The Woman’s Journal can make suffrage speeches every week in the remote parts as well as in the crowded cities, and it can do this more cheaply than can any other agent of equal quality.  But if the paper is to do its part in the general suffrage work, it must be through the body of organized suffragists, and not single-handed.  The movement is growing too fast for the management, unaided by organization, to make the obvious and necessary expansion.

=What Papers Live By=

[Illustration:  The First Editor of the Woman’s Journal Mary A. Livermore]

One of the well-known facts in the world of publishing newspapers and periodicals is that neither magazines, newspapers nor periodicals of any kind live by the subscription price.  Most of them live chiefly by advertisements.

Why, then, does the Journal not carry more advertising?  The answer is that it will not take most of the advertisements it can get, and it cannot get most of the advertisement sit wants.  In the first place.  The Woman’s Journal will not accept liquor or tobacco advertisements, or any advertisements of patent medicines, swindling schemes, or matters of a questionable character.  Every year it declines a considerable amount of business on this score.

“But,” the reader is sure to say, “what about the thousand and one advertisements which are legitimate?  There are hundreds and thousands of advertisements of women’s products for which the Journal ought to be an excellent medium.”  In answer to this one might almost say that the better the grade of advertising the harder it is to get.  The better grades of advertising require a much larger circulation than we have and a better grade of paper on which to print their advertisements; they naturally want their advertisements to be shown in the most attractive manner.  And there are hundreds of publications just as good as ours which can give them the proper display.

Another difficulty we have to combat is the fact that our paper is not well known to men; it is not advertised anywhere, it is not displayed anywhere; they rarely see any one reading it; they cannot get it on the newsstands, and, in short, they cannot imagine who reads it.  This is hard to combat.

Another reason given by those who refuse to advertise in the Woman’s Journal is that the advertiser or the advertising agent does not believe in equal suffrage, or to use his own expression, he is “not a suffragette.”  He is sure that no one would ever advertise in the paper unless he believed in votes for women, and frankly, he does not want his friends to be given a chance to tease him about “this suffragette business.”

Since the Journal is a national paper, it ought, of course, to have national advertising, but national advertisers require at least 50,000 circulation, we are told.  If the Journal’s circulation were local, it could get plenty, but local advertising, of course, does not properly belong in a national paper, for all except the local circulation is a waste for it.