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Julie Golia
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Newspaper Confessions
ii
iii
Newspaper
Confessions
A History of Advice Columns in
a Pre-Internet Age
JULIE GOLIA
1
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1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

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You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Golia, Julie, author.
Title: Newspaper confessions : a history of advice columns in a
pre-internet age / Julie Golia.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048678 (print) | LCCN 2020048679 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197527788 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197527801 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197527818
Subjects: LCSH: Advice columns—United States. | American
newspapers—History. | Newspapers—United States—Sections, columns, etc.
Classification: LCC PN4888.A38 G65 2021 (print) |
LCC PN4888.A38 (ebook) | DDC 070.4/44—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048678
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048679
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197527788.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
For Christian
who provided patience, encouragement, laughter, and good advice
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vi
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Making Advice Modern: The Birth of the Newspaper

Advice Column 9
2. America’s Confessional: Advice Columns and Their Readers 22
3. Queen of Heartaches: The Advice Columnist as Icon

and Journalist 54
4. Advising the Race: Princess Mysteria and the Black Feminist

Advice Tradition 86
5. The Modern “Experience”: Loneliness, Anonymity, and

the Virtual Community 115
Conclusion 147
Notes 161
Bibliography 191
Index 207
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Acknowledgments
This book is a result of over fifteen years of discovery, research, writing,

brainstorming, rethinking, rewriting, editing, and ultimately, letting go. It is
a long time to work on one project, and I am humbled by the generosity of so
many along the way.
The research for this book would not have been possible if not for the
financial support I received from various institutions, including Columbia
University, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, and the American
Association of University Women. I have spent more time in a dark room
staring at microfilm than a healthy person should, and I am indebted to the
librarians and archivists who provided access, guidance, and support, partic-
ularly those at the Library of Congress’s Newspaper and Current Periodical
Reading Room, the Austin Peay State University Special Collections, the
Tulane University Archives, the Mount Holyoke College Archives, the Sophia
Smith Collection at Smith College, the Newberry Library, the Detroit News
Archives, and the Historic New Orleans Collection.
I became a historian because of remarkable teachers. At Hopkins School,
Karl Crawford instilled a love of geography and historical method. Lynn
Lyerly’s rigorous and empowering approach to gender history has remained
with me since my time at Boston College. At Columbia and beyond, Eric
Foner has taught me so much about what it means to be a public scholar and
a committed teacher. Alice Kessler-Harris has provided decades of guidance
and mentorship; her remarkable intellectual legacy has profoundly shaped
my scholarship and professional work. Thank you also to Cathy Hannabach
of Ideas on Fire and Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press, whose keen ed-
itorial skills have improved the book immensely.
I’m lucky to count many dear friends among my history colleagues; thanks
in particular to Elizabeth Pillsbury, Jenna Alden, Valerie Paley, Niki Hemmer,
April Holm, Rachel Van, Jennifer Brier, and Zaheer Ali for your intellectual
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x Acknowledgments
partnership on this project and others. I am grateful for my colleagues at

New-York Historical Society, The New York Public Library, and especially
Brooklyn Historical Society for doing groundbreaking public history work
with me. Particular thanks to Deborah Schwartz and the Board of Trustees at
BHS for granting me a sabbatical in order to complete the book manuscript.
Over the years that Newspaper Confessions took shape, my life changed a
lot, but my family remained an anchor. I want to thank my stepfather Chuck
Spatz, my stepmother Alyssa Esposito, Roger and Judy Vardeleon, and all of
my sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, stepsisters, and stepbrothers for their pa-
tience, generosity, and for our big boisterous families. I am grateful that my
brothers, Matthew and Geoffrey Golia, are also two of my best friends and
biggest cheerleaders. My father, Robert Golia, has never flagged in his en-
couragement and his belief in me. My mother, Marian Montano, has always
been there to listen to me, encourage me, love me, and occasionally, give me
a kick in the pants. My delightful children, Samuel and Cora, may have dis-
tracted me from finishing the book, but they were also my biggest motiva-
tion. Finally, for making me laugh no matter what, for his razor-sharp advice,
and for his abiding faith in me and in this project, I dedicate this book to
Christian Vardeleon.
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Newspaper Confessions
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1
Introduction
On any given day, one can open a browser window, type in Reddit.com,
and witness a distinctly modern incarnation of the advice column—the Am
I The Asshole (AITA) forum. There, contributors with personal or ethical
quandaries ask the site’s users, colloquially called Redditers, to weigh in with
a chosen abbreviation: YTA (You’re the Asshole), NTA (Not the Asshole),
NAH (No Assholes Here), and so on. Threads address mundane and even
comical topics (“AITA for being furious with my husband for getting the
Sublime sun tattooed on his arm?”), as well as problems that reflect the de-
fining social and cultural issues of our time—among them drug addiction,
blended families, racial micro-aggressions at work, and conflicting expecta-
tions about marriage and gender roles. In January 2020, one Redditer sought
counsel from the forum about his failing marriage, drawing comments from
over 1,200 fellow users who overwhelmingly declared that he was NTA. Once
a successful business owner, the contributor had recently entered a period of
financial hardship, requiring his wife, who had previously stayed home raising
their now-grown children, to take employment. Deeply resentful, the man’s
wife became withdrawn and even cruel, insisting that he had failed as a hus-
band, father, and provider. At the end of his post, the Redditer shared a sense
of relief at having told his story, even before receiving a single piece of advice.
“I am grateful for this forum and the opportunity to vent if nothing else,” he
concluded. “It felt good to get this all out finally. Thank you.”1
Almost a century earlier, on February 2, 1927, a popular Detroit News advice
column called “Experience” ran several letters from readers seeking counsel
about a range of emotional and interpersonal topics, from courtship and
marriage to etiquette and comportment. That day, the column featured cor-
respondence from Just Betty, who shared her troubles with advice columnist
Nancy Brown, along with the other anonymous readers who regularly wrote
2
2 N ewspaper Con fessions
into “Experience”: contributors with pen names like Blossom, Rag Carpet,
Firefly, and Another Mac. A girl of twenty, Just Betty left home when she was
a teenager, after her mother’s untimely death drove her father to alcoholism,
violence, and indolence. She found a job and bounced from boarding house
to boarding house, often fending off the advances of aggressive housemates.
Recently, Just Betty met a kind young man and fell in love; at the same time,
she tearfully reunited with her brother, who begged her to come home and
tend house for him and their father—though the father had not reformed his
ways. Just Betty missed her family, but she also valued her independence, her
job, her new sweetheart, and her sanity. At the start of her letter, Just Betty
declared that “my whole person is in an uproar, and I can’t get my mind on
my work in the day time or sleep at night.” By the time she concluded, how-
ever, it was clear that the process of confession had soothed her. “I don’t know
whether you’ll answer this or not,” Just Betty shared, “but I feel better now
that I’ve told someone.”2
Just as Redditers would later do, Just Betty and other Detroit News advice
column participants built an anonymous community in a mass-media form
to ask for guidance, but also to be heard and valued. These correspondents
shared compelling personal narratives, drew enthusiastic responses from
their virtual communities, and employed a remarkably similar language of
therapeutic empathy. Both forums, moreover, played a key role in growing
the economic and cultural value of their respective publications. Without
realizing it, twenty-first-century Redditers—along with millions of other dig-
ital participants—engage in a form of virtual communication established in
newspaper advice columns a century earlier.
Over the first half of the twentieth century, American newspapers came
to feature hundreds of advice columns, covering topics as diverse as courtship
and marriage, childrearing, fashion and beauty, politics, music, art, and liter-
ature. Advice columns became unprecedented forums where readers could
debate the most resonant cultural crises of the day; in doing so, the columns
transformed not only the American newspaper and media landscape, but
also the very nature of democratic discourse. Emerging in the 1890s, advice
columns helped newspaper publishers to diversify content, raise circula-
tion, draw advertisers, and attract loyal female readers. They gave rise to the
newspaper advice columnist, a new type of female journalist who drew on
Progressive Era reform traditions and celebrity culture alike to craft the pro-
fession. Advice columns also transformed the way that Americans gave and
received interpersonal counsel, as readers increasingly turned to public, anon-
ymous, and interactive sites for help with their most intimate problems, rather
3
Introduction 3
than to their family members or friends. Some columnists even encouraged

