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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
For Christian who provided patience, encouragement, laughter, and good advice
5.
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, particularly 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 editorial 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
Acknowledgments x
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 patience, 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 encouragement 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 distracted me from finishing the book, but they were also my biggest motivation. 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.
Newspaper Confessions
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 defining social and cultural issues of our time—among them drug addiction, blended families, racial micro-aggressions at work, and conflicting expectations 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 husband, 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 correspondence from Just Betty, who shared her troubles with advice columnist Nancy Brown, along with the other anonymous readers who regularly wrote
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, however, 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 digital 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 literature. 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 circulation, 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 profession. Advice columns also transformed the way that Americans gave and received interpersonal counsel, as readers increasingly turned to public, anonymous, and interactive sites for help with their most intimate problems, rather
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 assumption 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, virtually 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, moreover, allowed publishers to quantify their female readership and provide concrete 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
on which future media genres would build. Almost a century before the creation 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, middleclass 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 multilingual 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,
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 consistent topics and themes that came to define a collective vision of modernity.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 existence 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, abstract processes that had material effects on the most personal and intimate aspects of Americans’ lives. Correspondents in the Boston Globe’s interactive “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 necessary 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
of urban life in the pages of the column. These ongoing conversations between 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, etiquette 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 isolation. 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 longtime 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 intimate 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 twentiethcentury advice columns could sometimes obscure the powerful editorial influence 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
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
Newspaper Confessions offers the first cultural history of early twentieth-century 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 content 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 masscirculation 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 indepth study.12 To understand the complex web of topics and messages in advice columns, this book draws on detailed, multi-decade case studies of seven columns featured in newspapers across the country.13 Trade journals, newspaper business records, advice columnists’ personal papers, and contemporary press coverage of columns shed light on the motivations of columnists, editors, publishers, and advertisers. One of the most challenging research hurdles 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.
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 communication, 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.
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 information 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 female. 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
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 feature forms in early newspaper history. In 1690s London, for example, John Dunton, editor of the bawdy and innovative Athenian Mercury, began answering 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 questionand-answer column differed from twentieth-century advice columns in important 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-tothe-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 reportage. 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 position 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,
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 became 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 submission, 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 authorship 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 characteristics of newspaper advice columns. The genre established advice as a
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 offering 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 advancement 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 notion 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 rhetorical 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 departed from these forerunners. Instead, they created a new, interactive genre
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 perspective, 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, transportation 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 newspaper 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
