Man’s Disposition Makes or Mars Wife’s Happiness

From the Sept. 13, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

A young woman asks: If you were a girl picking out a husband, what particular characteristics would you look for in him? Well, first of all, I should make a general survey of his personality and background. I would never marry a man, not even if he were Prince Charming himself, who was temperamental and who had to be handled with gloves. Nor would I marry a high-tempered man nor a jealous man who would keep me walking on eggs and holding my breath lest I do something unwittingly that would bring on an explosion.

Nor would I marry a weak-kneed, flabby drunkard, nor a lazy, ne’er-do-well who depended on marriage being a sort of galvanic battery that would shock him into action. Also on my taboo list of those with whom I would not march to the altar would be the rich playboy who had never done a day’s work in his life nor earned a dollar; the only son whose mamma has raised him a pet and waited on him hand and foot all of his life and who would expect his wife to pinch-hit for Mother. All these would be out. That would leave just the common or garden variety of men and the things that I should ask of them would be just the common or garden variety of virtues.

So I should begin by cocking a wary eye on his disposition. That is what counts the most in a husband because it is the thing that his wife has to live with, day in and day out. It is what makes or mars her happiness, and it doesn’t make a particle of difference to her how moral and upright he is if he is about as pleasant to have around the house as a sore-headed bear. She is miserable.

There are thousands of women married to grouchy saints who would swap them off any day for a cheerful sinner. It does not feed the starving heart of the wife, whose husband never shows her the slightest affection or tenderness, to know that he is faithful to her. Nor is it any comfort to have a domestic husband who never stirs from his own fireside of an evening if he puts in the time nagging and finding fault with everything she has done or left undone.

Then I would pick out a sturdy oak instead of a broken reed to cling to. A woman needs something she can lean on, not something she has to prop up, and so I would not marry any man who had not shown that he had the intelligence, the grit and industry to make a living. Money won’t make a happy marriage, but the lack of enough of it to get the decent comforts of life can make a miserable one.

I shouldn’t look for a rich man. I would rather marry a boy who is making a hundred dollars a month at a steady job and who has shown that he is on the up and up than the son of a millionaire who has never done anything but work his father. No couple has a greater chance of happiness than the poor boy and girl who marry and climb the ladder of success together. No marriage is more foredoomed to failure than that in which the husband sits down and folds his hands in idleness and lets Mary do it.

Then I should look for a man who was a good sport for a husband. Marriage isn’t easy on a man. It lets him in, as a general thing, for a life sentence at hard labor and out of all he earns he gets only his board and clothes—and those the worst in the family. I would like to know that I was getting a man who could stand the gaff without going sour.

I would pick out an affectionate man for a husband. I am no crystal gazer. Neither am I a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter who was born in a caul, and so the only way I could possibly have a knowing whether my husband loved me and appreciated me would be by his telling me so. And being a repeater. None of your frozen, dumb, take-it-for-granted husbands for me, who never give their wives a kind word until they put it on their tombstones.

And, finally, I would be very, very certain that the man I married could entertain me. There are so many evenings that a husband and wife must spend together, dependent upon each other for society, and the dullness is so appalling if they have nothing interesting to say to each other. So I would mark well before I selected a life companion whether I hung upon his words as Desdemona did upon Othello’s, or whether I yawned my head off.

There are no perfect husbands. No woman wants one. But if a girl picks out a man with the qualities I have enumerated it is a good bet that she will live happily ever after.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Sept. 1, 1936, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: What must a girl have to attract the right sort of men? Does she have to smoke and drink and be a wild woman? I am almost 23 and have never had a real boyfriend. I am inclined to be moody and have an inferiority complex at times. Most of the boys I meet bore me to tears, yet my girlfriends think these same boys wonderful. Somehow, I can’t make myself gush over a boy who doesn’t interest me in the least just so he will take me out somewhere. There is nothing in the world that I desire more than a home and a nice husband, but I realize I may never have one unless my attitude toward the stronger sex changes. LONELY GIRL.

ANSWER: There is no specific line of feminine qualities that are a sure fire hit with men because men differ in their tastes in girls just as they do in their taste in food and clothes. There are men who prefer the domestic girl just as there are men who always order roast beef and mashed potatoes for dinner, and there are other men who prefer more sophisticated girls and whose fancy runs to caviar.

