Advice Columns

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Advice Columns

An often maligned and much parodied journalistic genre—though a telling and accurate barometer of moral assumptions and shifting sexual attitudes—the advice column has been a staple of various venues of American journalism for over a century.

Ironically, the grandmother of all advice columnists, Dorothy Dix, never existed in the real world at all. In fact, none of the major columnists—from Dix and Beatrice Fairfax to today's Abigail "Dear Abby" Van Buren—were real people, as such. In keeping with a turn-of-the-century custom that persisted into the 1950s among advice columnists, pseudonyms were assumed by most women writing what was initially described as "Advice to the Lovelorn" or "Lonelyhearts" columns. In the pioneering days of women's rights, journalism was one of the few professions sympathetic to women. In the so-called "hen coop" sections of papers, several progressive women used the conventional woman's section—including its soon standard "Lonelyhearts" column—as both a stepping stone to other journalistic pursuits (and sometimes wealth and fame) and as a pioneering and functional forum for early feminist doctrine.

While the name of Dorothy Dix remains synonymous with the advice genre, the real woman behind Dix was much more than an advisor to the lovelorn. Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (1861-1951) was the daughter of a well-connected Southern family who had come to Tennessee from Virginia. In her early childhood she experienced both the Civil War and the death of her mother. Largely self-educated, she married a struggling inventor in 1882. The problematic union ended with George Gilmer's death in a mental institution in 1929.

Gilmer suffered a breakdown in the early 1890s and was sent to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to recuperate, where she met Eliza Nicholson, publisher of the New Orleans Picayune. Nicholson offered Gilmer a job on her paper, and after a brief apprenticeship, Gilmer's weekly column appeared in 1895 under the pen name of Dorothy Dix. Gilmer's first columns were amusing, literate social satire, many geared to early women's issues. They were an instant success, and readers began writing to Dorothy Dix for advice. In 1901 William Randolph Hearst assigned Gilmer to cover Carrie Nation's hatchet-wielding temperance campaign in Kansas, which eventually led to a position on Hearst's New York Journal. There Gilmer became a well-known crime reporter while continuing the Dix column, which was now running five times a week with an increasing volume of mail. In 1917 a national syndicate picked up Dorothy Dix, and Gilmer returned to New Orleans to devote all her time to the column. By the 1930s she was receiving 400 to 500 letters a day, and by 1939 she had published seven books. Even after achieving wealth and fame, she answered each of her letters personally, and when she retired in 1949 her column was the longest running one ever written by a single author. Elizabeth Gilmer, still better known to the world as columnist Dorothy Dix, died in 1951 at the age of 90.

In real life, Beatrice Fairfax, another name inextricably linked to the lovelorn genre, was Marie Manning (1873?-1945), who originated her column in 1898. Born of English parents in Washington, D.C., Manning received a proper education, graduating from a Washington finishing school in 1890. Shunning a life in Washington society, Manning (who shared Elizabeth Gilmer's feminist leanings and desire for financial independence) was soon pursuing a journalistic career, first at Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and later at Hearst's Evening Journal. It was in the Journal's "Hen Coop" that Beatrice Fairfax, a name fused from Dante and the Manning's family home in Virginia, was born.

Both Dix and Fairfax initially responded to traditional romantic/social problems of the times, but soon dealt with more essential quandaries as well. In the late Victorian era, when females were expected to be submissive dependents and when social codes dictated that certain aspects of marriage and relationships were taboo subjects for public airing in print, Dix and Fairfax provided practical, often progressive advice—counseling women to seek education, and to independently prepare to fend for themselves in a man's world. Gilmer often spoke of her personal difficulties as the basis for her empathy for the problems of others. The financial vulnerability of women, which Gilmer herself experienced during the early years of her marriage, was also a persistent theme, as was her oft-stated observation that "being a woman has always been the most arduous profession any human being could follow." Gilmer was also an active suffragist, publicly campaigning in the cause of votes for women.

Both the Dix and Fairfax columns quickly became national institutions, their mutual success also due to their appearance in an era when the depersonalization of urban life was weakening the handling of personal and emotional problems within the domestic environment. Help was now being sought outside the family via the printed word, and the Dix/Fairfax columns were an impartial source of advice for many women of the period. Both Gilmer and Manning were noted for a more practical approach than many of the subsequent so-called "sob sister" writers who began to proliferate with the popularity of Dix and Fairfax.

Manning left journalism for family life in 1905, but again took over the column after the stock market crash of 1929, noting that while her previous column had only rarely dealt with marriage, in the 1930s it had become women's primary concern. By then the name of Beatrice Fairfax had become so familiar that it had even been mentioned in a verse of one of George and Ira Gershwin's most popular songs, "But Not For Me": "Beatrice Fairfax, don't you dare, try to tell me he will care." Along with writing fiction, an autobiography—Ladies Now and Then—and reporting on the Washington scene, Manning continued to write the Fairfax column until her death in 1945. But Manning's demise was not to be the end of the column. In 1945 it was taken over by Marion Clyde McCarroll (1891-1977), a reporter/editor active in New York journalism during the 1920s and 1930s. McCarroll established a new, more functional column, referring persons needing more intensive counseling to professional help, while her personal responses took on an even more realistic, down-to-earth tone. McCarroll's Fairfax column, which she wrote until her retirement in 1966, is said to have established the precedent for most subsequent advice columns.

