Dorothy Dix Says...

What kind of advice does Dorothy Dix have for thirtysomething women whose biological clocks are starting to tick very loudly? She weighs in on the subject in a column first printed November 2, 1940.

Dear Miss Dix - About once every five years I take a personal inventory to check up on development and progress, if any. Have just been doing this and realize with a shock that I am 33 years old and that if I ever wish to marry and have the normal life of a woman I must be up and doing. So far I have never been in love. Never thought of marrying. Have let two good chances pass me by because I have to support my mother, and lately an invalid sister who is divorced and has two children have been added to my burden. Now the next five years are very important if I am to marry, and I know that I do want to marry. I know that I am good wife material. Am affectionate, attractive, energetic, well read, and domestic. Can you suggest any way out for me, bearing in mind that there is no other revenue other than my salary coming into the house? I will appreciate any advice you can give me on how, when and where to snare the illusive male.

DOT.

Answer - No other woman in the world has such a good opportunity to marry as the business woman, because she is thrown every day and all day in contact with men. Propinquity has a chance to get in its deadly work and it does so often that there is always a big turnover in the female employes in every establishment where the two sexes labor side by side.

So you have the ideal environment. You are casting your bait, so to speak, in a river that is full of suckers, but it is up to you to have enough skill and adroitness to hook your fish and land him. Nobody can teach you the trick.

You have to evolve your own craftsmanship, and apparently you have so far not taken the trouble to do it. You even scared off the two who came and nibbled at your line. So if you want to make your catch you will have to get busy. Thirty-three is getting along toward the deadline for fisherwomen.

I hate to be discouraging to any woman wanting a good husband, but, being a practical business woman yourself, you are bound to realize that your family is an almost insuperable handicap to you. Not many men in these days make enough money or are generous enough to marry a whole ready-made family and take on their shoulders the support of five people instead of one, as your husband would have to do.

Maybe there is some rich old man who would realize that a young, charming, interesting and domestic wife, such as you would be, is worth the price, but even if such a one should appear on the scene, would he be the Prince Charming you had always hoped to marry?

I think that nothing is more tragic than the fate of girls like you who would like to marry and who were intended by nature to marry and make some man happy, but who cannot do so because they are the family goats.

And I think that nothing is more cruel than the way in which families ruthlessly offer up these daughters, without a thought that they are making girls give up their lives for them.

Mothers who are perfectly capable of earning their own support settle down at 45 or 50 on Janey for the balance of their lives. Sisters and brothers demand that Janey work her fingers to the bones and do without everything she wants to send them off to college and give them good clothes, and then they marry without every repaying Janey a cent and go off about their own affairs and leave her to take care of Mother.

Why shouldn't Mother work if she is able to? Why shouldn't the sisters and brothers work their way through college if they are bound to go? Why shouldn't the sisters who lose their tastes for their husbands put up with them, as Janey does with her unpleasant bosses, instead of coming home with a houseful of children for Janey to support?

I am fed up hearing about parasitic families and I am hoping and praying that I will live to see the day when the nanny goats get up on their hind legs and stage a rebellion and refuse to furnish the sacrificial meat any longer. For why work when Janey provides a comfortable home and three square meals a day?

Dorothy Dix Says...

Dorothy Dix has been currying a lot of favor for the last few weeks, but this week's advice may be a bit more controversial. In a column first printed on December 17, 1940, she weighs in on the issue of publicizing adultery.

Dear Miss Dix - I have been married for 30 years. My husband has been kind to me and a good provider, but he has always been a philanderer. Recently I discovered that he had been having a love affair with a young business girl in our home town and that this had been going on for five years. I came across some love letters in his coat pocket from this girl. After reading them I passed them on to my 15-year-old daughter and also to several friends. Finally I gave them to the girl’s employer to read. I knew he was a man of high morals and that he would dismiss the girl if he knew of her conduct. He did so reluctantly, for she was a very competent and dependable worker. Now I would like to know whether I did wrong in publishing my husband’s shame to the world and causing the girl to lose her job?

MRS. L. M. D.

Answer - It is easy to see how a wife, driven mad by discovery of her husband’s infidelity and with jealousy of the woman who has supplanted herself in his affections, does things in the stress of her emotions that are neither wise nor right. Much excuse is to be made for her. Not many of us can be calm and judicious in our reasoning when our hearts are torn to tatters and our world is crumbling about us.

No one can wonder that in your fury at being betrayed you took the first means at hand to revenge yourself upon your husband and his lady love. But you have found, as we all do who try it, that revenge is not as sweet as we thought it would be. It is gall and wormwood in our mouths. For it makes us do and say things that we spend our lives in regretting.

I know that you must be very sorry that you showed those incriminating letters to your young daughter, because they shattered her ideal of her father and forever killer her respect for him.

