effects: interaction between ladies that otherwise might have been impossible.