Generally speaking, of course, the charms that a girl needs to conjure with are a pretty face, smart clothes, a laugh that is hung on a hair-trigger, dancing feet and the ability and willingness to toil like a coal-heaver to keep a man entertained and amused.

As I have said, there are many men of many minds and each has a different mind about women. But one taste all men have in common and that is, they do not like morbid, self-centered, lachrymose women. Men want women to be gay and light-hearted. They want them to wear the smile that won’t come off. They like to tell their troubles to women and have women sympathize with them. But woe betide the woman who tries to tell her troubles to a man. She has seen the last of him. And as for the weeper, men avoid her as they would the plague.

So, if you are Gloomy Gussie, you need seek no further in your inquiry as to why you are unpopular with the boys. Your morbidness is the reason.

Another reason why you are not popular with the boys is because you are not working hard enough at your job of trying to please them. The main attraction for men that any woman has is her will to attract, and you haven’t that. You don’t wear a thrilled expression when listening to bores as if an oracle were speaking. And that is fatal.

Men are like sheep in so far as women are concerned. The more other men run after a girl, the more they chase her. That is why one girl has dates to burn and another, equally attractive and good-looking, sits at home reading an improving book.

A man may pick and choose among girls and cut out those who are dull and tiresome but a girl has no such privilege. She has to pet, cajole and feed the whole herd sugar in the hopes that somewhere in it she will find the little lamb she wants.

And there you are, my dear. There is nothing for nothing in this world. It takes a lot of work and worry and self-sacrifice to be popular with boys. 

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the September 2016 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper, along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “The Suspension Bridge at Nashville” (1850); “Jimmy Carter Not Fuzzy On Issues, Wife Says” (1976); and “195th Hour Finds 4 Couples Still in Marathon Dance” (1928).

From the Oct. 18, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

Are you a good father or mother? Are you making a career of parenthood or turning out just a slack job of it? Are you putting as much ambition and intelligence and energy in bringing up your children properly as you are into making a success of your business or your profession or your golf? Or are you just letting your children tumble up anyhow and trusting the result of luck?

Do you make your children feel that they are “bundles from heaven” for which you cannot be sufficiently grateful, or something that the junk man left on your doorsteps which is in the way, but of which you do not know how to rid yourself?

Are you always complaining about the expense of children, and saying that you can’t have a new automobile or go to Europe because Mary had to have her adenoids out and it cost so much to send John to college? Are you always whining about being tied down by the baby so you can’t step out to night clubs and whining over what a slave a mother is to her children?

Have you a fixed code of conduct in rearing your children, so that they are taught from their infancy up what things are permissible to do and what are taboos? Or is your discipline determined by whether you drank too many cocktails last night, or you can’t wheedle your husband out of a new hat, so that the thing that is forbidden one time is granted the next?

Are you one of the men who are so busy making money to give their children what they call advantages that they never have time to give them the greatest advantage of all and that is being friends with their father? Do you ever take off for a little outing without their mother so that you can have real talks together and find out what is in their little minds?

Are you one of the mothers who turn over the children to servants to rear because you are too busy with clubs and social engagements? Are you one of the mothers who send the children out on the street to keep them from tracking up the rugs, and who see that they eat their spinach, but never bother to find out what kind of boys and girls they play with, or are you one of the mothers who are playmates and friends and confidantes to the children, and make home a heaven on earth to them?

Are you fitting your children for life? Childhood is very short. Soon they will be going out on their own to fight their battle with the world, and whether they win or fail will depend on how you have armed them to control their passions and their appetites. Have you taught them good manners? Have you bred in them strength and courage and the grit that struggles on until it wrests victory out of defeat? Have you taught them by precept and example to be truthful and honest and loyal? Have you instilled into them habits of industry and thrift?

Are you a good parent? Check up and see.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Oct. 18, 1936, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: Can’t something be done to stop girls from going around the streets and to the stores and driving in cars with almost no clothes on, and looking as if they had just escaped from a nudist colony or a side show of freaks? If the girls themselves are totally lacking in modesty and have no sense of decency or propriety, at least the general public should be protected from having to witness the shameful spectacle. OLD MRS. BELL.