Gilmer had also noted a shift in public attitude when she commented that, in the 1890s, readers questioned the propriety of receiving gentlemen callers without a chaperone, while by the 1940s girls were wondering if it was acceptable to take a vacation with their boyfriends. Picking up the rapidly changing thread of public morality in the 1950s were a pair of advice columnists who together cornered a national market that they still dominated into the 1990s.

The identical Friedman twins, Esther Pauline "Eppie" (who became columnist Ann Landers), and Pauline Esther "Popo" (who became "Dear Abby" Abigail Van Buren) were born in Iowa in 1918. They were inseparable; when Pauline dropped out of college, Esther did the same, and after a double wedding in 1939 they shared a double honeymoon. By 1955 they were living separately in Chicago and Los Angeles. Esther, who was once elected a Democratic Party chairperson in Wisconsin, was active in politics, while Pauline busied herself with Los Angeles charity work.

Though conflicting stories have been published as to exactly how it happened, with the sudden death of Ruth Crowley, who had originated the Chicago Sun-Times advice column, Esther (now Lederer) became "Ann Landers" in 1955. Her common sense responses and droll humor soon put Ann Landers into syndication across the country. In her first column on October 16, 1955, a one-liner response to a racetrack lothario—"Time wounds all heels, and you'll get yours"—became an instant classic. Lander's skill with snappy one-liners contributed to creating an instant and intimate rapport with her readers, as did the fact she was not above reproving letter writers who she felt had it coming. David I. Grossvogal writes: "From the earliest, Ann came on as the tough cookie who called a spade a spade, and a stupid reader Stupid." But he also noted: "One of Ann Landers's main gifts, and an underlying cause of her huge and nearly instant success, was this ability to foster an intimate dialogue between herself and her readers. The caring Jewish mother appeared very soon and regularly. From the start she was able to turn the huge apparatus of a syndicated column into an expression of concern for the dilemma or pain of a single individual."

Ann/Esther launched sister Pauline's journalistic career when the popularity of "Ann Landers" instigated an overwhelming avalanche of letters that necessitated assistance. Ironically, Pauline's independent success as Abigail Van Buren, a name chosen for her admiration of the American president, precipitated an eight-year feud between the twins who, nonetheless, separately but similarly developed into two of the most well-known women in America. (They eventually made up at their twenty-fifth high school reunion).

In tandem, the collected responses of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren reflect the changing values and assumptions of the second half of twentieth-century America—one of most rapid periods of overall social/cultural change in human history. While the essential issues remained naggingly the same—romance, sex, marriage, divorce—new and troubling variations appeared and persisted. In 1955 Landers and Van Buren could still refer to a generally accepted social structure, but one which was even then shifting, as family structure weakened, children became more assertive, and divorce more common. Even Ann Landers, basing her early judgments on her overriding belief in the traditional family as the center of society, had a difficult time dealing with issues such as the women's liberation and feminism, and was not above airing her apprehensions in print. Landers's involvement with the changing American values, as well as a profusely documented overview of both her letters and responses, is detailed in Dear Ann Landers, David Grossvogel's 1987 biography.

Aside from the increasing complexity of the issues and the new public mindset with which she had to deal, Landers was not above facing up to her more misguided judgments on any subject. She herself has said: "When I make a mistake, I admit it. I don't believe admitting a mistake damages a person's credibility—in fact I think it enhances it." And well into the 1990s, when readers overwhelmingly call either Ann and Abby on faulty judgments, neither is afraid to offer retractions in print, and controversial issues often lead to a kind of open forum. Evolving post-1950s columns introduced such previously taboo subjects as explicit sexual matters (including disease), alcoholism, and drug use. In the 1990s recurring subjects have included homosexuality, including the issues of same-sex marriage, and the less controversial but delicate issue of family etiquette in dealing with same-sex couples. A new and particularly hot issue circa 1998 was sexual obsession and contacts via the Internet.

The popularity of advice columns inspired an unusual spin-off, the celebrity advice column. In the 1950s Eleanor Roosevelt wrote "If You Ask Me" for the popular woman's magazine, McCall's. While eschewing the more mundane lovelorn complaints, Roosevelt still responded to many deeper personal issues, such as religion and death, as well as to a broad spectrum of requests for personal opinions on subjects ranging from Unitarianism and Red China, to comic strips and rock and roll. (Mrs. Roosevelt responded that she had never read a comic strip, and that rock and roll was a fad that "will probably pass.") Nor was she above responding in a kindly but objective manner to such humble domestic concerns of young people such as hand-me-down clothes. In a similar serious vein, Norman Vincent Peale and Bishop Fulton Sheen also answered personal questions on faith and morality in some of the major magazines of the era.

