Enough About Me: Teaching History Through Advice Columns

I have a secret passion for advice columns. Dear Prudence is my mainstay, but I've also dallied with Ask a Manager, Ask a Clean Person, and the classic Dear Abby (whenever there's an analog newspaper around). My interest is perhaps because I am fascinated with the concept of "shoulds"-- the "what should I do?" explicit or implicit in every question and the expectation that there will be an answer. I spend much of my day wondering about the "should" of the moment. Should I eat breakfast at home, saving money but sacrificing productive time in my office, or should I grab a donut on campus, which will cost money but save time? Once I arrive, should I answer emails first, so that others don’t have to wait for my reply any longer, or should I work on personal projects first, to make sure I actually make some headway on them today? I imagine most people do this sort of back-and-forth. Advice columns have long affirmed this impulse to wonder about "shoulds" and provide the comfort of having the matter judged by an outside expert. This has obvious value to the question-asker, but also provides a litmus test for the reader-- are your instincts about the matter correct? Did you come to the same conclusions as the expert? Today, I want to briefly unpack a couple of ways in which the concept of the advice column presents an interesting avenue for exploring various facets of history in the classroom.

The most obvious way to use advice columns to study history is to have students read historical advice. By examining the questions asked and the expert responses, students can get a sense of the kind of questions people were interested in having answered at a particular time.  There's a broad range of possible time periods for this activity-- advice columns have about a three-hundred year history, most likely beginning with the Athenian Mercury, a British publication. The two-year-old Atlantic article The Questions People Asked Advice Columnists in the 1690s (which I recall being pretty widely shared when it was published) has a delightful set of journalist Adrienne LaFrance's favorite pieces from the Athenian Mercury-- edited, but still revealing. The questions deal with a variety of topics, from broad questions about science and the natural world ("If the light of the moon is borrowed from the sun, why are they so differing in complexion?") to the more familiar "shoulds" I mentioned ("Dancing, is it lawful?"). Some questions would be particularly interesting to those seeking evidence of women's roles in society ("Is it proper for women to be learned?"), while others speak to 17th century British attitudes about religion and the supernatural (such as the meandering statement-question about a dog's power to foretell death). Those of you who have played The Trial of Anne Hutchinson may find some questions among these that your characters would have been quite interested in.

 I've used early twentieth-century advice columns in my own work to suggest complex attitudes toward women, work, and disability. For example, the bulk of Dorothy Dix's advice in one December 1935 column was given to a letter about a disabled young woman whose mother would not let her father provide her with a vocational education. The mother received nothing less than a tongue-lashing from Dix for standing in the way of progress:

Looking at a source like this, I encourage students to think about the layers of meaning that this may (or may fail to) reveal. What does this piece tell us about the letter-writer? About Dix? About the Boston Globe, which printed the piece? About the readers of the piece? About the disabled woman at the center of the question? Notice also what the column is surrounded by-- more advice, on a variety of matters! (If you're squinting, take a gander at a fuller picture of the page.) 

Some secondary source context may prove helpful in interpreting the variety of roles that advice columns can serve. Scholar Elyse Vigiletti suggests in an interview with Ask a Manager's Alison Green that the advice column surged in popularity at the turn of the century, and developed the "blend of self-help, humor, and tastemaking" that advice columns of the modern day possess. Part of a broader boom in print culture and literacy, advice literature (including columns, etiquette manuals, cookbooks, parenting guides, and other self-improving texts) were tools channeling desires for upward mobility to cultivate particular tastes in consumers. Joel E. Black's article "A Theory of African-American Citizenship: Richard Westbrooks, The Great Migration, and the Chicago Defender's 'Legal Helps' Column" in the Journal of Social History uses a legal advice column from the Chicago Defender to "examine law away from courts" (897). Black points to the ways in which columnist and attorney Richard Westbrooks used his advice column to promote theories of African American equal citizenship based on everyday, local matters-- municipal codes about employment and housing that assumed equality of application among all city residents. So, advice columns could be coercive or prescriptive, but they could also be radical or transformational. 

In short, there are a variety of things that advice columns of the past can reveal about the kinds of questions people were asking, answering, or interested in reading about. But perhaps more interesting is the possibility of using the writing of an advice column as a historical exercise. Students could take on the role of a person affected by a particular historical event in their letter and use their submission to reflect on the ways that different actors might experience history. In a unit on the 1910s, for example, students could take major events of that period and imagine the questions that different parties might seek advice about: a working woman, unsure of whether to join the unionists organizing her workplace; an African American family in the South considering the benefits and costs of joining the Great Migration northward; a suffrage supporter questioning whether or not to halt suffrage organizing to support the war effort. Students might also be asked to reflect on what sort of periodical they would send their question to: a national newspaper? A radical journal? A women's magazine? A black press publication?

This is also obviously of interest as a complement to a Reacting to the Past game. Students would be asked to write a question to an advice column as their character, focusing on what their concerns are within the game. This could be used as an introductory exercise, to help everyone get into character. However, it could also take on a dramatic role in the middle of the game, as students could use their questions to achieve character goals. The advice columnist could be portrayed by the Gamemaster (instructor) or by one of the characters. Greenwich Village, 1913 would be a particularly good candidate for this idea-- the game is already immersed in print culture and characters are required to contribute to the creation of an issue of The Masses by game's end.

What other historical instances would make great advice column questions?

Related Links:
A Library of Congress topic page on Dorothy Dix, including some samples of her work. 
A blog post on 17th and 18th century advice columns. 
Folks with an U of I login should be able to access Black's article here. 


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