ANSWER: I agree with you, Madam, that a woman clothed only in shorts and a bandana handkerchief is hard on the eyes and shattering to the nerves of the beholder and makes us long for the good old days when the police ran their likes into the hoosegow.

It has been said that modesty is a matter of geography and that the South Sea Island belle clothed only in a string of beads is as conventionally dressed as grandma was when she had on seven petticoats and high-necked and long-sleeved red-flannel underwear. So let that view of the matter ride.

What concerns us all is the esthetic side of the subject. We are bound to admit that, as Omar Khayam remarked, the hand of the potter shook when constructing most female legs and that they are not exhibition pieces. The least seen of them the better for their owner and for the happiness of the enforced observer. Thus the display of limbs that look as if they had just strolled out of a Kansas City or Chicago packing house or had been rescued from the bone yard or that cried out for the attention of an orthopedic surgeon is an offense unforgivable against both good morals and good taste.

Nothing but superhuman vanity and a lack of sense of humor could induce any girl to appear in public in shorts. If she had any idea of how funny she looks and of the ribald comments she inspires, wild horses couldn’t drag her into a pair of the things.

Of course nothing is going to stop the dear creatures from wearing what they want to wear, but one thing I urge on every girl: before she goes into shorts let her get the candid opinion of her cattiest friend on her underpinning. Have a heart, girls, and save us from having to look at so many knock knees and bowed legs.

___

DEAR MISS DIX: I have a boy friend who is lacking in good manners. When we go out together he always walks ahead of me. When we enter a restaurant or theater he never holds the door open, but gets there first, grabs the best seat, lets me crawl in as I can. Never thinks of helping me on or off with a coat or into a car. What should I do with him? Or aren’t these things really important? A READER.

ANSWER: Give him a marked copy of a good book on etiquette, and, if that doesn’t change him, give him the air, for I can think of nothing that would get on a woman’s nerves more than to be married to a man who was a boor.

Evidently this youth has had no social training whatsoever and is ignorant of even the elementary courtesies which a gentleman is expected to show a lady when he takes her out. Doubtless his rudeness is not a lack of respect for you, but his not knowing what to do and what are the decencies of the situation.

It is a pity that somebody hasn’t the courage to tell him that his lack of good manners will not only prevent girls from wanting to have anything to do with him, but that it will be a handicap that will prevent him from succeeding in life. For a man’s manners make or mar him. It is the first thing we notice about him and, if he is uncouth, if he does not know how to hold himself, what to wear, how to eat, what to do in every emergency, we turn thumbs down on him.

But every door is open to the man of poise who knows how to make the right approach, who is easy and graceful and at home in every situation. If you could only teach a boy one thing in the world, it should be good manners. They will carry him further than anything else will.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the October 2011 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “For The Birds: The Tennessee Ornithological Society” by George Zepp; “The Assault on Buchanan's Station: Part I” by Paul Clements; and “High Atop Nine Mile Hill” by John W. Zuccarello Jr.

From the Nov. 4, 1941, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: While going to school I met a girl considerably older than myself who fell in love with me and who is driving me to desperation by her determination to marry me against my will. I have told her that I do not love her, but she keeps pursuing me. I have left town when I knew she was coming to see me and have constantly dated other girls, but she is still unshaken in her purpose to marry me. How much does a man have to put up with from a girl and still be a gentleman? ROBERT.

ANSWER: So far as I am aware, no etiquette authority has laid down any rules, either ethical or chivalrous, to guide the conduct of a young man who is being pursued by a woman who is determined to drag him to the altar, no matter how balky he is. Apparently in such cases the female of the species is more deadly than the male, as Mr. Kipling justly observed. For while it is comparatively easy for a girl to discourage even the most ardent suitor and induce him to give up the love chase, when once a woman sets her amorous eyes upon a man and marks him for her own it is about as easy for him to escape death or taxation as it is to get out of her clutches.  

One of the reasons why men have bitterly opposed giving women the right to pop the question is that they have felt that somehow they would be bound to marry the girls who proposed to them. They have sensed that there would be some sort of occult compulsion in the matter that would be their doom.

