I forgot about all this until I read Dear Mrs. Bird by A.J. Pierce recently. The main character, Emmy Lake, is an aspiring war correspondent who accidentally takes a job as Junior Typist at Woman’s Friend, a woman’s magazine. There are many things that Emmy doesn’t like about this job, but the main one is her boss, advice columnist Mrs. Bird’s, refusal to deal with unpleasantness of any kind – that is, pretty much anything and everything that real people deal with. Emmy soon begins writing back to those whose letters got scrapped. I enjoyed this novel for several reasons, not the least of which being that it reminded me of those long summer days lying on my grandmother’s couch and pouring through one yellowing magazine after another. I started to wonder about the history of advice columns: how long have they been a thing? How have they evolved since their early days until our current online Dear Prudie iterations? I set out to find out. Originally, conduct literature was written by white men who sought to indoctrinate and cement gender roles. They preached the natural inferiority and subjugation of women. Not much changed when white women took over and wrote their own conduct books, with the central message remaining the same. By the 19th century, however, the focus shifted to “defining and disseminating emerging middle-class values.” Race was rarely mentioned in these books, but “whiteness was at the center of these visions of ideal masculinity and femininity.” When this type of writing crossed the Atlantic, it found a new home in newspapers, as well as books. Many of these newspapers made space to include the numerous letters that they received from readers in response to their content. The purpose was the same as that of conduct books: to indoctrinate their (presumed white male) readers into ideal voters. That is not to say that Black-authored conduct literature didn’t exist: towards the end of the 19th century, African American conduct literature became a staple. It sought to define appropriate behavior for Black women within the Jim Crow era, going so far as to require them to adhere to strict conservative gender roles “for the good not only of themselves and their families, but also of their race”. Now, in order to get women to buy what they advertised, it became necessary to tell them what they wanted and needed. According to historian Elyse Vigiletti, an “early 20th century spike in literacy and the growing middle class created an opportunity for a wider print audience, but in order to be tapped, its tastes had to be cultivated.” In other words, conduct literature became taste literature, molding its readers into the perfect consumers. Later on, she left the World to work at the New York Evening Journal. To her dismay, she was relegated to the women department instead of covering the crime section as she wanted. Still, she set out to do her best. Noticing how many women wrote to the paper with questions about marriage, childcare, and courtship, Manning proposed a “department where people could write about their personal troubles – love and domestic – and receive unbiased opinions.” This department, she thought, should have “a touch of the maternal in it, as well as of the sybil.” Manning’s brainchild became “Advice to the Lovelorn” on July 20, 1898. Writing under the pseudonym of Beatrice Fairfax (named after Dante’s Beatrice and Fairfax County, Virginia), she turned the genre into what most people now think of when they picture an advice column. Its success was immediate and overwhelming, to the point where Manning herself later said “If I had been ten years older, I might have hesitated at the Frankensteinian monster I was invoking.” Beatrice Fairfax remained in Manning’s hands until she resigned in 1905. She returned years later, in 1929, when the nation’s stock market crash left her and her family broke. She continued to write until her death in 1945. Beatrice Fairfax would continue to exist for another 20 years.
