https://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Worlds-Condensed-Minutes-Reading/dp/B000KOWRNY?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000KOWRNY
Clara Savage Littledale was born on January 31, 1891 in Belfast, Maine, United States, the daughter of John Arthur Savage and Emma Morrison. Her father was a Methodist minister who developed doctrinal differences with his church and later was ordained in the Unitarian ministry. When Clara Savage was a year old the family moved to Medfield, Massachusetts, where she spent her childhood. Upon her father's retirement, the family moved to Plainfield, New Jersey.
She attended high schools at Medfield and Plainfield. Influenced by Charles A. Selden, a New York newspaperman, foreign correspondent, and husband of an older sister, she began to think of a career in journalism. She enrolled at Smith College, where she became a member of the press board. While at college she sold short feature articles to the New York Times and other newspapers. She graduated from college in 1913.
Clara Savage started to work on Oswald Garrison Villard's New York Evening Post, which had never before employed a woman reporter in its city room. After moving up to woman's page editor, Savage became interested in the woman suffrage movement and resigned in 1914 to become press chairman of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. On one occasion she paraded down Fifth Avenue in New York City, carrying a sign reading, "Insane and Idiots Can Vote, Why Can't I?" Finding, however, that she did not care for publicity work, Savage joined Good Housekeeping magazine in 1915 as associate editor and persuaded the editor in chief to send her to Washington to report each month upon political developments at the capital as seen from the woman's angle.
In June 1918 the magazine sent Savage to Europe on a six-month assignment to write on aspects of the American participation in World War I. She found so much that she wished to see and record that she asked the editor to extend her stay for another six months. When he refused, she replied with a three-word cable: "Resigning and remaining. " She continued to travel and write as a free-lancer based in Paris until the fall of 1919. After returning to the United States, Savage demonstrated her versatility by contributing articles and stories to a wide range of general and specialized magazines.
Later Littledale was persuaded by the publisher George J. Hecht to return to the magazine field. In July 1926 she became managing editor of a new venture that Hecht was launching, Children, the Magazine for Parents. A monthly publication devoted editorially to prenatal and infant care, it advised on the problems of adolescence, on books, movies, and the comics, and on the whole range of parent-child relationships. It was sponsored by prominent consultants, educators, clinicians, agencies of the federal government, and child-welfare organizations. The following year Children evolved into Parents' Magazine with Littledale's name on the masthead as chief editor. It remained there until her death.
As editor and regular contributor to the magazine and in her frequent radio, television, and platform appearances, Littledale sought to translate technical scientific studies on family health and nutrition, child training, vocational guidance, and experimental work in the field of education into practical, understandable articles. Parents' Magazine supported legislation prohibiting the exploitation of child labor; advocated better school health facilities, more child care centers, expanded nursery- and play-school programs, and increased federal aid to education; and rallied support for the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF).
Littledale was coauthor of Parents' Magazine Book of Baby Care (1952) and edited a number of condensations of standard literary works. Common sense was the hallmark of Littledale's advice to parents. To a mother who called her in great distress, asking what to do when her son refused to eat breakfast, the editor replied solemnly, "Try him on lunch. "
Littledale was the first woman reporter of the New York Evening Post and first editor of Parents' Magazine. Under her guidance, Parents' Magazine became a far-reaching influence. It was used as a text in college and university classes and by thousands of child-study and parent-teacher associations. It was widely quoted in periodicals, in books, and on the air. At the time of Littledale's death Parents' Magazine was the most widely read publication in its field, with a circulation of 1, 675, 000.
book
Littledale was compassionate, articulate, and determined crusader for child-welfare causes.
On December 20, 1920, Clara married Harold Aylmer Littledale, a newspaper colleague whom she had met while working for the New York Evening Post. They were divorced in 1945. She had two children.