They have realized that while a girl can rid herself of a man she does not desire to marry by saying “no” to him and telling him that she would be a sister to him, no such door of escape will be open to men. For the lovelorn maiden will not take a refusal as definite. She will hang on and worry and nag him until, in some desperate moment, he will marry her to get rid of her.

I, myself, have seen this happen many times, so I can only offer you my sympathy in your predicament and advise you to scram for the tall timber. Your only safety is in flight, for if you stay within reaching ground the lady will get you, no matter how much you watch out.

Coldness, avoidance, rebuffs will not save you. They will only whet her appetite for you, because the harder you are to get the more determined she will be to have you. Nor will she be moved by the knowledge that you do not love her, for her vanity will make her believe that she can win your love after marriage.

Nothing but flight will save you. Buy a ticket to somewhere on the Russian front. You will be safer there than where you are.

__

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: I have just received my engagement ring from my fiancé. It is a darling and just fits but the diamond is quite small and Mother thinks I should demand a ring with a larger stone. She says a wife has to take enough from her husband during marriage and she wants me to have a ring that I will be proud to show to my friends. Should I send the ring back and tell him that I would prefer to wait until he can give me a better one with a bigger diamond? A.L.O.

ANSWER: Well, if the boy has the spunk of a mouse, if you send the ring back to him demanding a better one, he will keep it and you will never get that or another one from him. He will know you for the grasping little gold-digger that you are and realize that you will make one of the kind of wives who work their husbands to death to give them the luxuries they crave.

Evidently your fiancé has given you the very best ring that he could afford. Probably he denied himself many good meals and comforts in order to buy the little diamond you despise so much, and you show that you have little love for him and little appreciation of his gift if all you see in it is the price-tag.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the November 2015 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “An Interesting Slave Case” (1853); “Colored Republican” (1886); and “Stripper Claims She Gave Elvis Pelvis Tip” (1956).

From the Nov. 9, 1933, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: My husband is kind to me. He never finds fault with me for anything I do or don’t do and he never refuses me anything I want. But there is one thing that I cannot stand any longer. He has a little rat dog that he will let sleep in the house at night in the wintertime in spite of the fact that I insist on having it put out. He just worships that dog, and I have given him notice that I am going to leave him if he doesn’t put it out. We would have a nice, agreeable time together, it if were not for this pesky old dog. What am I do do?  MRS. H.R.

ANSWER: Mrs. H.R., aren’t you ashamed of being jealous of a poor little dog? If your husband were petting some flapper about half your age and who weighted about half what you do, you would have some cause to be green-eyed and tell your husband that he would have to choose between you and your deadly rival. But how silly of you to wreck your home over Fido!

I am sorry for any human being who doesn’t love dogs. He or she misses one of the purest pleasures on earth, for there is no other love that is so faithful, so unselfish, that asks so little and gives so much as a dog’s. Anyone who has not had a dog who called him Master and who looked up to him as we look up to God; anyone who has not had a dog nuzzle its head into his shoulder or lay its head upon his knees and look up into the face with eyes of deathless devotion; anyone who has not heard a dog’s yelp of joy at his return of an evening, is poor indeed. He or she has missed something fine and beautiful and wonderful out of life.

Next to a baby’s caressing arms about your neck is a dog’s tongue licking your hand. So, Mrs. H.R., I pity you from the bottom of my heart, because you don’t love your husband’s dog.

But even if you are a dog-hater, try to get his point of view on the subject and realize that to many men a dog is an absolute requisite of happiness. They simply can’t exist without one. Home is no home without the pattering of little paws running to meet them and the wriggling of a little body that leaps all over them the minute they open the door. They are like the Scotchman who said that he felt as if he was undressed when he took a walk if he didn’t have the dog at this heels.

After all, your husband has as much right in the home as you have. He pays the freight. He earns the money that keeps it going and if all that he asks is the privilege of having his little dog sleep in the house on a winter’s night, don’t you think that you are pretty mean and stingy to begrudge it to him?