Never again can he be a hero in her eyes. She will always see him as an amorous old man having a sordid intrigue with a girl and double-crossing his wife. To the young elderly Romeos are not romantic. They are disgusting.

No matter how your husband has treated you, you were not justified in hurting your daughter in order to hurt him. To shake a child’s faith in her father is almost as bad as to shake her faith in God.

And you must also be very sorry that in the fury of your passion you blazoned your husband’s shame to the world, because that puts you in such an undignified position if you go on living with him. The only way a married woman can save her face when she has a philandering husband is to pretend that she does not know about his infidelities.

Dorothy Dix Says...

Dorothy Dix's column on February 17, 1949 featured a short, but sweet letter from a delegation. In a world where divorce still carried great social stigma, their question was of vital import to young women with marriage on the mind.

Dear Miss Dix: How can a girl tell whether or not a man will make a good husband?

TWO GIRLS.

Answer - Unless she is a seer with second sight and has the gift of prophecy, there is no way by which a girl can absolutely foretell what sort of husband a man will make. She has to take his word for it that he will be as good a lover after marriage as he is before, and that he will never criticize her cooking, or ask her whether that thing she has on her head is a hat or last year’s bird’s nest.

But while picking out a husband is always more or less of a guessing game, there are certain signs and portents that will give a girl a few good tips on what sort of husband a man will make. For instance, the bad risks are: Mama’s baby boy, the man with a Yale lock on his pocketbook, the gourmet who thinks he knows how to cook, the man who passes into silence if he can’t have the floor, or else breaks up the party with his monologues. And, most of all, beware of the man who begins bossing you even before the marriage.

Dorothy Dix Says...

Here's a timely question - considering some of the choices our own generation is having to make during the recession. This column dates to January 17, 1949. How does Dorothy Dix do this time 'round?

Dear Dorothy Dix: I am the wife of a traveling man and I am sick of this half-time wife business. When my husband travels I stay at home with my people. When he is off the road we stay with his. I want him to give up the road. I feel very sure that he could go into some other business that would not require that he be away from home.

He doesn’t like my home town and my friends and I don’t like his home town and his friends. We love each other, but it seems as though we are on the road to the divorce court the way things are. What shall we do?

AN UNHAPPY WIFE.

Answer - If your husband has a job, he had better stick to it. You have got to eat, you know, and this is no time to part one’s self from a pay roll.

But when you come to settle where to live, the man has the say-so. The law lets him determine the place of domicile and in most of the states he is entitled to a divorce if the wife refuses to go with him.

You must be a good sport about this. If your husband has a better chance of getting along among the people he knows and where he has friends and a family connection, it is your duty to go there cheerfully and make his friends your friends and his people your people.

Dorothy Dix Says...

Rising divorce rates during the 1940s brought about a whole new set of questions for "agony aunts" like Dorothy Dix. Here's one divorce-related plea for advice in a column first printed on February 28, 1942. How does Ms. Dix do this week?

Dear Dorothy Dix: My husband was divorced before we ever met - so was I. He is one of the finest men on earth - good to me in every respect, except one. But what I can not stand, and that I know will eventually end in our separation, is that he has kept all the furniture that he and his former wife had, and insists upon my using it. Many of the things were wedding presents to her. So imagine my feelings when my friends ask me: “Where did you get these lovely linens?” Or: “Did you make this luncheon set?” And I have to tell them they were No. 1s. I admit they are very nice; but I would gladly trade them for a shabbily furnished apartment. No one could understand, unless they had been through it, what it is to be alone all day washing dishes that were never bought for them; polishing furniture and ironing clothes that were done many times by their predecessor. Once I mentioned that I would like to get some new linens, but my husband said we couldn’t afford them, and what was the use when we had all of this? I vowed to myself that I would never mention it to him again, but I know that sometime when I have spent a long day looking at her things I will leave. And if I do leave, I won’t leave as much as a hairpin to haunt another wife if he should remarry.

POLLYANNA’S STEPSISTER.

Answer - Of course you are making a mountain out of a mole hill, but inasmuch as you have your mound built so high that it shuts off your sunshine, your husband should be wise enough to level it down and cart the dirt away in the interest of peace and happiness. Consider that this is his second venture into matrimony, he has learned little about women if he has not found out that you can not argue with their prejudices and whims, and that they can make themselves just as miserable over a fancied grievance as a real one.

I think you will be foolish to break up your home and give up an otherwise good husband because of the association connected with a few chairs and tables, but I think your husband is still more foolish not to understand how you feel about the matter and send the offending articles to the auction room. It would be a cheap price to pay for keeping a home intact.

Dorothy Dix Says...

This week's topic: How to deal with a husband who might be seeing another woman? Dorothy Dix lights a fire under the suspicious wife in this column first printed on April 12, 1940. What do you think of her answer? Is Ms. Dix naive or is her advice sound?

