After his father lost most of his wealth due to bad investment decisions, the family immigrated to Brooklyn, New York, when Edward was six years old.

[4] After moving to Philadelphia in 1889, he obtained the editorship of Ladies' Home Journal when its founder and editor Louisa Knapp Curtis stepped down to a less intense role at the popular, nationally circulated publication.

He noted among other things, that "A man who truly loves his mother, wife, sister or sweetheart never tells a story which lowers her sex in the eyes of others.

"[7] During his editorship, the Journal became the first magazine in the world to have one million subscribers and it became very influential among readers by featuring informative and progressive ideas in its articles.

Mencken observed that Bok showed an irrepressible interest in things artistic: When he looked at the houses in which his subscribers lived, their drab hideousness made him sick.

When he went inside and contemplated the lambrequins, the gilded cattails, the Rogers groups, the wax fruit under glass domes, the emblazoned seashells from Asbury Park, the family Bible on the marble-topped center-table, the crayon enlargements of Uncle Richard and Aunt Sue, the square pianos, the Brussels carpets, the grained woodwork—when his eyes alighted upon such things, his soul revolted, and at once his moral enthusiasm incited him to attempt a reform.

The result was a long series of Ladies' Home Journal crusades against the hideousness of the national scene—in domestic architecture, in house furnishing, in dress, in town buildings, in advertising.

In 1895, Bok began publishing in Ladies' Home Journal plans for building houses which were affordable for the American middle class – from $1,500 to $5,000 – and made full specifications with regional prices available by mail for $5.

Plans for these houses cost as little as a dollar, and the 1+1⁄2-story dwelling, some as small as 800 square feet, soon became a dominant form of new domestic architecture in the country.

This room had traditionally been used only on Sundays or for formal occasions such as the displaying of deceased family members before burial; it was the buffer zone between the public sphere and the private one of the rest of the house.

Just whom or what it 'draws' I have never been able to see unless it draws attention to too much money and no taste ..."[16] Bok's overall concern was to preserve his socially conservative vision of the ideal American household, with the wife as homemaker and child-rearer, and the children raised in a healthy, natural setting, close to the soil.

[15] Theodore Roosevelt said about Bok:[He] is the only man I ever heard of who changed, for the better, the architecture of an entire nation, and he did it so quickly and effectively that we didn't know it was begun before it was finished.

[18] Because of criticism of some of their programs and methods in the Journal, women's clubs attempted to organize a boycott of the publication, for which Bok threatened them with legal action.