___

DEAR MISS DIX: I am a young married woman, a stenographer working every day and three nights a week for two different concerns. My husband is a salesman in a real estate office, but not entirely depending on that source for a living. He requires me to pay all our living expenses, such as rent, food, laundry, etc., while he puts all he earns in the bank. He even makes me give him spending money, although he has more than I have. Do you think this is fair? WORRIED WIFE.

ANSWER: Certainly not. If you pay half of the living expenses, it is all and more than he should expect of you, and you should have the balance of your money to do with as you please.

As matters stand, if your husband should tire of you and decide to leave you, he would have all the money and leave you destitute. A good husband who means fairly by his wife does not try to take all of her money away from her; therefore, a wife does well to be suspicious of her husband when he tries to rob her of her pocketbook.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: We are two young boys 20 years of age. We have good homes and are always having a good time, but we don’t want to work. What shall we do? ROBERT AND TOM.

ANSWER: Well, boys, the world is full of youths such as you are. It has always been full of them, and the best way to answer your question is to ask you to take a look at those men who are 40 and 50 and 60 years old now and who took the same view of life at age 20 that you do.

They were not willing to work, either. They had good homes just as you have, and for a while they got along well enough by sponging on their parents. But after a time their poor fathers and mothers got too old to work and support them or they died and these Weary Willies were thrown out upon the hard and callous world that has little place in it for loafers.

Look at these men, shabby, homeless, drifting from place to place; looked upon with contempt, without even money to provide themselves with the good times you crave and tell me if you think that laziness pays. You say that you don’t want to work. Why, boys, there is nothing else in the world that is such fun as work! There is nothing else so interesting as work. Nothing that has such thrills to it. Nothing that is such a great adventure.

You will never know what a good time really is until you get to doing some work that you put your heart and soul into, and in which you are so absorbed that the day goes by in a flash and is over before you thought it had really begun. You will never know what happiness is until you are doing some work that fills all your thoughts and your dreams and that brings out in you powers that you did not know you possessed. You never even know what love is until you fall so much in love with your job that you have for it a passion that passes a man’s love for any woman.

And think of the rewards of work! Happiness. Contentment. An interest that will never fail you. The respect of all who know you. The sense of doing a man’s part in the world. The gratification of knowing that you can hold your own with other men. And, not least of all, the possession of money that will buy you the comforts and luxuries you crave and independence when you are old.

Of course, you can refuse to work, boys. You can dead-beat your way through the world and be despised and poor and end your days in the almshouse. But do you think it will pay?

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Dec. 7, 1939, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I dearly love my mother and my mother-in-law, and I would hate to do anything that would hurt their feelings, but I simply can’t bring myself to name my little girl baby after either one of them because both of them have perfectly hideous names. Do you think it is my duty to call my child a name that sets my teeth on edge every time I hear it just to please one of them? A YOUNG MOTHER.

ANSWER: Indeed, I don’t. I consider it an unforgivable crime to affect any poor helpless babe with an ugly name just to flatter a vain old woman.

Furthermore, consider that if you do so you are just adding another link to the chain of ear-rasping names that future generations will have to carry on, for if your little Mahitable, or whatever she is called, has to be named for her grandmother, Mahitable’s children will have to be named for her, and so ad infinitum. So break the chain and emancipate future generations. There is no more sense in perpetuating an ugly family name than there would be in carrying on any other family affliction if you could eradicate it. You would not wish the family gout or the family dyspepsia or the family rheumatism on a child if you could help it. Why, then, handicap it with the blight of an ugly family name?

Especially should girls get a kind deal in christening, because a girl’s name makes a lot of difference to her. She has to be called by it as long as she lives, so give your baby a moniker that will come trippingly to the tongue and sound pleasing to the hearer, and she will arise and bless you in after years.

Probably there is no other one subject that is more filled with controversial angles than naming the baby, nor is there anything that has started more family feuds, or that has more amply proved that a large number of parents should not be entrusted with slapping a lifetime brand on a defenseless infant, but that it should be given a number to be known by until it is old enough to pick out a name for itself.