their readers to correspond regularly with each other within the pages of the
column, fostering virtual communities of confession, debate, and empathy. In
this sense, advice columns served as important and overlooked precursors to
many forms of popular therapy—from group counseling to pop psychology—
and to participatory communities that flourished online in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries.
-
Advice columns emerged when they did because of revolutionary changes in
the content, style, and business of newspapers taking place at the turn of the
twentieth century. By 1900, American news had commercialized, evolving
from a partisan organ into a commodity in and of itself valued for its ability
to generate profit, especially advertising profit.3 At the same time, advertising
firms focused on tapping the “female market” based on the widespread as-
sumption that women were the primary family purchasers. To reach the
demographic that their advertisers so coveted, publishers established robust
woman’s pages, developed content geared toward “feminine audiences,” and
experimented with new feature genres like advice columns. During the 1890s,
only about half of American newspapers featured any content for women,
and those that did reserved less than a column of material. By 1925, virtu-
ally all featured extensive woman’s sections with a bevy of interactive features,
including one or more advice columns. This expansion and diversification
of women’s content constituted nothing less than the feminization of the
American newspaper, elevating women readers as essential consumers of daily
mass-circulation papers.4
Publishers and female readers alike loved advice columns because of their
interactivity. Newspaper executives recognized that the serial nature of the
columns could help them build loyal, long-term customers who turned to
the woman’s page each day to follow ongoing conversations, look for updates
from regular correspondents, and write in themselves. Reader letters, more-
over, allowed publishers to quantify their female readership and provide con-
crete evidence of a column’s popularity to potential advertisers, thus growing
their profits. By contrast, women readers seized on the interactivity of advice
columns to transform woman’s pages into communities where their voices
could be heard. The participatory nature of the columns also drew unexpected
readers to the woman’s page—a significant number of men, who crossed the
newspaper’s gendered boundaries to take part in ongoing debates. Newspaper
advice columns served as an essential—and rarely acknowledged—foundation
4
on which future media genres would build. Almost a century before the cre-
ation of fan websites and social media communities aimed at niche groups
such as sports aficionados, television enthusiasts, and gamers, these columns
demonstrated how enthralling interactive media could be.5
In their woman’s page content and in their pitches to advertisers, publishers
articulated an idealized vision of their female readership: white, middle-
class women with enough disposable income to prioritize regular consumer
spending. The mass-circulation publications that dominated the newspaper
business during the early twentieth century were essentially white papers,
printed by white publishers, capitalized largely by white advertisers, run by
a white staff, and geared toward a white readership. Advice columns of this
era carefully avoided topics of racism, poverty, and class strife, and columnists
almost never featured letters from black Americans.
Yet during the early twentieth century, mass- circulation newspaper
readers were more diverse than they had ever been, especially in urban centers.
Publishers like E. W. Scripps and Joseph Pulitzer recognized that the tens of
millions of immigrants arriving in the United States between the 1880s and
1920s were potential customers. They established afternoon editions aimed
at working-class readers who tended to purchase papers after their early shifts
and employed simplified headlines and more illustrations for a growing mul-
tilingual readership. Publishers and editors made a much smaller effort to
draw black readers, despite the fact that the number of African Americans
migrating to northern cities from the South rose steadily in the early twentieth
century. Black men and women were stalwart customers of the newspapers
that comprised a small but growing national African American press, but they
also read mainstream daily papers, in part because most black newspapers
were weeklies.6
Readers of color, poor readers, and immigrants interacted with the messages
of the mainstream woman’s page in complex ways, sometimes endorsing or
internalizing the cultural messages embedded in advice columns and other
special features, and sometimes rejecting others. For some—particularly
European immigrants—the woman’s page seemed to offer a blueprint for
assimilation, acceptance, and social and financial success. Black Americans,
who had to grapple with the often explicitly white supremacist values that
many newspapers articulated, likely felt more alienated from mass-circulation
newspaper content. Publishers of African American newspapers took similar
steps to diversify their content and draw advertisers, allowing pioneering
black columnists to craft an alternative dialogue of advice that addressed the
multiple struggles of their target audience, black urban women. In many ways,
5
Introduction 5
newspapers captured the paradox of American culture in the early twentieth

century, as evolving media forms widened the net of what it meant to be
American, even while espousing virulently racist and classist ideas.
-
Advice columns gave columnists and participants a new kind of public forum
to critique what they saw as the fractured and isolated nature of modern
life. When examined over several decades, readers’ questions reveal con-
sistent topics and themes that came to define a collective vision of moder-
nity.7 Letters to advice columns reflected Americans’ concerns about the
impact of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and the nationalization of
businesses, communities, and ideas on their lives. City life, increasingly the
norm for Americans by the early twentieth century, meant different living
arrangements, changing work patterns for both men and women, and the ex-
istence of new and previously unimaginable leisure opportunities. Massive
movements of people—waves of immigrants settling in the United States, the
migration of millions of black Americans to northern urban centers—laid the
groundwork for an unprecedentedly pluralistic society. Of course, many of
these processes had begun during the nineteenth century, well before advice
columns took off. Yet it was during the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s that newspaper
readers revealed an almost unquenchable desire to discuss and quantify these
changes—and found the space to do so in mass-circulation newspapers.8
Urbanization, nationalization, and industrialization were broad, ab-
stract processes that had material effects on the most personal and intimate
aspects of Americans’ lives. Correspondents in the Boston Globe’s interac-
tive “Confidential Chat” sought solace and advice from each other as their
children rejected parental authority and spent more time among peers in
movie theaters, dance halls, and amusement parks. During the 1910s and
1920s, syndicated advice columnist Dorothy Dix received regular letters from
husbands frustrated with their wives’ insistent demands that they be taken
dancing or to the movies. Novelist-turned-columnist Laura Jean Libbey held
a 1912 forum in which her reader-contributors debated the income levels nec-
essary for young working-class couples to set up household in the city. During
the 1930s, Beatrice Fairfax received a spate of letters from teenagers expressing
frustration with newer, more casual dating practices and the mixed messages
they received about sexual behavior. And countless correspondents wrote into
“Experience,” the Detroit News’s local advice column that printed Just Betty’s
letter, expressing feelings of hopelessness and isolation as residents of an
industrialized city in the 1920s and 1930s, and seeking a cure for the loneliness
6
of urban life in the pages of the column. These ongoing conversations be-
tween columnists, contributors, and readers became an indispensable tool for
recalibrating what it meant to be a parent, a spouse, a teenager, a worker, and
a man or a woman in modern American society.
When readers wrote into advice columns with marriage troubles, eti-
quette questions, or housekeeping queries, they sought not just counsel, but
the sympathy of the columnist and her readers. Over time, this process of
confession and catharsis became central to advice exchange. As Nancy Brown,
who helmed the Detroit News column “Experience,” observed in 1921, “The
principal appeal of the [advice] column is the love that we all have to talk
about ourselves and the human desire to unburden our troubles.” For readers
and correspondents struggling with feelings of loneliness, depression, and
ennui, the columns provided proof that they were not alone in their isola-
tion. In some columns, including “Experience,” participants even maintained
close and ongoing virtual relationships in the pages of their newspaper.
“You will never know,” wrote contributor Another Kim to the Detroit News
column in 1930, “how much belonging to the [Column] Family has had to
do with saving my reason.” Many decades later, participants in some of the
Internet’s earliest chat rooms expressed similarly personal sentiments. On the
WELL, a subscription-based online community founded in 1985, one long-
time member, Tom Mandel, wrote to the group shortly before his death from
cancer, “I cannot tell you how sad and griefstriken [sic] I am that I cannot stay
to play and argue with you much longer.” Both the structures and the inti-
mate language of online virtual relationships, seen so poignantly in Mandel’s
final post on the WELL, were established decades earlier in columns like
“Experience.”9
Yet the enthusiastic reader participation that marked early twentieth-
century advice columns could sometimes obscure the powerful editorial in-
fluence that columnists exerted over the tone and message of their columns.
Chameleon-like, advice columnists recognized the benefits of reader debates,
but also stood ready to confidently assert their worldviews to readers across
the country. “If a preacher has a congregation of a couple of hundred people
on Sunday he thinks he has a good audience,” wrote syndicated columnist
Dorothy Dix in the late 1920s. “If he preaches to a thousand people on
Sunday, we consider him a popular preacher, and speak of his great influence.
Without vanity, I may say that every day I talk to millions of men and women
who read the daily papers.” As confidantes and advisors to millions of readers,
columnists like Dix represented an important gendered transformation of
cultural authority in the early twentieth century. Millions of Americans no
7
Introduction 7
longer directed questions face-to-face to family, priests, or other often-male

figures of authority; instead, they turned to a female columnist and to a mass
of virtual correspondents. Via their columns and the popular press, the most
successful columnists carefully crafted and nurtured their public personas,
drawing followers over years and sometimes decades. The contours of the
modern celebrity journalist that we know today took shape in the pages of
newspaper advice columns.10
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Newspaper Confessions offers the first cultural history of early twentieth-cen-
tury advice columns. It reveals that the genre’s heyday began decades before
Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren launched their now-iconic careers in the
1950s. Most studies of advice columns have focused on analyzing the con-
tent and messages of advice columns—a valid approach, but one that sees the
columns only as texts and not as a genre worthy of study in and of itself.11 By
contrast, this book contends that the content of advice columns is just one of
many important aspects of the genre that reveals its impact on the modern
newspaper and on American culture. It analyzes not only what the columns
say, but also the social context in which they emerged and the editorial and
business decisions that allowed them to flourish.
Newspaper Confessions is based on an examination of thirty-one mass-
circulation newspapers between the years of 1895 and 1940. This long span of
time enabled an analysis that charted content and style changes, chronicled
the growth of woman’s sections, and located advice columns for further in-
depth study.12 To understand the complex web of topics and messages in ad-
vice columns, this book draws on detailed, multi-decade case studies of seven
columns featured in newspapers across the country.13 Trade journals, news-
paper business records, advice columnists’ personal papers, and contempo-
rary press coverage of columns shed light on the motivations of columnists,
editors, publishers, and advertisers. One of the most challenging research hur-
dles was the lack of existing newspaper business records dating back to the
early twentieth century. Before the digital age, many newspaper companies
disposed of their institutional records each decade. Anecdotal business and
editorial records exist from some publications, including the Boston Globe
and the Chicago Daily News, but there was not enough extant source material
to support industry-wide conclusions about publishers’ handling of advice
columns.14 As such, the book relies on trade journals like Printers’ Ink and
Editor and Publisher to piece together the motivations and perspectives of
newspaper publishers and their relationship with advertisers.
8
What resulted is a study that reveals as much about modern American

culture and the making of the current media environment as it does about the
history of advice. An influential, long-lasting, and vibrant genre of cultural
expression, advice columns gave rise to a new form of interpersonal commu-
nication, one that paved the way for the forums, chat rooms, and social media
groups that would flourish on the Internet many decades later. In the early
twentieth century, technological advances—improved printing apparatuses,
new delivery and transport abilities, and the rise of marketing strategies—
were able to bring readers together in the public space of the newspaper in
ways heretofore impossible. By the end of the 1900s, another technological
leap—the development of the Internet—allowed for these seeds of virtual
community to grow again. Newspapers, like the Internet, offered readers the
anonymity to make candid revelations about remarkably personal details of
their lives: sexual indiscretions, failed marriages, struggles between children
and parents, and fears about aging and death. The columns created a new kind
of virtual kinship, at once intimate and anonymous, available for voyeuristic
observation by a paper’s many readers. In doing so, they continue to shape
the way we communicate, interact, and connect today, on the Internet and
beyond.
9
Making Advice Modern