On a more colorful level, movie magazines offered columns in which readers could solicit advice from famous stars. While no doubt ghostwritten, these columns are nonetheless also accurate barometers of the popular moral climate and assumptions of the period, sometimes spiced up with a little Hollywood hoopla. In the early 1950s, Claudette Colbert provided the byline for a column entitled simply "What Should I Do?" in Photoplay. Around the same period Movieland was the home of "Can I Help You?," a column by, of all people, Joan Crawford. ("Let glamorous Joan Crawford help you solve your problems. Your letter will receive her personal reply.")

In the case of the Photoplay column, querying letters sometimes approached the complexity of a Hollywood melodrama. Colbert responded in kind with detailed and sometimes surprisingly frank comments, tinged with psychological spins popularized in 1940s Hollywood films such as Spellbound. To a detailed letter from "Maureen A." which concluded with the terse but classic query, "Do you think Bob is sincere?," Colbert responded: "Please don't be hurt by my frankness, but I believe that stark honesty at this time may save you humiliation and heartbreak later. Your letter gives me the distinct impressions that you have been the aggressor in this romance, and that Bob is a considerate person, who perhaps really likes you and thinks he might come to love you. There are some men, usually the sons of dominant mothers, who go along the line of least resistance for long periods of time, but often these men rebel suddenly, with great fury. I also have the uncomfortable feeling that you were not so much thinking of Bob, as the fact you are twenty-seven and think you should be married." A typical (and less in-depth) Crawford column dealt with topics such as age differences in romance ("I am a young woman of twenty-six. I'm in love with a young man of twenty-one."), blind dates, and marital flirting. Surprisingly, men were frequent writers to both columns.

At the approach of the millennium, the advice column remains a popular staple of both mass and alternative journalism, effortlessly adapting to the changing needs of both the times and the people. The cutting-edge alternative papers of the West Coast provide orientation-specific and often "anything goes" alternatives to Abby and Ann. IN Los Angeles offers "advice from everyone's favorite fag hag" in the regular column, "Dear Hagatha." Readers are solicited to "Send in your burning questions RIGHT NOW on any topic," and Hagatha's scathing and often X-rated responses are both a satire of, and an over-the-top comment on the venerable advice genre. Los Angeles's Fab! also offers "Yo, Yolanda," by Yolanda Martinez, more earnest, but still biting advice to gays and lesbians. More serious aspects of gay mental and physical health are also addressed in many papers, among them Edge's "Out for Life" column by psychotherapist Roger Winter, which frequently deals with issues such as sexual addiction, monogamy, depression, and AIDS.

A key and up-coming alternative advice column now featured in over sixty newspapers in the United States and Canada is Amy Alkon's "Ask the Advice Goddess." While still dealing with the traditional romantic/sexual quandaries that are seemingly endemic to human society—although now as frequently (and desperately) voiced by men as by women—the Advice Goddess responds to both men and women with an aggressive, no nonsense, and distinctly feminist slant, albeit one remarkably free of the New Age vagaries that the title of her column might otherwise suggest. Alkon frequently (and ironically) reminds women of their sexual power in today's permissive, but still essentially patriarchal society: "Worse yet for guys, when it comes to sex, women have all the power. (This remains a secret only to women.)" Alkon started her advice-giving career on the streets of New York, as one of three women known as "The Advice Ladies" who dispensed free advice from a Soho street corner. The Advice Ladies co-authored a book, Free Advice, and Alkon also writes a column for the New York Daily News, and is developing a television talk show.

"Miss Lonelyhearts went home in a taxi. He lived by himself in a room as full of shadows as an old steel engraving." Nathanael West's 1933 novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, told a depressing story of that rare bird, the male advice columnist. They still exist, and are only slightly less rare today. In a highly publicized search, Wall Street Journal writer, Jeffery Zaslow, was chosen out of twelve thousand candidates to replace Ann Landers when she moved from the Chicago Sun-Times to the rival Tribune in 1987. Don Savage's "Savage Love" column offers witty male perspectives in the mode of the "Advice Goddess" to both gay and straight readers of Los Angeles's New Times. Many other male advice advocates have found voices among the alternative free presses of today.

In his biography of Ann Landers, David I. Grossvogel comments on the problems facing the contemporary advice sage: "At a time when many of the taboos that once induced letter-writing fears have dropped away, the comforting and socializing rituals afforded by those taboos have disappeared as well. The freedom resulting from the loss of taboos also creates a multitude of constituencies with a babel of voices across which it is proportionately difficult to speak with assurance." Grossvogel concludes that in the face of the increasingly depersonalization of modern society the "audibly human" voice of Ann Landers and others of her ilk "may well be the last form of help available at the end of advice."

The increasingly complex nature of contemporary life, compounded by the apparently never-ending story of humanity's depress-ingly changeless emotional, romantic, and sexual hang-ups, would seem to insure the enduring necessity of the advice column well into the next millennium. It remains the one element of the mass press still dedicated to the specific personal needs of one troubled, disgusted, hurting, frustrated, or bewildered human being, and thus to the needs of readers everywhere.

—Ross Care