To begin with, most grandparents fight over the new baby like dogs over a bone and the winner gets to name it. Nobody considers the poor mother’s and father’s taste in names, nor how bitterly they are writhing under the names their own grandparents fastened on them, nor how they dread thinking that the poor little mite in the cradle has got to carry on the hideous names of somebody who came over in the Mayflower or fought in the Revolutionary War. Then, if there happens to be a rich old maid aunt or a wealthy bachelor uncle, it is a cinch that Babykins is called after him or her, and goes stumbling along through life handicapped by a name he or she attempts in vain to hide under a nickname. And then gets left out of the will.

Somehow fathers never seem to have much say in naming the baby, but when Mother is given a free hand she simply lets herself loose and all of her repressed yearnings after the romantic and the “whatness of the ain’t” come to the surface. Hence we have the poor little girls afflicted with the names of flowers and stars and the Muses and Graces, and the double-barreled names, and as if to make a bad matter worse, the unfortunate victims of their mothers’ fancies never grow up to look the part. The Violets are always strapping hoodlums and the Brunhildes anemic little girls who toe in.

And, crime of crimes, is when parents give children a first name without any reference to their last name that makes them a target for all the low wits they ever encounter and a laughing stock for everybody who has a funnybone. So it is no wonder when we hear of a new baby we ask: What are they going to name it? There is no telling what crazy things parents are liable to do.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Jan. 4, 1939, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

Don’t people make you tired who have NO ENTHUSIASM? Who haven’t a thrill in their entire system? Who never love, nor hate, nor get into a rage, but merely like, or don’t care for some one, or are displeased. They never laugh at a comedy, or weep at a tragedy, or are stirred by a bit of fine writing. Even God Almighty hasn’t made anything that rouses their emotions, for they can look at a storm at sea, or a snow-clad mountain and merely comment that they are “nice.” And no matter what you can show them, or what you do for them, the most you get is a mumbled word that you suppose indicates that they were not bored to death.

Don’t the people who are WET-BLANKETS make you weary? The ones who consider it their sacred duty to take all of the joy out of life and to douse you with cold water until they have melted down all of your hope and faith and pleasure and taken the kick out of whatever it was that you were planning to do. If you are in love with the prettiest girl in the world, or the finest man, they say that she looks tubercular to them and they doubt, anyway, if she knows how to cook and pinch pennies. Or they wonder if the boy friend doesn’t drink, or philander like his Great-Uncle Abner did.

Don’t the ARGUERS give you a pain in the neck? Those who can’t let any statement pass unchallenged and who feel divinely appointed to set everybody right upon every subject from politics to pie. If you say it is a pretty day, they contradict you and point out that the humidity is a little greater than it should be and that it was foggy at dawn. If you say something happened at 4 o’clock, they say “no” it was 3:57. They dispute your politics, debunk your heroes, fight with you over religion, criticize your taste in literature and art and clothes, and leave you with murder in your heart and a dark brown taste in your mouth.

Don’t WHINERS get on your nerves? The poor, weak, spineless creatures who get a morbid joy out of weeping on our shoulders and telling us their troubles. The down-and-out men who lay their failures to lack of luck instead of lack of work. The mournful women who boast that they have never got over a sorrow. The hordes of neurotics who enjoy poor health and force you to listen to all of their symptoms.

Don’t you loathe the WISECRACKERS? Those who sharpen their tongues on the weaknesses and peculiarities of their fellow creatures and who think they are being witty when they are merely being insulting. Those who take a sadistic joy in deflating everybody’s little pink balloon and making them feel flat and silly. And especially don’t you loathe the wisecracking husband who makes his wife his stooge and sets the table in a roar while he holds her up to ridicule by telling stories about her that make her seem a fool?

And, most of all, doesn’t the BOASTER wear you down? The man who swells out his chest and monologues about how great and wonderful he is, and how he has written the President and told him just how to settle all of his problems, and what a wonderful car he has and how much better it is than all other cars of that same make, and how he is always being importuned to be Mayor, or Governor, or something. And so on and so on. And the woman who brags about herself, her children, her house, her servants.

Don’t they simple take all the joy out of life and make you wonder by Providence allows them to exist?

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Jan. 19, 1938, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

A young girl asks me to tell her why she should learn how to cook. There are about a million good reasons why every woman should acquire skill in juggling the pots and pans, one of which is, as Owen Meredith said long ago, because we can live without music, poetry and art, but civilized man can’t live without cooks.