The Birth of the Newspaper Advice Column
The newspaper advice column was by no means the first print genre
to experiment with the dissemination of advice. For centuries, public advice
giving has been a popular and potent tradition, one with deeply conservative
roots. Publishers, religious leaders, authors, and other self-styled counselors
began creating and selling advice via conduct books and periodicals as early as
the seventeenth century. These figures—almost always men—used advice in a
number of ways: as a commodity, as a form of social control, as a platform to
endorse traditional gender roles to wide audiences, and as an outlet for male
readers and writers to express their fears about cultural change. In each of
these early genres, advice giving was seen as a one-way transmission of infor-
mation from expert to audience.
Transformations in media and in American society and culture at the end
of the nineteenth century paved the way for a new and modern paradigm
of advice—one that was interactive, public, flexible in topic and form, and
woman-centered. The newspaper industry’s growing reliance on advertising
revenue prompted publishers to re-envision their targeted customers as fe-
male. Newspapers courted women readers by establishing separate woman’s
pages, hiring women writers and editors to helm “soft news” sections, and
creating innovative gendered features. Advice columns proved a particularly
popular genre for publishers because the constant influx of reader letters
enabled them to quantify their female audience to potential advertisers.
Readers, too, were drawn to advice columns, albeit for very different
reasons. The columns established a virtual forum that allowed female
columnists and readers to transform advice from a one-way lecture into an
ongoing conversation. Unlike conduct books, newspaper advice columns
10
proved adaptable and evolving; many subgenres of advice columns emerged,

allowing for diverse conversations about dozens of issues. The columns made
popular the strikingly modern notion that Americans could seek comfort and
support not from family, but from a community of anonymous comrades. In
this way, they not only set a precedent for a new genre, but redefined the very
meaning of advice as an ongoing and subjective dialogue.
-
Primitive question- and-answer columns served as one of the first fea-
ture forms in early newspaper history. In 1690s London, for example, John
Dunton, editor of the bawdy and innovative Athenian Mercury, began an-
swering questions about everything from practical botany to premarital sex.
While most readers made inquiries about history or current events, other
letter writers introduced issues such as marriage, public comportment, and
class divisions, expanding the topics discussed in newspapers well beyond
the traditional purview of politics and economics. Yet Dunton’s question-
and-answer column differed from twentieth-century advice columns in im-
portant ways. While the Mercury did feature some letters from women and
many letters concerning women’s roles, Dunton proved critical of British
women’s growing participation in the public sphere and intended his column
to address his male readers’ anxieties about changing gender roles. Few letter
writers, moreover, wrote in repeatedly enough to foster an ongoing dialogue
with the editor or the audience.1
The interactive newspaper feature made its way across the Atlantic and
bore fruit in eighteenth-century America in the form of newspaper letters
to the editor. In early America, as in Britain, most newspapers eschewed the
cultural topics of the Athenian Mercury, which as a publication remained
something of an outlier. Periodicals typically focused their content on
politics, foreign affairs, and business. To accommodate their often vocal,
opinionated readership, many American publications carved out letters-to-
the-editor sections to engage their presumed male audience in debates about
party politics. In the years before newspapers adopted modern standards
of objectivity, readers’ letters could be almost indistinguishable from re-
portage. The letter format served as a didactic device that editors could use
to educate—or indoctrinate—their readers on particular political issues
during the nineteenth-century heyday of partisan newspapers. Their posi-
tion on the editorial page, rather than on a feature page, placed them firmly
within the realm of political news and debate. Although letters-to-the-editor
sections demonstrated some potential for community building and activism,
1
Making Advice Modern 11
rarely did the forums foster the intimate and long-lasting conversations that
twentieth-century advice columns would.2
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conduct literature be-
came a popular and influential medium for disseminating behavioral and
etiquette advice. In books and pamphlets, authoritative advice givers laid
out hard-and-fast rules on comportment that left little room for debate.
Authors directed conduct literature toward one sex or another—and one
race or another—and usually assumed a middle-class or elite audience. In
eighteenth-century America, etiquette and marriage manuals for upper-class
white women invoked religious stricture, counseled obedience and submis-
sion, and emphasized women’s essential mental and physical inferiority. As
with the Athenian Mercury, the advice givers in these conduct books were
male—usually well-known British laymen and clergy—in stark contrast with
female-edited advice columns of the twentieth century. By the beginning of
the nineteenth century, some white women began to claim the conduct book
genre for themselves, penning their own novels and prescriptive advice books
for young women. Conduct books helped to spur rising literacy and author-
ship rates for women, especially in the South; yet the message and tone of
advice literature did not change significantly when women took up the pen.3
By the early nineteenth century, American prescriptive literature became
less explicitly misogynistic and focused instead on defining and disseminating
emerging middle- class values. Advice literature remained sex- segregated
during the nineteenth century, and it was just as central in the shaping of men
as of women. Conduct book authors helped readers bridge Victorian ideals
with a more modern focus on appearance and consumption emerging in the
late 1800s. Though race was rarely mentioned in nineteenth-century conduct
literature, whiteness was at the center of these visions of ideal masculinity and
femininity. While white women were the largest audience for manuals from
this period, by the end of the nineteenth century there emerged a thriving
market of African American conduct literature, which defined appropriate
behavior for black women in the context of the racism of the Jim Crow era.
African American conduct book authors also envisioned a middle-class and
elite audience and emphasized themes of propriety, morality, and modest
behavior. The guidelines laid out in these manuals reinforced conservative
gender roles and imbued their strictures with additional import: women were
to adhere to these standards for the good not only of themselves and their
families, but also of their race.4
In some ways, nineteenth-century conduct books anticipated key char-
acteristics of newspaper advice columns. The genre established advice as a
12
middle-class endeavor, helping to popularize a set of morals and manners

that came to define a bourgeois ideal—for middle-class Americans as well
as for generations of immigrants seeking to assimilate and amass economic
and cultural capital. Advice was also a segregated experience. As with earlier
conduct books, twentieth-century advice columns were modeled around a
presumed white audience, with black papers like the Chicago Defender of-
fering their own counsel that explicitly addressed the burdens of racism. In
the late nineteenth century, middle-class advice givers increasingly focused on
appearance and personality, extolling the importance of material success and
consumption—themes that would figure prominently in the ideology of early
twentieth-century newspaper advice columns.
In the nineteenth century, women’s magazines like Godey’s Ladies Book
and, a generation later, the Ladies’ Home Journal began to blend the traditions
of conduct literature and the serialized, interactive nature of newspaper
question-and-answer features. Longtime Godey’s editor Sarah Josepha Hale
endorsed some progressive notions of womanhood—educational advance-
ment and female financial aptitude—while still embracing women’s essential
rootedness in the home. During Hale’s tenure, Godey’s ran advice in various
forms, including fashion and housekeeping tips, but the one-way nature of
that advice more closely resembled the conduct literature of the period than
the more interactive dialogues of later advice columns.5
Launched in 1883, the Ladies’ Home Journal further advanced the no-
tion that the white middle-class American woman was inherently defined
by her consumer impulses. Household and fashion advice abounded, often
informed by the desires of the magazine’s advertisers. Like conduct books,
etiquette columns in magazines like the Journal offered strict guidelines on
appropriate behavior for young women. But they also addressed issues like
marriage and divorce that would become central to the “lovelorn” advice
columns in early twentieth-century newspapers. The Journal developed more
interactive, serialized forms of advice, experimenting with some of the rhetor-
ical conventions that would later define newspaper advice columns—reader
letters, expert counselors, and appeals for readers to return to the columns in
the following issue. Because the Journal was a national monthly periodical,
however, and because its editorial staff largely took content cues from their
advertisers, the magazine rarely fostered ongoing dialogue with its readers.6
Early question- and-answer columns, conduct books, and especially
women’s magazines set important precedents for modern advice columns.
But the newspaper advice columns of the early twentieth century largely de-
parted from these forerunners. Instead, they created a new, interactive genre
13
that nimbly responded to Americans’ evolving values, anxieties, and desires.

They were able to do so because of changes in the American newspaper’s form
and business model that turned the newspaper into a commodity for women.
-
At the end of the nineteenth century, American newspapers moved away
from a model of journalism centered on partisan politics and began to
emerge as the profit-driven businesses that we recognize today. A glance back
at the newspaper business a century earlier shows how drastic this shift was.
In the early 1800s, the political party system defined and funded American
newspapers. Decades before journalistic standards of objectivity dominated
the field, most editors used their publications to loudly endorse local, state,
and federal party platforms and candidates. If, from the publisher’s perspec-
tive, the nineteenth-century newspaper reader was a voter, then that reader
was necessarily male. Women did read and even write into newspapers, but
publishers and editors were often critical or dismissive of these “women
politicians.” Between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s, newspaper
publishers shifted their focus away from politics and toward profit. By the
dawn of the twentieth century, news had become a commodity, its form and
content shaped toward the bottom line. Advertising revenue served as the
major source of profits, which meant that the ideal newspaper reader was
no longer a voter, but a potential purchaser. This transformation marked the
birth of the modern American newspaper—and a feminized vision of its
readership.7
Broader forces, including nationalization, industrialization, transporta-
tion and technological innovations, and the growth of corporations, spurred
the commercialization of newspapers. The steady growth of American cities,
the emergence of a culturally and financially influential middle class, and the
expansion of market capitalism created a need for newspapers offering more
diverse content, from crime reportage to coverage of leisure pursuits. The
establishment of telegraph lines across the country and the founding of the
Associated Press in 1846 made possible the fast delivery of news from faraway
places. With technological innovation, expanding circulation, and growing
newsroom staffs, the amount of capital needed to start and maintain a news-
paper rose significantly by the end of the nineteenth century. One historian
has estimated that during the early 1830s, a printer could establish a small
weekly paper with about $500. In the decade after the Civil War, newspaper
startup costs would jump to $1 million. As the advertising industry grew and
matured, ad revenue became a more attractive source of capital for publishers
14
and influenced their understanding of their target audience. By the turn of