Dear Miss Dix: I have a bad case of the jitters and here is the reason: An old flame of my husband's has come back to town, after having lived in the East for several years, and he has been seen out with her. The first time I heard of it I wasn't so terribly upset, as there was another gentleman with them, so I took it for granted that the other man was her escort. But since then my husband and the lady have been seen alone and I feel sure that he still thinks a great deal of her. She isn't a young woman any more, but they tell me she still retains much of her good looks. I must admit that the lady in question has always been a most wonderful character and has lived a fine, clean life. Yet I am simply bursting to let him know that he isn't putting anything over on me and that I know she is back in town and that they have been seen together two or three times. Shall I do this, or would you just let the affair ride?

WORRIED.

Answer - You are one of the women who explain why husbands have to lie to their wives, and why they have to do things secretly and undercover when they would much rather be frank and open about them.

A perfectly commonplace thing has happened that no doubt your husband would like to talk over with you, but your idiotic jealousy forces him to keep silent about it to save a scene. He can't say to you: "Mary Jane," or whatever her name is, "is in town and I met her on the street and took her to lunch, " because if he did you would raise the roof. Still less can he suggest your inviting her to dinner, so if he sees her at all he has to do it on the sly and make an affair of something that is nothing.

Can't you see how silly you are acting? You are burned up because this middle-aged woman who hasn't been home for years comes back to her old town. In heaven's name, what significance is there in that? Isn't it something that everybody in the world does? And if your husband and she were friends or even sweethearts years ago, are you naive enough to think that they are still in love, when each of them has married and had a different life and been happy and satisfied?

Don't you know that if she had designs on him she would have found some means to get in contact with him years ago? Don't you know that if he were still in love with her that he would have gone to see her? You couldn't have kept them apart. But neither one has existed for the other except just as a pleasant memory, as every man and woman have for their boy and girl sweethearts.

Haven't you intelligence enough to know that the sure cure for any youthful romance is to meet the beloved one after the lapse of years? For time does things to all of us that dispels the glamour that once encircled us.

My advice to you is to take counsel with your common sense instead of your jealousy. Tell your husband that you know his friend is in town. Call upon her and invite her to dinner.

Believe me, she has no designs upon him and you are torturing yourself needlessly.

Dorothy Dix Says...

The most popular advice columnist of the 1940s was Dorothy Dix, pen name for Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (1861-1951). At her height in popularity, Ms. Dix had a syndicated column which reached approximately 60 million readers around the world. In 1940 alone, she received some 100,000 letters --- many of which were written by American housewives. I think it's high time we bring some of these voices back to life, so Wednesdays will now be dedicated to these vintage advice columns.

What were housewives thinking about? What kinds of concerns did they have when it came to life, love, children, and other relationships? Do these letters fit the picture you have of the '40s housewife? Is Dorothy Dix's advice sound - or does she miss the boat completely?

DEAR DOROTHY DIX - I have been married 15 years. Am still young and enjoy living. My husband is a good provider. We have a beautiful home and two lovely youngsters. I do all of my own sewing and housework. My husband tells me that I would be an ideal wife if I didn't care to smoke or play bridge. Now I only play bridge once a week and I do not smoke excessively.

I have waited on my husband hand and foot all these years and have endeavored to do everything possible to make him happy and comfortable, but I am not going to give up my bridge, which is my only outside pleasure. I love my husband, but I cannot permit him to take away every scintilla of my personal liberty. After all, I never tell him what he can or cannot do.

Just what is your opinion of a man who will let a little innocent game of bridge and an occasional cigaret separate him from an otherwise ideal wife?

INDIGNANT WIFE.

Answer - No man ever makes a bigger mistake than when he deprives his wife of any innocent amusement and tries to keep her shut up inside of the four walls of her home. Yet many husbands do this because they are the victims of the old superstition that a woman should be like the turtle and carry her house on her back, though why, goodness only knows. Turtles don't get very far. Nor are they interesting and amusing as household pets.

Still the idea prevails among old fashioned husbands that there is something meritorious in a woman being a stay-at-home and never going places or seeing things and having no conversational range beyond the children and the next door neighbors and the price of pork chops.

Now men have the wrong angle on this subject, and if they realized what was good for them, instead of trying to keep their wives locked up in the house all the time and objecting to their belonging to clubs and having their little games of bridge they would encourage them in it. For it would be money in their pockets and peace and happiness in their homes.

To begin with, it would save husbands a lot of doctor's bills for their wives to get around a little. Half of the neurotic women who are being treated for mysterious ailments are just simply bored.

They have no interest outside of their homes, meet few strangers, get no new ideas and they get so fed up on doing the same dull, monotonous round of chores, day after day and year after year, that they devise symptoms just to get something they can get a kick out of.

And, furthermore, the wife who belongs to clubs makes many friends who are valuable assets to her husband and children in a business and social way.