That makes a knowledge of how to prepare food the very foundation stone of a girl’s education. Every woman finds that no matter what her position in life, no matter what business or profession she goes into, no matter how many other things she knows, the one thing that she always needs to know is how to cook.

A girl should learn how to cook because, if she does, she has a trade by which she can always support herself if need be. In times of depression the market may be glutted with actresses and writers and interior decorators and stenographers and office women, but there are never enough first-class cooks to go around. Moreover, even in its lower brackets the salary of the cook compares favorably with other female laborers, considering that she gets her lodging free and eats as well as her employer does, while the salary of a woman chef entitles her to groan over the income tax.

In domestic life a knowledge of how to cook is the answer to the problem of how to retain a husband’s affections. In time beauty fades, passion dulls of satiety, wisecracking gets to be a bore, even love wears down into a habit, but a man’s appetite never fails. It is the one thing to which a woman can always appeal and thus it is that you seldom hear of a man wandering away from his own fireside after having partaken of a dinner of the things he likes, prepared just the way he likes them.

But the paramount reason why every girl should learn how to cook is because the health and efficiency and prosperity of her family is going to depend upon how she feeds it. Many a child is rated stupid at school because he is filled up on soggy cereals. Many a boy takes to drink because he is undernourished from lack of good, wholesome, well-cooked food and feels the need of a stimulant. Many a man loses out in life because his wife’s bad cooking has turned him into such a dyspeptic that he can’t get along with anybody and made him so pessimistic that he is afraid to go into any new venture.

We are shocked when we read the papers about a woman poisoning her husband’s children, but the one who feeds her family on watery soups, overdone meat, underdone vegetables and heavy bread poisons them just as surely as if she had flavored their food with Rough on Rats. On the other hand, the woman who is a good cook builds for her children and husband strong, healthy bodies with which to fight the world, and clear brains with which to think. She puts into them the pep that comes from overflowing vitality.

These, my dear little girl, are some of the reasons why every girl should learn to cook.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the January 2015 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other articles from the city’s past, including: “Dog Survives 3-Floor Fall, in Greeting Master” (1944); “Steam Heating Apparatus” (1857); and “2 Madison College Students Fire 3rd Successful Rocket” (1958).

From the Feb. 2, 1949, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: When my daughter was married a short time ago, I tried in every way to start her married life running smoothly. I would drop over to her apartment several times a week and try to get her settled. I didn’t like the way she was handling her money, so I tried to show her exactly what she should do. Why, she has spent money without telling me, and when I questioned her about it she practically told me that I was interfering. Now tell me, Miss Dix, am I being an interfering mother? MRS. T.

ANSWER: You certainly are and, without intending to, you are becoming first aid to divorce, for nothing else breaks up so many marriages as mothers meddling in their children’s affairs. The average mother seems incapable of ever realizing that when her daughters get married, she no longer has any authority over them. Their loyalty is to their husbands, not to Mama; and they have a perfect right to live their lives in their own way, without any interference from Mother.

Probably, dear lady, you could spend your daughter’s money more judiciously than she does; but it is her money, not yours. No doubt, you would like to have your daughter blab everything that happens in her home to you, but there is no surer way of her losing her husband.

If every mother would sit on her hands instead of poking them in her married children’s pies, it would put an awful crimp in the divorce statistics.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: No married couple could have been happier than my husband and I were until my mother came to live with us. Now everything is changed. She bosses me around and yells if I do anything that doesn’t suit her, which makes my husband mad. She is always gripping and complaining about something, and she has to know everything we do and every place we go. We would be willing to support her if she would go somewhere else to live, but she refuses. She says it is my duty to stay with her, so my husband is leaving me. I want to know if it is wrong for me to leave my mother and go with my husband? Or should I stay with her and have my husband leave me? R. H. B.

ANSWER: When you married you took a solemn oath to cleave to the man you took for a husband, forsaking all others. That should settle the matter.