the twentieth century, advertisers had thoroughly internalized the notion
that women were the primary purchasers in American households, gearing
the majority of their ads toward female readers. Publishers, too, began to
place women at the center of newspapers’ content, marketing, and business
strategies.8
Newspapers like Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s New York Evening
Journal— pioneers of what many called “yellow journalism”— set early
precedents for this gendered transformation. Yellow journalism was a turn-of-
the-century style of reportage that offered narrative-driven, sensationalized
headlines and stories, and it claimed to champion the plights of the poor,
anonymous, and underrepresented. Often derided for their lack of objectivity,
yellow publishers nonetheless established marketing, content, and stylistic
innovations that newspapers across the country would use to draw in women
readers. They expanded feature and entertainment content. They employed
new visual and graphic innovations like banner headlines and photographs.
They relied on advertising to support their significant overhead costs. They
used publicity stunts to raise circulation and to drum up interesting and scan-
dalous stories—stories that often involved women journalists like the famous
stunt reporter Nellie Bly. It was yellow newspapers that first hired significant
numbers of female journalists to work in feature departments.9
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, newspapers began
implementing and refining the techniques that yellow newspapers had
pioneered— particularly those pertaining to potential women readers.
Publishers and editors established separate departments to handle women’s
content, and they added more and different features aimed specifically at
women. In 1895, only about half of newspapers published content for women,
and when they did, it rarely extended beyond a half-column feature. By the
mid-1920s, creative and extensive woman’s sections were standard features in
most American newspapers. Almost all comprised their own autonomous
section, featured in the middle or back of the newspaper, but often advertised
on the front page. On Sundays, especially, they made up a large portion of a
newspaper’s content. A number of woman’s page columns used eye-catching
graphics and photography, and the section itself was clearly marked with a
banner headline.10
Most woman’s pages included columns offering housekeeping schedules
and cooking menus, theater and movie gossip, home decoration guidance,
information on political issues pertaining to women, local gossip and club
news, and etiquette and fashion tips. Almost all featured at least one advice
15
column; many featured several, covering topics about women’s health, love
and marriage, parenting, beauty techniques, and more. The myriad column
genres and topics demonstrated that newspapers were taking new liberties
and experimenting with new forms in order to draw women with varied
interests and at different stages of life. In the 1890s, columnists, editors, and
publishers printed women’s content almost as an afterthought; only a few
decades later, they competed with other newspapers to best serve female
readers of their city and region, conducting careful research on which topics
and genres would best attract this coveted market.11
To craft thoughtful and authentic features for a female audience,
publishers sought syndicated material written by female authors, hired women
journalists, and, somewhat less frequently, employed women editors. Women,
one newspaper-industry periodical told its readers, were best suited to craft
the kind of wholesome content that made a newspaper a “home paper.” “The
tone of their work, when left to themselves, is high. People who love clean
newspapers are not slow to discover this and patronize [female reporters].” By
1936, according to newspaperwoman Ishbel Ross, there were 12,000 women
working in journalism as editors, feature writers, and reporters. Yet Ross also
recognized the limits women faced as journalists. “They excel in the feature
field and dominate the syndicates. . . . They function in the advertising, busi-
ness, art, promotion and mechanical departments, as well as in the editorial
rooms. They have arrived, in a convincing way. But the fact remains that they
have made surprisingly little progress on the front page.” Authors of women’s
features including advice columnists, usually barred from the front page,
crafted a distinctly female professional niche on the pages of the woman’s
section.12
The growth of the woman’s page was not the only evidence of newspaper
executives’ preoccupation with women readers. Publishers regularly placed
ads for their publications in advertising-industry trade journals like Printers’
Ink touting their unprecedented access to female consumers. By the end of the
1910s, ad after ad placed in Printers’ Ink featured women in their visual and
textual appeals to advertisers and boasted of their ability to get newspapers
“into the home.” All ads placed by newspapers in trade journals featured
white women as their idealized readers, sometimes situating them in or ad-
jacent to single-family homes. “Into homes where you can SELL,” stated an
Indianapolis News ad in a 1932 issue of Printers’ Ink. It featured a well-dressed,
fair-skinned woman opening the front door of her comfortable, middle-class
home to retrieve the newspaper. A New York Sun ad in a 1936 issue of Printers’
Ink featured an image of a young woman with a stylish bob and emphasized
16
Figure 1.1 Typical of woman’s pages of the period, this 1923 spread in the Indianapolis
Star occupied a full page, featured various graphics and photography, and covered many
topics. Indianapolis Star, March 4, 1923.
17
the “floodgate of new wants” prompted by her recent engagement. Newspaper

ads in trade journals provide a candid look at publishers’ understanding of
the ideal female reader: a white, middle-class homemaker with access to dis-
posable income. By contrast, publishers rarely, if ever, touted their access to
audiences of color, working-class, or immigrant readers.13
In fact, the only representations of African American women in trade
journal newspaper advertisements were cartoons depicting racist stereotypes.
A Baltimore News ad in a 1919 issue of Printers’ Ink, for example, featured a
cartoon depicting a white woman appealing to an African American woman
in head wrap and apron, the latter holding up her hand in protest. “ ‘I’m
looking for a laundress,’ ” announced the white woman. “ ‘Would YOU like
to do my washing?’ ” The black woman, whom the ad dubbed “Aunt Jemima,”
Figure 1.2 This Chicago American advertisement in Printer’s Ink promised advertisers
exclusive access to consumer-focused brides. “We Furnish the Bride,” Chicago American
advertisement, Printer’s Ink, November 30, 1933. Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune.
18
responded, “ ‘No, but I’ll gib you de name ob de lady what does mine.’ ” The
News pronounced Baltimore “a fine field for home labor saving devices,”
implying that white Baltimore women sought housekeeping alternatives to
replace the labor of black female domestic workers.14
Given the growing successes of foreign-language newspapers, especially
Yiddish and Jewish publications, publishers and advertisers proved more
open to acknowledging foreign-born readers, though rarely without a veiled
racism that was prevalent at the time. In 1904 the newspaper-industry peri-
odical Editor and Publisher noted the “constantly increasing . . . territory of
Jewish papers in New York,” though they lamented the “grotesque appear-
ance . . . of their big headlines in the curious Hebrew characters.” This attitude
did not necessarily reflect newspapers’ disinterest in drawing a wide read-
ership; in fact, as the population of foreign-born residents swelled in cities
across the country, along with the numbers of African Americans moving
from the South to urban centers, publishers certainly understood the racial,
ethnic, and class diversity of their readership and the economic potential of
new markets. Rather, trade journal articles and advertisements reflected the
idealized readers that publishers believed their advertisers wanted to reach.15
By the first decades of the twentieth century, women readers had become
publishers’ most prized demographic, and the woman’s page one of the most
culturally and economically significant sections of the daily paper. “From any
point of view,” observed veteran newspaper editor Harland F. Manchester in
1932, “the contents of the woman’s page is now probably the most important
non-news reading matter in the newspaper, and wields the greatest power.”16
The commercialization of the newspaper, publishers’ growing focus on ad-
vertising revenue, the idealization of the woman reader-consumer, and the
expansion of the woman’s page—each of these phenomena constituted the
gendered modernization of the American mass-circulation newspaper. The
rise of the woman’s page and newspapers’ interest in female readers reframed
the paper as a space where readers could tune into debates on the most inti-
mate, personal, and pressing issues facing Americans.
-
In 1898, a young newspaperwoman named Marie Manning found herself with
a new assignment. Manning wrote for the woman’s department of Hearst’s
New York Evening Journal—sometimes dubbed the “Hen’s Coop”—cov-
ering club and society news, fashion, housekeeping, and other domestic
topics. Recently, she had noticed, the newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor de-
partment had been receiving more and more queries from women requesting
19
counsel on issues like adultery, childcare, and courtship. Manning jumped

at the opportunity to answer them, proposing “a department where people
could write about their personal troubles—love and domestic—and receive
unbiased opinions.” Manning envisioned a column that had “a touch of the
maternal in it, as well as of the sibyl.” That July, she adopted the pen name
“Beatrice Fairfax” and commenced her “Advice to the Lovelorn” column in
the pages of the Journal. Under the Fairfax name, Manning became one of the
earliest and most influential advice columnists of the period.17
Over the next several decades, American newspapers and syndicates
followed the example of the Journal, producing hundreds of different ad-
vice columns covering dozens of topics. The columns drew on the advice
Figure 1.3 Marie Manning, far left, sitting with other female journalists who worked in
the New York Evening Journal’s women’s department, circa 1898. Marie Manning Papers,
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts).
20
traditions of the past like conduct manuals, but the public and interactive
nature of newspaper columns transformed both the content and the process
of advice giving. Ultimately, the modern column’s flexibility and its potential
for democratic interaction marked a new approach to the way that advice was
dispensed and received.18
Newspaper advice columns of the early twentieth century shared a
number of key traits. First, they addressed a bewildering number of is-
sues affecting the daily lives of American readers. Advice columnists and
letter writers covered housekeeping, beauty, marriage and courtship, pol-
itics, money and employment, childrearing, politics, mental health, and
many other topics. Editors and publishers took cues from the interests
and demands of readers and tested out different topical focuses and rhe-
torical styles, creating a heterogeneous market of advice to accommodate
the genre’s many purposes and wide audience. Second, the interactive na-
ture of advice columns made the market highly competitive and poten-
tially very lucrative. Reader letters provided quantifiable evidence of the
responsiveness of a newspaper’s readership. New columns that did not re-
ceive positive reader feedback could be pulled after only a few weeks, while
others garnered enthusiastic support, ran for decades, and launched pop-
ular columnists to stardom. Finally, advice columns of the period incor-
porated readers’ letters and requests in very different ways. Some featured
letters front and center and invited readers to participate regularly, while
other columns focused on the ideas and wisdom of the columnist. This
tension between participatory dialogue and editorial authority became a
defining characteristic of the modern advice column.
Most mass-circulation newspapers relied on national syndicates—content-
producing agencies that sold columns and other features to editors across the
country—to provide advice content. By 1925, the great majority of American
newspapers featured at least one syndicated advice column on their woman’s
pages, and many featured several.19 Syndicates saved publishers the time and
cost of having to hire a columnist and generate original content; if a column
did not attract reader feedback, a publisher could simply cancel his or her
subscription or substitute a new columnist or feature. From home economist
Marion Harland to opera singer-turned-beauty maven Lina Cavalieri, many
of the most popular and long-standing advice personalities penned syndicated
columns. Along with motion pictures, women’s magazines, advertisements,
and radio shows, syndicated woman’s page features disseminated standardized
advice on beauty and fashion, gender norms, social values, etiquette, leisure
pursuits, and even politics to female audiences across the country.20
21
With their prescriptive focus on women’s appearance and behavior,

