Background
Gertrude Battles Lane was born in Saco, Maine, the sixth child among the four daughters and three sons of Eustace and Ella (Battles) Lane. Her father, whose English ancestors had settled in Maine in the seventeenth century, was an organist and piano tuner, gentle and impractical by nature. Mrs. Lane, the strong-willed, handsome daughter of a Lowell, Massachussets, textile manufacturer, had grown up in the South, where her father had gone to take charge of a cotton mill. The Lanes' family life was close-knit and affectionate.
Education
Gertrude went through the public grade school in Saco and entered the Thornton Academy. Later she studied English at Simmons College.
Career
By her teens Gertrude had evidently decided on a literary career. She followed a course that she later held up to young women seeking business success: get some practical training, accept a modest job, and don't be impatient to leave it too soon. For a year after graduation she was tutor in a Boston family. Then, after taking a stenographic course, she became assistant editor for the American Biographical Dictionary Company in Boston.
Meanwhile she contributed without pay to the Boston Beacon, a society weekly.
In 1903 she moved to New York City to accept an assistant editorship on the Woman's Home Companion. Though her new job paid less than the old--only $18 a week--it proved a wise move. The Crowell Publishing Company, which had just taken over the Companion, was then on the eve of great expansion; Joseph Palmer Knapp bought a majority interest in 1906 and went on to acquire the American and Collier's.
By 1909 Miss Lane was managing editor of the Companion, and even before becoming editor-in-chief in 1912, she had shaped the magazine's editorial direction. Aiming to discover and satisfy the most basic needs of the new generation of American housewives, she gave editorial attention to child care and health, menu planning and food preparation, fashions, home furnishings, and handicrafts, served with a generous helping of entertaining fiction. Although her magazine bore her firm imprint, it followed the basic pattern that Edward W. Bok had earlier cut for its archrival, the Ladies' Home Journal. The motto she adopted, "The Woman Makes the Home, " reflected the Companion's emphasis on home and mother.
Years later Helen Woodward, who worked with Miss Lane, noted that "among the top editors there was not one who was a mother or who had a husband. " "Home" to them was a bachelor apartment, sometimes shared with another single woman. Beneath the sugar frosting, she added, the magazine had toughness. From the start Miss Lane involved her readers. She paid them for household hints. She regularly queried them on how they spent their time and money. In 1935 she set up a corps of 1, 500 reader-editors in various parts of the country who provided editorial advice on household management. An enduring feature was her Better Babies Bureau, which greatly helped in disseminating modern information on prenatal and newborn care.
As an acknowledged expert on the day-to-day problems of family life, she served on the planning committee for the 1930-1931 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. Her conservatism, or perhaps her canny assessment of reader opinion, made her avoid the issue of birth control, and it was not until shortly before her death that contraception was discussed in the pages of the Companion.
A noteworthy feature of the Companion was the publication of stories by some of the best-known American writers of the time, to whom Miss Lane paid top prices. The bulk of the magazine's fiction was by perennially popular women's authors like Kathleen Norris. Though a warmly partisan Republican, Miss Lane published contributions by presidents of both parties--Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover--and, in the 1930's, a regular feature by Eleanor Roosevelt. Like other women's magazines--for instance Good Housekeeping with its less than disinterested "Seal of Approval"--the Companion under Miss Lane easily combined the service aspect of its work for women with a quite frank exploitation of their consumer needs. The success of her promotion department in garnering advertisers was regarded as a model. By hard work and quiet ability, Miss Lane became a director and in 1929 vice-president of Crowell Publishing Company, whose chairman, Joseph Knapp, called her "the best man in the business. "
Her own interests included gourmet food, classical music, and antique collecting. In addition to her Park Avenue apartment, she had a restored country home of the federal period at Harwinton, Connecticut. She never married. After a decade of intermittent illness, she died in her apartment of lung cancer and was buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery, Saco. She had been a Unitarian.
Personality
Outwardly gentle, inwardly strong, she was of medium height and had curling brown hair, an oval face, fair skin, and gray eyes framed by a pince-nez. She made her judgments impersonally, then acted decisively.
