Geraldine Rhoads, who in 16 years as editor in chief of Woman’s Day magazine guided it toward covering the women’s movement while still embracing its tradition of homespun advice, died at her home in Manhattan on Saturday, three days before her 99th birthday.
Her longtime friend Jeannie McCloskey confirmed the death.
Miss Rhoads (she preferred the old courtesy title to Ms.) was editor of Woman’s Day from 1966 to 1982, during the heyday of the so-called Seven Sisters, a group of national women’s magazines that also counted Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Better Homes and Gardens, and Redbook. During her tenure, Woman’s Day’s circulation grew to more than eight million, from about five million.
“It was a period of enormous change in women’s lives,” Jane Chesnutt, who was Woman’s Day’s editor from 1991 to 2009, said on Monday. The magazine was then at the forefront of issues like domestic violence — “ahead of the law on that issue,” she said — and women’s health.
“In the mid-’70s, under Gerry’s leadership, we wrote about lumpectomy as an alternative to radical mastectomies,” Ms. Chesnutt said.
That was a significant shift from the days in which women’s magazines featured only recipes, needlework and proper etiquette.
Woman’s Day was first published in 1931 as a menu sheet handed out to shoppers at grocery stores owned by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. By 1937, it was a magazine priced at 2 cents a copy and sold only at A.&P. stores. Today, five owners later, Woman’s Day is published by Hearst Magazines and has a circulation of about 3.25 million.
Ellen Levine, who is editorial director of Hearst Magazines and was Miss Rhoads’s immediate successor at Woman’s Day, called Miss Rhoads’s editorship “a balancing act.”
“She had an eye and ear for what was going to matter for women,” Ms. Levine said, “particularly in the health area, in money management for women, stories about women’s emotional needs. And she managed to get that on pages between the stories on hobbies and recipes.”
Still, Miss Rhoads never disavowed traditional homemaking advice. In 1988, with Edna Paradis, she wrote “The Woman’s Day Help Book: The Complete How-to for the Busy Housekeeper.”
Geraldine Emeline Rhoads was born in Philadelphia on Jan. 29, 1914, the only child of Lawrence and Alice Fegley Rhoads. Her father was a teacher at a boarding school. Miss Rhoads never married, and no immediate family members survive her.
Miss Rhoads graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1935, where she had been editor of the College News and the Lantern, a literary magazine. After answering a classified ad, she was hired as an editor by a start-up magazine in New York, The Woman. She held editing positions at Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s and other women’s magazines before being named editor in chief and vice president of Woman’s Day.
“Gerry was especially proud,” Ms. Chesnutt said, “of the fact that Woman’s Day was, and still is, the only one of the Seven Sisters that was never edited by a man.”