syndicated beauty and fashion columns could sometimes resemble the
one-way advice mechanisms of the past. By contrast, local columns—those
created and generated by individual publications rather than by syndicates—
tended to foster more interactive and creative advice content. These columns
flourished in well-capitalized, high-circulation newspapers that could af-
ford to hire a columnist and could garner the necessary letters from regional
reader-correspondents. Though local columns required a higher initial invest-
ment from publishers, when successful they drew remarkably loyal, long-term
readers and shaped the paper’s marketing and content decisions well outside
of the column inches of the woman’s page. They sometimes maintained hun-
dreds of repeat contributors and were able to address the particular regional
needs or demands of their audiences—from where to get the freshest groceries
to where to see and admire local art.21
More nimble and responsive than syndicated columns, local columns were
able to foster dialogue between columnists and readers—and sometimes,
between readers themselves. Housekeeping forums, for example, tended
to be successful in regional papers situated in large urban areas. The Boston
Globe’s “Confidential Chat” and similar columns created flexible, public, and
quasi-anonymous spaces in the newspaper for participants to trade cooking,
housekeeping, childcare, and other domestic tips. A letter writer seeking
good recipes for pie filling, for example, might receive several responses from
household forum readers.22 “Lovelorn” columns, which addressed marriage,
romance, and the changing cultural meaning of the American family, also pro-
vided opportunities for reader interaction.23 To address the diffuse problems
of America’s jilted and jaded, lovelorn columns relied heavily on the person-
ality and opinions of advice columnists, who carved out distinct writing styles
and worldviews. Yet particularly in non-syndicated lovelorn columns, loyal
readers began sending their own responses to questions; sometimes they even
took issue with the guidance provided by the columnist herself.
Whether syndicated or local, and whether addressing home economics
or marriage woes, newspaper advice columns represented a fundamentally
new way of giving and receiving advice. Certainly, the columns reflected key
conservative strains of modern American society—in particular, the values
of consumer capitalism that shaped both the business models and the con-
tent strategies of mass-circulation papers. Yet newspaper advice columns
also opened up unintended and potentially radical opportunities for women
editors, columnists, and especially readers to seize on the structure of the
woman’s page and make it their own.
2
America’s Confessional
Advice Columns and Their Readers
In October 1910, novelist-turned-advice columnist Laura Jean Libbey

responded to a distraught letter from a heartbroken young woman.
A. M. identified herself as “one of many girls [working] in a big department
store” in the booming city of Chicago. While at work, A. M. made the ac-
quaintance of a young gentleman who professed his love and asked for her
hand in marriage. “O do pity me, Miss Libbey, in my mortification, when
I tell you, without mincing words, that he jilted me for no reason. The day
I was to have been married dawned; in my bridal dress my friends waiting—
but no bridegroom came. . . . I lost my position and my heart is as one dead.”
Libbey responded sympathetically, encouraging the girl to take some time
away, if she could, “where you have friends who will be kind enough to take
a new interest in your welfare and will help you to forget the trouble that is
fresh in your grieved mind.” Libbey also assured A. M. that she had turned to
the right place for help. “You have indeed poured your heart woes to one who
sympathizes with you in your misfortune, more than words can tell.”1
A. M.’s letter and Libbey’s response revealed the multilayered reasons
that newspaper readers wrote into advice columns. The columnist offered
A. M. counsel on what to do and how to behave in the aftermath of her failed
engagement. But her column also provided the letter writer with a public
confessional where she could convey her grief, embarrassment, and anx-
iety, eliciting the sympathy of the columnist and, presumably, the column’s
thousands of readers. The exchange between Libbey and A. M., moreover,
demonstrated that by 1910, many Americans dealt with very different cultural,
social, and economic conditions than did previous generations. A. M. was
a single woman taking advantage of new employment opportunities in an
23
America’s Confessional 23
expanding consumer economy. It was A. M.’s friends and coworkers, rather

than her family or religious community, that most influenced her life and pro-
vided her with support. And rather than encouraging her suitor to seek her
hand through her father, A. M. eschewed patriarchal conventions of court-
ship, followed her heart, and made her own arrangements for her marriage.
The exchange between Libbey and A.M. seemed to suggest that it was these
decidedly modern conditions that led to the young woman’s heartbreak.
This chapter examines the meanings of advice and the cultural purpose of
advice columns from the mid-1910s through the late 1930s, a period in which
Americans incorporated advice columns into their everyday newspaper
reading and came to view them as an indispensable source of counsel, sup-
port, and camaraderie. During these decades, newspaper advice columnists
and letter writers came together to create a complex exchange of advice that
both responded and contributed to the making of modern American so-
ciety. Newspaper readers wrote into columns to confess their problems and
anxieties, to seek empathy and answers from virtual strangers, to propose
topics of debate, to take issue with columnists’ advice, and even to offer their
own guidance. By identifying the process of confession as central to the diag-
nosis and cure of their anxiety, advice column participants helped to carve out
a remarkably modern—and enduring—genre of entertainment and popular
therapy.2
Advice columnists deftly led this evolving newsprint dialogue. Many
espoused worldviews that sought to appeal to a broad swathe of readers, while
simultaneously outlining a bewildering set of expectations and ideals. To help
readers navigate the problems of urban industrial life, the columnists blended
an optimistic approval of modern innovation with a nostalgic reverence for
a supposedly premodern past. They rarely mentioned race or racism, and al-
most all of their advice internalized the values of racism and segregation that
shaped Americans’ lives across the country. At the same time, the columnists
implicitly acknowledged the growing diversity of their readership and shaped
their advice around concepts of practicality and respectability—ideas that
saw wide acceptance among many Americans regardless of race, ethnicity,
and class.
While advice columnists often sought to assert themselves as the “bosses”
or the “mothers” of their columns, they also recognized the power of columns
that included dissenting opinions from readers. Advice columns drew so many
reader responses because they were able to serve as public forums that could
nonetheless ensure contributors’ anonymity.3 This was a potent combina-
tion and prompted detailed, candid, intimate, and often engrossing glimpses
24
into contributors’ worldviews and psyches. Over the decades, it was reader-
contributors, and the debates they helped foster, that made advice columns
into a quintessentially modern mass media juggernaut—an adaptable genre
that served alternately as a means of popular and cathartic therapy, an en-
tertainment feature, a force of cultural assimilation, and a site of democratic
cultural debate.
-
Advice columns featured questions about religion, politics, courtship and sex,
childrearing and the meaning of parenthood, marriage and divorce, beauty,
fashion, women’s employment, cooking, budgeting and running a household,
loneliness and depression, and other topics. Regardless of specifics, almost
all the discussions in advice columns of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s reflected
Americans’ struggle with changing meanings of womanhood, manhood, and
family in an urban, industrialized, and mass-culture-saturated environment.
The vibrancy of discussions, the skyrocketing popularity of the columns in
newspapers across the country, and the organic interactivity of columns—es-
pecially local columns—marked these decades as the heyday of advice. This
period also served as a transitional one between the more puritanical advice
of the Victorian era and the period following World War II, in which most
advice columnists acknowledged the permanence of a pluralistic society and
proved more willing to engage in frank discussions about sexual experience
and to question traditional notions of women’s roles.
Columnists adopted different tones— from romantic to intensely
practical— and sometimes parted ways with each other on particular
subjects; but as a group, they generally endorsed mainstream and traditional
worldviews, assuming middle-class housewifery as the standard experience
for women, encouraging chastity during courtship, and counseling divorce
only in extreme situations. They sought to modernize this perspective by en-
couraging women to approach their domestic roles as they would a job—with
efficiency, practicality, and professionalism. They expressed concern about
the potential for idleness and luxury that consumer culture engendered, yet
insisted that women were instinctually good consumers and encouraged them
to remain attractive and fashionable. In other words, advice columnists found
a way to blend the old and the new, to encourage Americans to adjust to the
vertigo of modern times without giving in to its excesses.
Lovelorn columns proved one of the most popular sub-genres of advice
columns. American newspaper readers had an almost insatiable desire to read
and talk about the changing nature of courtship and marriage. Though many
25
letter writers asked about personal minutiae—the meaning of a particular

encounter, frustration with a spouse’s foibles—they nonetheless grappled
with broad questions about the nature of the modern family and the relation-
ship between self and society. For example, in the early twentieth century, it
appeared as if an epidemic of failed romances had struck the United States,
or so many columnists and reader-contributors remarked. Advice columnists
came at the pressing problems of jilted lovers from different perspectives.
Drawing on her experiences as a sentimental novelist, Laura Jean Libbey often
employed emotional and romantic tones in her advice in order to cast her re-
lationship with readers in an affectionate light. In her first Chicago Tribune
column, Libbey greeted her readers thus:
In every life there are dark and lonely moments during which one
would give the world—were it possible—for some kindly heart to
confide in, some sympathetic being to share and assuage their grief. In
such an hour, if you will entrust your little sorrows to me, there may
be much to teach each other—a strength and a refuge in the hour of
need . . . A little silver cord, so tiny you cannot see it, draws us together
in a friendship which I hope will be enduring as long as life lasts.4
In deploying the flowery language of the sentimental novel genre, Libbey

