Living in the past

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/12/2016 (3265 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the summer of 1935, a 16-year-old girl was struggling with a very big problem, one she could not tell anyone.

The problem was a teacher, who had taken her under his wing. At first, the girl said, she considered him a hero. But as their after-school sessions continued, the dynamic changed. The teacher kept trying to kiss her. Then he began to “paw” her.

So the teen wrote a letter, to one person she thought could help: Free Press advice columnist Elizabeth Thompson.

“Am I at fault?” the girl wrote, under the pseudonym Perplexed. “And what am I to do?

As for the advice Thompson issued, well, let’s just say it wouldn’t be something the Free Press would sanction today. You can check it out yourself; more on that in a moment. First, let us pause for a minute, and reflect on the history of giving advice.

Throughout the 20th century — and still today, for many — advice columns were a big draw for newspapers. Readers clipped out their favourites. Columnists earned authoritative reputations; the wisest or most witty of them even became celebrities.

This is how, for instance, two identical twin sisters — one born Esther Pauline, the other Pauline Esther — became not just household names as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, but also bitter rivals on the lucrative syndicated column beat. 

Heck, when Landers — Esther Pauline Lederer, who was not the first writer to inhabit the Landers name — died in 2002, readers flooded newspapers with requests to simply recycle her old columns. Advice, in its prime, was big business.

Today, that tradition is slowly fading. The titular function of the advice column is steadily being replaced by online forums, such as Reddit, where anyone may crowdsource multitudinous solutions for their romantic, social or familial woes.

Yet the actual advice was not necessarily the driving factor in the popularity of the columns. Rather, the format fulfills a common craving for, to be blunt, gossip: Advice columns open an anonymous window into everyone else’s lives.

There’s no shame in that, necessarily. Many of us feel at least some flicker of curiosity in getting glimpses of other people’s dilemmas, from overbearing in-laws to ill-considered liaisons. Other people’s problems are engaging; just look at reality TV.

And to be fair, some of the best advice columnists were fonts of grace, or wisdom. Some of their words were timeless. But they were also products of their time, and their advice reflected that. So let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?

Every day for the rest of the year, the Free Press will frolic in the halcyon fields of our own past bad advice. We’ve gone spelunking in the archives of our long-ago advice mavens, and returned bearing treasures from the inky deep. A new (old) column will appear on our website each day. They can be found at wfp.to/ageoldadvice.

“But Free Press,” you might say. “Perhaps what was made in the past, should have stayed in the past.”

Frankly, you’d probably be right. A word of caution: These columns are, ahem, very clearly products of their time. In their prescriptions, these agony aunts didn’t just dole out advice — they also reified strict codes of social expectation. 

These restrictions often fell heaviest on women, who also made up the largest share of advice-seekers. By and large, the columnists urged women to endure ghastly behaviours — even some that were abusive, exploitative or simply wrong.

So, in a 1961 response to a wife whose husband was a pathological liar, columnist Doris Clark advised it was likely that “little can be done.” Instead, she urged the woman to stop correcting the husband’s lies, and instead feign belief in his fictions.

Ten years later, Clark clucked her tongue over a teen girl’s report of being assaulted by her parents, due to a crush on a boy. (The problem with the match, in their view, was that the boy’s parents were “shiftless” and his older brother was a divorcee.)

If the parents had been “a little less forceful,” Clark wrote, the girl might not have listened to their warnings.

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Then there is what is arguably the worst of a bad lot, the one about 16-year-old Perplexed that we are running today. Make no mistake, Thompson’s advice to that young lady is horrifying in many ways. A lot of these vintage advice columns are.

Yet perhaps they are educational, too. You won’t find these columns in many history books, and they aren’t technically news, but these dusty old columns have a place in our historical understanding — even if it makes us cringe in dismay today.

After all, the details in the columns, both from advice-seekers and advice-givers, paints a vivid picture of former social norms. Many of these were doubtless customs more honoured in the breach, but at the time they had weight of propriety.

So my advice? Come along with us this week, and take a spin through some of these old missives. Some of them are ghastly. Some, in hindsight, are just funny. But if nothing else, they ought to give us some comfort: we’ve come a long way, baby.

 melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca 

July5-1935

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.