Midge Turk Richardson - Telegraph As a member of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for 18 years, Sister Agnes Marie, as she then was, served as headmistress of a girls" high school in the black ghetto area of Los Angeles; she regarded her role as editor of Seventeen, a monthly magazine aimed at 12 to 19-year olds, as a continuation of this work - helping young women to understand the modern world. When she took over the editor's chair in 1975 Seventeen's main focus was fashion, make-up and romance, but Midge Turk Richardson was determined that it should confront real issues. "Life is moving so much faster for this generation," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. They're talking about jobs and college when they're 15.... They are making a lot of very serious choices [about sex] at a very early age. We have to educate them much sooner to deal with this. Over two decades she expanded the magazine's coverage to include advice about further education and careers, and articles about feminism and human rights. She also featured frank discussions of topics such as sex, abortion, eating disorders, depression and suicide. In 1982 she introduced a new column, "Sex and Your Body," which she wrote herself and which dispensed practical advice on such issues as sexually transmitted diseases, sexual relations and contraception. The formula proved a success and she built up the magazine's circulation at a time when America's population of teenage girls was falling. By the late 1980s Seventeen was selling 1.2 million copies a month, though she estimated that it was reaching around 6 million readers - roughly half the teenage girls in America. Agnes Turk was born in Los Angeles on March 26 1930, the youngest and shortest (hence the nickname Midge) of three daughters of a school administrator. She joined the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a teaching order, in 1948 and went on to become a teacher. From 1959 she was headmistress of Our Lady Queen of Angels High School in Los Angeles, where she became increasingly disillusioned by what she saw as the Church's failure to pay attention to the concerns of the poor, especially the need for birth control. After leaving the convent in 1966, she worked as a teacher before being offered a job with Glamour magazine. She joined Seventeen in 1974. In the same year she married Hamilton Richardson, a Rhodes scholar and former Davis Cup tennis star, who died in 2006. She is survived by three stepchildren. Midge Turk Richardson, born March 26 1930, found dead December 17 2012