marketed herself as a loyal and exceedingly kind confidante, offering “a
refuge” and “friendship” just as much as advice.
Posing herself in contrast to the sentimental writings of novelists like
Libbey and Victorian women journalists like Jenny June, Dorothy Dix
identified romance as the singular problem of courtship and marriage. “No
other one thing has done so much harm,” Dix declared confidently in 1919.
“Novelists and poets sing the glory of romance, but in reality romance is
merely a kind of sentimental delirium.” Romance, she regularly argued, was
particularly pernicious in a society saturated with modern amusements, where
parents were less likely and able to police the activities of their children, and
where sexual and behavioral boundaries were eroding.5
Most columnists agreed that courtship, especially casual courtship,
should be a chaste experience. The “kissing question” dominated many advice
columns during the 1910s and 1920s, especially in letters written by teenagers.
Almost across the board, columnists reminded girls of the threat that sexual
permissiveness posed to their marriage prospects, their reputations, and their
moral fiber. Responding to “the vital question among girls of 14 to 17 . . . ‘Is it
right to let a boy kiss me,’ ” Detroit News columnist Nancy Brown answered
26
Figure 2.1 Novelist and early advice columnist Laura Jean Libbey, 1910. Bain News
Service, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.
with an unequivocal no. “The right kind of girl does not allow promiscuous
kissing. The right kind of girl, with a clean, little girl mind, such as she should
have at that age is not always thinking of kissing.”6 Columnists incentivized
the withholding of kissing and petting by explaining to girls the best way to
capture a young man’s long-term attentions. “Believe me, it is the modest
girl, chary of her kisses, who will win his admiration, and awaken his heart,”
Libbey assured young women. Yet these strictures did not go unquestioned
by readers. Only a few weeks later, a young man who dubbed himself W. R.
K. wrote in to Libbey, borrowing her flowery and romantic tone. He and his
sweetheart had confessed their love for each other, but he complained that
27
“she will not grant me a love’s privilege of holding her dear self in my arms and
pressing her dear lips to my own. Please, dear Miss Libbey, give me the benefit
of your advice and help me out of my difficulty, for my love is true.” Libbey
gently chastised W. R. K., reminded him how “sacred” a woman’s lips were,
and counseled him to appreciate the good sense of his girlfriend. By featuring
W. R. K.’s letter, Libbey allowed a multiplicity of opinions in her column, but
ultimately reinforced her insistent belief that promiscuous kissing was detri-
mental to modern courtship.7
Most columnists and letter writers believed that the kissing question was
indicative of the tensions between two cultural archetypes: the modern girl
and the old-fashioned girl. These two figures loomed large in letters written
by both men and women in the 1910s and 1920s and in the advice given by
columnists. The modern girl drew on the concept of the New Woman that
emerged at the turn of the century, though columnists did not often use
the latter term. The modern girl embraced consumer values, participated in
mass leisure, and interacted in the public sphere with ease. Though shaped
by women’s new political opportunities, especially after the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, she was not inherently political. Dorothy
Dix characterized the modern girl as practical, frank, and independent. Yet,
“like a great many other modern improvements . . . she isn’t an unmixed
blessing.” The main reason, Dix continually insisted, that courtship and mar-
riage had fallen on such hard times was because the modern woman had no
male counterpart. “We’ve evolved a new woman,” she insisted in one column,
“but Man is the same Man as he was when Adam was a boy.” In Dix’s world-
view, masculinity required no reinvention. It remained the responsibility of
women to temper their new opportunities and desires, while still deferring to
time-honored male fantasies about ideal womanhood.8
Readers themselves also debated the value of the modern girl and the
old-fashioned girl. Responding to a spate of letters about extramarital af-
fairs in the Detroit News “Experience” column, Disappointed wrote that he
longed for a traditional girl, as those he had met in Detroit turned out to be
selfish, only interested in money or a good time. Responses to his criticisms
came quickly, many from the self-proclaimed “old-fashioned girls” that
Disappointed had insisted were a rarity. A Tin Pan Heart retorted, “In answer
to [Disappointed’s] question, ‘Where are the old-fashioned girls?’ I should
like to ask . . . Where are the men who want old-fashioned girls? In this pre-
sent day the average man wants a Twentieth Century girl, and the girl who
does not care for dancing, swimming and the rest of the sports, is the girl
of two centuries ago.” Young, single Detroiters like Disappointed and A Tin
28
Figure 2.2 Many images of the New Woman abounded at the turn of the century.
The Gibson Girl blended aspects of modernity—the bicycle, for example—with trap-
pings of traditional feminine beauty. Scribner’s, June 1895. Library of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Division.
Pan Heart used the column to express their frustration with the complex and
sometimes contradictory nature of courtship and leisure in the modern city.
They also insisted that traditional values continued to hold strong among
some Detroit residents.9
By the 1930s, many young column participants no longer found resonant
the demands for chastity made by columnists like Dix, Libbey, and Brown or
the traditional nostalgia of Disappointed and A Tin Pan Heart. Syndicated
columnist Beatrice Fairfax dedicated several columns to the topic of “petting”
29
in 1938, and both the questions asked and counsel given reflected growing
public acceptance of premarital kissing and an increased frankness on the
part of younger column participants. In an essay entitled “Playing with Fire,”
Fairfax argued that the problem of modern dating was not the act of petting,
but the fact that parents did not explain properly to their children the nature
of courtship and the inevitability of sexual urges. “We can’t nowadays keep
youngsters in ignorance of the fact that human nature is an inflammable sort
of thing. On the contrary, the more clearly they understand this, the better.”
Petting was a problem, Fairfax concluded, for those youngsters with negligent
parents, but not for “sweet wholesome youngsters who . . . have been sensibly
brought up.”10 In refusing to flatly condemn petting, Fairfax proved willing
to adjust her advice in order to complement changing mainstream beliefs and
practices and to appeal to new generations of readers.
Fairfax’s amended approach to the subject may have resulted from her
column’s interactivity. Many letter writers shared candid feedback on this
topic, expressing frustration with hard-and-fast rules about abstention from
petting. “I went out with a very nice boy the other night but he wanted to kiss
me good night,” Anxious and Not so Prudish wrote to Fairfax. “I said ‘no,’ and
when I saw him again he acted very cool. I like him a lot but I’m afraid I won’t
see much more of him. Was I right in saying ‘no’?” Another young woman
who had been jilted by a boy after kissing him used the pen name Man-Hater,
but sought opinions from “good sorts of chaps” on the subject.11
Some letters revealed readers’ poignant struggles to balance their physical
desires with social rules. In an unprinted letter to Beatrice Fairfax stating that
she “can’t seem to like anyone else” but the young man she had been dating
for several years, Betty confessed, “Whenever I see him I get weak around
the knees.” She asked Fairfax how to control these feelings when around
her boyfriend. Another correspondent, Margaret, conveyed similar sexual
frustration:
Tell me, please how far can a girl go and still be good? My body cries
to be loved but my conscience will not allow me to go very far. I have
been raised by very strict parents who believe that it is a sin for a girl to
even kiss a boy unless he is engaged to her at least. Yet it seems to me
that everybody does quite the contrary. I am so muddled that I do not
know what to do and what not to do.
I feel that I am normal and human. And I want to do the things
that cry out to be done from within me. But, I do not want to be cheap,
promiscuous or foolish. Please, do nice girls “pet”? How far shall I go?
30
Margaret’s handwritten letter was annotated “hard to answer,” presumably

by the columnist or one of her assistants.12 The honesty of correspondents
like Betty and Margaret reflected how difficult it was for young Americans to
interpret the rules of courtship during a transformative cultural moment—
and during the throes of young adulthood. The anonymous confessional of
the advice column allowed these readers to share frank details about their
own sexuality; such candor might not have been possible with their parents,
friends, or other in-person supports. Their letters show that the reality of
young American women’s experiences—especially their reckoning with their
own sexual desire and agency—differed greatly from the idealized standards
of womanhood that prevailed at the time.
Kissing and petting became a particularly debated issue during these
decades because of the increasing mobility and personal freedom experienced
by young people. As growing numbers of Americans dwelled in cities, it be-
came more difficult for parents, extended families, or local communities to
monitor their behavior. Modern sites of amusement, from Coney Island to
nickelodeons, offered public spaces where young men and women could meet,
yet provided enough privacy for sexual experimentation. The increasing ubiq-
uity of the automobile created a new, perhaps unprecedented quasi-private
space in which young people could interact. Dorothy Dix noted often that
the anonymity of city life and the lures of modern amusements were particu-
larly dangerous for working-class girls. In response to a working girl’s plaintive
question, “DOES IT PAY TO BE GOOD?,” Dorothy Dix penned a sympa-
thetic but cautionary response:
[This] girl is pretty and poor. She has to work for her living. Her hours
of labor are long and hard and her earnings only enough to pay for the
bare necessities of existence. She has few pleasures and no luxuries, and
she sees the future stretching before her, an arid highway along which
she must toil footsore and weary, cold and hungry and discouraged.
Yet she has the natural impulse of her sex within her. She is no sense-
less, passionless machine. She is all quivering, throbbing girlhood. She
longs for pretty clothes to set off her beauty, for amusement, for gayety,
for feasting and dancing and lovemaking.
Dix acknowledged how enticing the excesses of urban leisure could be,
but ultimately advised her correspondent to rise up against these impulses.
“Truly, little sister, there is nothing in the world so little gay as what we call
the gay life. . . . It pays to be good, because only good women get any decent
31
treatment from men.” Her advice revealed that no matter her economic posi-
tion, a woman’s ultimate goal was to acquire the “decent treatment” of a man.
Her response also alluded to the ominous threat of indecent treatment from
men. The lures of leisure, Dix seemed to imply, created opportunities for men
to take sexual advantage of working girls like the letter writer. Dix believed it
was women’s responsibility to protect their virtue, leaving unquestioned the
notion that by moving freely in the public sphere, modern women invited
sexual assault.13
For those who had fallen victim to these pitfalls of modern culture,
fellow reader-contributors often proved more effective comforters than ad-
vice columnists. A letter from Lonely Heart to participants in the Boston
Globe’s “Confidential Chat” about her office affair prompted a number of
responses from contributors in early 1919. While some women condemned
Lonely Heart for her behavior, others jumped to her defense. “Lonely Heart,
it seems to me,” wrote Granite Heart, “was more sinned against than sinning
to be made love to by a married man.” She went on to remind Lonely Heart
that she had the support of her column sisters no matter her mistakes. “It
does one good to read [these] letters and know that there are such helpful un-
derstanding women.”14 This sentiment—that participation in a virtual com-
munity could sometimes draw condemnation and judgment but more often
fostered support and camaraderie—would be echoed years later in online
chat rooms, message boards, and social media groups.
Urban life meant that Americans interacted with people of very different
backgrounds. While most columns mentioned topics of race and ethnicity
relatively rarely, segregation and white identity were central subtexts and
assumptions underlying mainstream advice columns and the dialogues they
hosted. Columnists espoused beliefs that idealized white womanhood and
reinforced the racial status quo that defined early twentieth-century America.
In their silence about race, columns failed to address issues of discrimination,
violence, and socioeconomic inequality that shaped the experiences of people
of color living in urban centers.15
Unsurprisingly, then, columnists embraced a segregationist vision of
courtship. They endorsed interpersonal relations between people of different
European ethnicities, but not between those popularly considered to be of
a different race. When R. S. wrote to Nancy Brown about how upset her
parents were over her Greek suitor, the columnist quelled her fears. “If the
young man’s nationality is the only objection, I see no reason why you should
not marry him. The Greeks belong to the white race, which is the main con-
sideration.” But for Brown, Jewish Americans were a different story. “Maxene,”
32
the columnist wrote to another correspondent a few weeks later, “A marriage

of Jew and Gentile is a very doubtful proposition. It is rarely successful. The
racial traits are too wide apart.” Never did Brown—or any other white advice
columnist—feature a letter addressing platonic or romantic relationships be-
tween African Americans or between white readers and African Americans.16
The topic of courtship revealed an implicit distinction between
newspapers’ approaches to white readers who were working-class or had re-
cently arrived from another country, and their approaches to black readers,
whether immigrants themselves or from families residing in the United
States for generations. Advice columnists envisioned themselves as providing
a blueprint for assimilation, Americanization, and idealized whiteness for
immigrants and working people that they and many Americans considered
white. Although columnists may have embraced a vision of modern city life
that was more ethnically and economically diverse, that vision remained
racially segregated. By discouraging their presumed white readers from be-
coming romantically involved with Jewish men or women—and by being
unwilling to even mention the idea of interracial relationships—columnists
identified which groups their readers should consider to be the real “others.”
Ironically, there were some aspects of mainstream white advice—columnists’
advocacy of notions of respectability, their practical and no- nonsense
approaches to courtship—that might have resonated with African American
readers, but those were hard for black readers to square with the columnists’
unexamined racism. This left black Americans to carve out a separate vision
of black modernity that informed their own media forms—including African
American advice columns.17
-
Columnists and column participants fretted about the failures of modern
courtship because courtship fed into an even more alarming develop-
ment: what Dorothy Dix dubbed “the modern matrimonial problem.” By the
early twentieth century, many American men and women sought affection,
romance, and even personal fulfillment in marriage. This “companionate mar-
riage” was a relatively new idea—a departure from earlier understandings of
matrimony as a largely economic transaction shaped by duty and hierarchy.
Ideally, companionate marriage was meant to encourage more democratic
relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children. The fact
that one’s marriage and family were supposed to provide almost total emo-
tional satisfaction, however, created high, if not impractical, expectations.
Young people, newly married, found that these “great expectations” often
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
ORANGE-CHOCOLATE CHIP
COOKIES
Follow recipe for Chocolate
Chip cookies and add 1 tsp.
grated orange rind to the
shortening mixture.
The glamorous Toll House cookies ... first
introduced to American homemakers in
3-IN-1 JUMBLES
1939 through my series of radio talks on
Choco-nut ... coco-nut ... date- “Famous Foods from Famous Eating
nut. Places.”
Follow recipe above—and

divide dough into three parts. Choco-Nut: To one part, add ½ sq.
unsweetened chocolate (½ oz.), melted, and drop whole nutmeats
(½ cup) into it ... coating each thoroughly. Coco-Nut: To another part,
add ½ cup moist shredded coconut. Date-Nut: Leave third part plain
... and drop nut-stuffed dates (14) into it ... coating each thoroughly.
Each coated date and each coated nut makes a cooky.
GLAZED ORANGE JUMBLES

Double-orange flavor.... Sure to win favor.
Follow recipe above—mix into dough 1½ tsp. grated orange rind
and, if desired, 1 cup chopped nuts. Bake. While hot, dip tops of
cookies in orange glaze (⅓ cup sugar, 3 tbsp. orange juice, 1 tsp.
grated orange rind ... heated together).
BRAZIL OR PECAN JUMBLES

Follow recipe above—and stir into the dough 2 cups cut-up Brazil
or other nuts.
OLD-TIME CINNAMON JUMBLES

Made with buttermilk ... soft and cake-like.
“So easy ... that making them is a thrill for the girls in the Home Economics classes
each year,” according to Miss Sarah M. Knight of Buffalo, New York. And even her
little sixth-graders report making them with great success in their own homes!
Mix together thoroughly ...
½ cup soft shortening (part butter)

1 cup sugar
1 egg
Stir in ...
¾ cup buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla
Sift together and stir in ...
2 cups sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour

½ tsp. soda
½ tsp. salt
Chill dough. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls about 2″ apart on lightly

greased baking sheet. Sprinkle with mixture of sugar and cinnamon
(¼ cup sugar and 1 tsp. cinnamon). Bake until set but not brown.
temperature: 400° (mod. hot oven).
time: Bake 8 to 10 min.
amount: About 4 doz. 2″ cookies.
Party specialties in answer to requests.
COCONUT MACAROONS ( Recipe) Moist, chewy, chock-full of

coconut.
Beat until fluffy (only ½ min.) ...
½ cup egg whites
Stir in ...
1¼ cups sugar
¼ tsp. salt
½ tsp. vanilla
Blend in ...
2½ cups moist shredded coconut
Drop rounded teaspoonfuls 2″ apart on ungreased wrapping paper

on baking sheet. Bake until set and delicately browned. (Illustrated
directions at bottom of page tell how to remove macaroons from
paper easily.) They spread during baking, so when they come from
oven shape into mounds by gathering in edges with fingers.
temperature: 325° (slow mod. oven).
amount: About 2½ doz. 1½″ macaroons.
CHOCOLATE-COCONUT MACAROONS
Follow recipe above—and add 2 sq. unsweetened chocolate (2
oz.), melted.
CHERRY-COCONUT MACAROONS
Follow recipe above—and add ½ cup chopped candied cherries.
ALMOND MACAROONS
Soften with hands ...
1 lb. almond paste (bought from bakery or made from recipe

below)
Work in ...
2 cups sugar
¼ tsp. salt
4 tbsp. GOLD MEDAL Flour
⅔ cup sifted confectioners’ sugar
⅔ cup egg whites, unbeaten
Drop teaspoonfuls 2″ apart on ungreased wrapping paper on baking

sheet. Pat tops lightly with fingers dipped in cold water. Bake until set
and delicately browned. Remove from paper.
amount: About 5 doz. 2″ macaroons.
ALMOND PASTE (1 lb.)

Grind 2 cups blanched almonds, thoroughly dried (not toasted),
through finest knife of food grinder. Then grind twice more. Mix in 1½
cups sifted confectioners’ sugar. Blend in ¼ cup egg whites,
unbeaten, and 2 tsp. almond extract. Mold into ball. Let age in tightly
covered container in refrigerator at least 4 days.
WHEATIES-COC’N’T
MACAROONS
Follow recipe above—
except, in place of 2½ cups
coconut, use 2 cups wheaties
and 1 cup coconut. Bake 12 to
15 min.
PEANUT MACAROONS
Thin, wafery.
Remove paper with baked
Beat until lemon-colored (5 macaroons on it. Lay a wet towel
min.) ... on the hot baking sheet. Place
paper of macaroons on towel and
1 egg (large) let stand 1 minute. Steam will
loosen macaroons. Slip off with
Gradually beat in ... spatula.
⅔ cup sugar
1 tsp. water
Mix together and gently fold in ...
1 tbsp. GOLD MEDAL Flour

⅓ tsp. salt
⅓ tsp. baking powder
Add and mix just enough to blend in ...
1⅓ cups finely ground roasted peanuts (1 cup shelled, brown

husks removed)
Drop teaspoonfuls 2″ apart on ungreased wrapping paper on baking

sheet. Bake until set and delicately browned. Remove from paper
immediately.
amount: About 3 doz. 2″ macaroons.
refrigerator COOKIES Mix when
convenient ...
HOW TO MAKE REFRIGERATOR COOKIES (preliminary steps on

pp. 14-15)
1 Press and mold with hands into a 2 Wrap in waxed paper ... twisting
long roll, even and smooth, and as big ends to hold the roll in shape. Or
around as you want your cookies to press into a waxed cardboard carton
be. (butter or ice cream carton).
3 Chill roll of dough until it is firm 4 Slice with a thin knife, very sharp, to
enough to slice easily. To speed up insure neat slices with uncrumbled
chilling, place in freezing edges. Return unused dough to
compartment. refrigerator so it can remain stiff.
REFRIGERATOR COOKIES ( Recipe)

Melt-in-the-mouth, rich, and crispy.
1 cup soft shortening

½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
2 eggs
Sift together and stir in
2¾ cups sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour

½ tsp. soda
1 tsp. salt
*2 to 3 tsp. cinnamon
*Or use 1½ tsp. vanilla (add with eggs).

Mix thoroughly with hands. Press and mold into a long smooth roll
about 2½″ in diameter. Wrap in waxed paper, and chill until stiff
(several hours or overnight). With a thin, sharp knife, cut in thin
slices ⅛″ to ¹⁄₁₆″ thick. Place slices a little apart on ungreased baking
sheet. Bake until lightly browned.
amount: About 6 doz. 2½″ cookies.
★ NUT REFRIGERATOR COOKIES

Nut-lovers really go for these cookies.
Follow recipe above—and mix into dough ½ cup cut-up blanched
almonds or black walnuts or other nuts.
DATE-NUT REFRIGERATOR COOKIES

Follow recipe above—using both cinnamon and vanilla. Mix into
dough ½ cup finely chopped nuts and ½ cup finely cut dates.
ORANGE-ALMOND REFRIGERATOR COOKIES

Follow recipe above—but omit cinnamon. Stir 1 tbsp. grated
orange rind into shortening mixture. Mix into dough ½ cup cut-up
blanched almonds.
CHOCOLATE REFRIGERATOR COOKIES

Follow recipe above—but omit the cinnamon. Blend 2 sq.
unsweetened chocolate (2 oz.), melted and cooled, into the
shortening mixture.
for an elegant dessert: Make a roll by
arranging the chocolate or ginger cookies (see
p. 23) side by side with sweetened whipped
cream between. Spread whipped cream over
top and sides of roll. Chill 6 to 8 hr. Slice
diagonally for gaily striped servings.
... slice and bake when convenient.
GINGER REFRIGERATOR COOKIES

Gingery favorites in jig-time!

1 cup sugar
2 eggs
½ cup black molasses
4½ cups sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour

1 tsp. soda
1 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. ginger (3 tsp.)
Mix thoroughly with hands. Press and mold into a long, smooth roll
(several hours or overnight). With thin, sharp knife, cut in thin slices
⅛″ to ¹⁄₁₆″ thick. Place slices a little apart on ungreased baking sheet.
Bake until lightly browned.
★ NEW NORTHLAND COOKIES

Crunchy, flavorful shortening-savers.
Languid days on the St. Lawrence; the pink, rocky cliffs and blue icebergs of
Labrador; and afternoon tea on deck. Such are the memories these cookies bring
to Ruth G. Anderson of our Staff who brought back the recipe after a cruise to the
Northland.
6 tbsp. soft shortening (part

butter)
1 cup brown sugar
Stir in ...
¼ cup cold water

1 tsp. soda
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. cinnamon
Mix in ...
½ cup cut-up blanched almonds
Mix thoroughly with hands. Press and mold into a long smooth roll
Bake until lightly browned. Remove from pan immediately.
Snip off and bake ... for unexpected guests.
★ PETTICOAT TAILS
Richly delicate and dainty.
This recipe was brought from
France to Scotland by Mary,
Queen of Scots. The French
name “Petits Gateaux Tailles”
means—“little cakes cut off.”
But the name came to be
pronounced as it sounded to
the Scotch and English
—“Petticoat Tails.”
1 cup soft butter

1 cup sifted confectioners’ sugar
1 tsp. flavoring (vanilla, almond, wintergreen or rose)

¼ tsp. salt
about 2″ in diameter. Wrap in waxed paper, and chill until stiff
Bake until lightly browned.
OATMEAL REFRIGERATOR COOKIES

Nice and chewy, with a molasses-lemon tang.
Voted the best oatmeal cooky ever tasted ... when sent to our
Recipe Contest by Mrs. J. A. Gmeinder of St. Paul, Minnesota. The
distinguishing molasses-lemon
flavor was an idea from Mrs.
Richard Nugent, Brooklyn, New
York.
½ cup soft shortening

½ cup sugar
½ cup brown sugar
1 egg
1½ tsp. grated lemon rind
1½ tbsp. molasses
½ tsp. vanilla
⅞ cup (¾ cup plus 2 tbsp.) sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour

½ tsp. soda
½ tsp. salt
Mix in ...
1½ cups rolled oats
(several hours). With thin, sharp knife, cut in thin slices ⅛″ to ¹⁄₁₆″
thick. Place slices a little apart on ungreased baking sheet. Bake
until lightly browned.
PRETTY FOR PARTIES
to make Petticoat Tails match your color scheme: Tint the dough with
a few drops of red food coloring and use rose flavoring for a pink
party. Use wintergreen
flavoring and a few drops of
green coloring for a green
party.
miscellaneous COOKIES Popular through
the years ...
SNICKERDOODLES
Fun to say ... to sniff ... to eat!
Pat Roth of our Staff said, “It’s one of my happy childhood memories. My mother
would be baking when we came home from school and we would have
Snickerdoodles hot out of the oven with a glass of milk.”

1½ cups sugar
2 eggs

2 tsp. cream of tartar
1 tsp. soda
½ tsp. salt
Chill dough. Roll into balls the size of small walnuts. Roll in mixture
of 2 tbsp. sugar and 2 tsp. cinnamon. Place about 2″ apart on
ungreased baking sheet. Bake until lightly browned ... but still soft.
(These cookies puff up at first ... then flatten out with crinkled tops.)
GOLD COOKIES
Really awfully good ... and they use up those extra egg yolks!
½ cup soft shortening
1½ cups sugar
4 egg yolks
Stir in ...
2 tbsp. milk
1 tsp. vanilla

½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
Chill dough. Roll into balls the size of walnuts ... then roll balls in a
mixture of ¾ cup finely chopped nuts and 2 tsp. cinnamon. Place 3″
apart on ungreased baking sheet. Bake until golden brown ... but still
soft.
★ MOLASSES CRINKLES
Thick, chewy, with crackled, sugary tops.
When served at Mrs. Fred Fredell’s in St. Paul, Minnesota, they were so delicious I
begged the recipe. Thanks to her, thousands of homes have enjoyed these spicy
cookies.
¾ cup soft shortening

1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
¼ cup molasses

2¼ cups sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour
2 tsp. soda
¼ tsp. salt
½ tsp. cloves
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
Chill dough. Roll into balls the size of large walnuts. Dip tops in
sugar. Place, sugared-side-up, 3″ apart on greased baking sheet.
Sprinkle each cooky with 2 or 3 drops of water to produce a crackled
surface. Bake just until set but not hard.
temperature: 375° (quick mod. oven).
WASHBOARDS
Coconut-taffy bars.
1 cup soft shortening (half butter)

2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
Stir in ...
1 tsp. soda dissolved in ¼ cup hot water

1 tsp. vanilla

1½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. salt
Mix in ...
1 cup moist shredded coconut (cut up any long shreds)
Chill dough 2 hr. Roll into balls the size of walnuts. Place 2″ apart on
ungreased baking sheet. With fingers, flatten each ball into a 1½″ ×
2½″ oblong ¼″ thick. (And we do mean ¼ inch!) Press each cooky
lengthwise with tines of floured fork in washboard effect. Bake until
lightly browned.
amount: About 5 doz. 2″ × 3″ cookies.
BAR COOKIES Perennial favorites ...
cut in squares or bars.
HOW TO MAKE BAR COOKIES (preliminary steps on pp. 14-15)
1 Spread dough in 2 Cut into squares or

3 Remove from the pan
greased pan and bake as bars when slightly
with a wide spatula.
directed. cool.
BROWNIES ( Recipe) Chewy, fudgy squares ... everyone loves

them!
Melt together over hot water ...
2 sq. unsweetened chocolate (2 oz.)

⅓ cup shortening
Beat in ...
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
¾ cup sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour

½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
Mix in ...
½ cup broken nuts
Spread in well greased 8″ square pan (8 × 8 × 2″). Bake until top has
dull crust. A slight imprint will be left when top is touched lightly with
finger. Cool slightly ... then cut into squares.
temperature: 350° (mod. oven).
amount: 16 2″ squares.
CHOCOLATE-FROSTED BROWNIES
“Lickin’ good!” ... youngsters say.
Follow recipe above—and spread cooled bars or squares before

cutting with
MARIE’S CHOCOLATE ICING

Melt over hot water 1 tbsp. butter and 1 sq. unsweetened chocolate
(1 oz.). Blend in 1½ tbsp. warm water. Stir and beat in about 1 cup
sifted confectioners’ sugar (until icing will spread easily).
DAINTY TEA BROWNIES

Picturesque ... very thin. A highlight of the silver teas at a Minneapolis church.
Follow recipe above—except chop nuts finely and spread dough
in two well greased oblong pans (9 × 13 × 2″). Sprinkle with ¾ cup
blanched and finely sliced green pistachio nuts. Bake 7 to 8 min. Cut
immediately into squares or diamonds. Remove from pan while
warm.
PLANTATION FRUIT BARS

Little sugar and shortening ... but delicious. Sent to us by Mrs. Charles Willard of
Chicago.
¼ cup soft shortening
½ cup sugar
1 egg
½ cup molasses
Stir in ...
½ cup milk

1½ tsp. baking powder
¼ tsp. soda
½ tsp. salt
Mix in ...
1 cup broken nuts

1 to 2 cups cut-up raisins or dates
Spread in greased oblong pan (9 × 13 × 2″). Bake. Cool slightly ...

spread with Lemon Icing (see below) and cut into bars.
temperature: 350° (mod. oven).
amount: 4 doz. 1″ × 2″ bars.
LEMON ICING (for Plantation Fruit Bars)

Gradually beat ½ cup sifted confectioners’ sugar into 1 stiffly beaten
egg white. Add dash of salt, ¼ tsp. lemon extract.
Confection-like squares for special entertaining.

Newspaper Confessions A History of Advice Columns in A Pre Internet Age Julie Golia Full Chapter

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Newspaper Confessions: A History of

Advice Columns in a Pre-Internet Age

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Making Advice Modern: The Birth of the Newspaper

2. America’s Confessional: Advice Columns and Their Readers 22

3. Queen of Heartaches: The Advice Columnist as Icon

4. Advising the Race: Princess Mysteria and the Black Feminist

5. The Modern “Experience”: Loneliness, Anonymity, and

This book is a result of over fifteen years of discovery, research, writing,

partnership on this project and others. I am grateful for my colleagues at

2 N ewspaper Con fessions

than to their family members or friends. Some columnists even encouraged

4 N ewspaper Con fessions

newspapers captured the paradox of American culture in the early twentieth

6 N ewspaper Con fessions

longer directed questions face-​to-​face to family, priests, or other often-​male

8 N ewspaper Con fessions

What resulted is a study that reveals as much about modern American

Making Advice Modern

10 N ewspaper Con fessions

proved adaptable and evolving; many subgenres of advice columns emerged,

Making Advice Modern 11

12 N ewspaper Con fessions

middle-​class endeavor, helping to popularize a set of morals and manners

Making Advice Modern 13

that nimbly responded to Americans’ evolving values, anxieties, and desires.

14 N ewspaper Con fessions

and influenced their understanding of their target audience. By the turn of

Making Advice Modern 15

Making Advice Modern 17

the “floodgate of new wants” prompted by her recent engagement. Newspaper

18 N ewspaper Con fessions

Making Advice Modern 19

counsel on issues like adultery, childcare, and courtship. Manning jumped

20 N ewspaper Con fessions

Making Advice Modern 21

With their prescriptive focus on women’s appearance and behavior,

In October 1910, novelist-​turned-​advice columnist Laura Jean Libbey

expanding consumer economy. It was A. M.’s friends and coworkers, rather

24 N ewspaper Con fessions

letter writers asked about personal minutiae—​the meaning of a particular

In deploying the flowery language of the sentimental novel genre, Libbey

26 N ewspaper Con fessions

28 N ewspaper Con fessions

30 N ewspaper Con fessions

Margaret’s handwritten letter was annotated “hard to answer,” presumably

32 N ewspaper Con fessions

the columnist wrote to another correspondent a few weeks later, “A marriage

Follow recipe above—and

GLAZED ORANGE JUMBLES

BRAZIL OR PECAN JUMBLES

OLD-TIME CINNAMON JUMBLES

½ cup soft shortening (part butter)

Sift together and stir in ...

2 cups sifted GOLD MEDAL Flour

Chill dough. Drop rounded teaspoonfuls about 2″ apart on lightly

Party specialties in answer to requests.

COCONUT MACAROONS ( Recipe) Moist, chewy, chock-full of

½ cup egg whites

longer directed questions face-to-face to family, priests, or other often-male

Making Advice Modern 11

middle-class endeavor, helping to popularize a set of morals and manners

Making Advice Modern 13

Making Advice Modern 15

Making Advice Modern 17

Making Advice Modern 19

Making Advice Modern 21

In October 1910, novelist-turned-advice columnist Laura Jean Libbey

letter writers asked about personal minutiae—the meaning of a particular