___

DEAR MISS DIX: There is much talk just now among women about getting a union-hour-day [an eight-hour work day] for wives. But, taking my own case as a test for this humanitarian movement, I don’t see how it can be put into operation unless men are permitted to have three wives and work them in shifts. This might, of course, appeal to the husbands with polygamous tendencies, but it certainly would make no hit with jealous wives, who would rather work their fingers to the bone to retain their monopoly over the men to whom they are married than to divide them up with other women. Also, most husbands find one wife about all they can support, and the idea of taking on a couple of extra charge accounts at the dress shops and the milliners and the beauty parlors wouldn’t go over with them. I think the idea is screwy, don’t you?  MOTHER OF SIX

ANSWER: Of course, women have just as much right to a union day as men have, but the trouble with all of women’s rights is that they can’t enforce them. A man can knock off after his prescribed hours of labor are through, but there are no union hours for Mother. She can’t take a day off every week and leave her family to get itself washed and dressed and fed, while she goes fishing.

Indisputably no woman, and especially no woman who has added child-bearing to their other manifold labors, should be compelled to work longer hours than the huskiest man. Undoubtedly, it is a shame that the wife and mother is the only slave who is denied even one day of rest a week. Sundays and holidays—when the balance of the family relax—are Mother’s hardest days, because she has to cook her biggest dinner then and be on the job getting the family off to church or on their pleasuring. But what there is to do about it even Solomon himself couldn’t tell you.

So as long as husbands and children persist in getting hungry three times a day, and continue to wear out their clothes, and tramp in dirt, and have colds and tummy aches, it is not easy to see how wives are going to get that union-day, with extra pay for overtime labor.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Feb. 24, 1938, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: Until a year ago, five of us were trying to live on my small salary as a stenographer. It was a meager existence, although my mother is the world’s best manager. Then my two brothers, both able and husky young men, descended on us with the idea that they had a right to come home and be supported. I did not complain, though I was the only bread-winner, because times were hard.

But after both brothers refused prospects of employment three or four times because, as one said, he would rather starve than work for a laborer’s pay, and the other said he would find his own work if he wanted it. I lost patience and asked them to leave. When my mother found out about this she was very much offended with me and has been very reproachful ever since. After one brother called the other day, she said he was just a bundle of nerves from having no work. She never considers that I am just a bundle of nerves from the strain of supporting so many persons.

More than that, I am engaged to one of the finest men in the world who hasn’t been too proud to do any kind of work he could get to do, but we have to put off our marriage for a year because of my brothers’ shiftlessness. But my mother still thinks that I am a cold, hard-hearted, selfish sister because I am not willing to support my brothers. What do you think? MABEL.

___

ANSWER: I think you did exactly right in refusing to support your able-bodied brothers, and if more girls had the grit and courage to do as you have done, it would reduce the number of loafers in our midst.

There are thousands upon thousands of homes like yours that are supported by the daughters of the family and to which the sons never contribute a cent, but in which the mothers feel that they should be pampered guests.

Mother always has an alibi for her sons being good-for-nothing deadbeats. John is so delicate he can’t do hard labor, although he is the picture of health, can play baseball all afternoon and spend the night walking around a pool table. Percy is so temperamental. He just can’t find any congenial work to do. And Tom always loses his job through bad luck and never because of drink. And, of course, the poor darlings had to come home when they were hungry and had no place to go.

Why daughters are any more obligated to take care of their parents than sons are, nobody knows. Nor does anybody know why parents think they have a right to their girl’s money and not their boys’, but that is the way they feel about it. They take a girl’s pay envelope as a matter of course. They don’t realize that she is supporting the house, that they have no right to impose her brothers upon her, make her feed and clothe them when they are far more able to work than she is.

But they do it, and there is no hope that Mother will ever do otherwise. She will always be ready with the fatted calf, which Susie has to pay for, when the prodigal son comes home. That is not only hard on Susie; it is the ruination of the weak, self-indulgent idler who will never work as long as he has a good bed to sleep in and plenty of food to eat, and Mother to supply him with a little change on the side.

The only cure for the trifling is to throw them out on their own and make them realize that they have to work or starve. A gnawing stomach would cure many a temperamental sponger and make work look good if it furnishes the price of a meal. So more power to the girl who had enough backbone to sweep her lazy brothers out of doors. May her tribe increase.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the February 2015 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Judge Urges ‘Wife-Slapping’ To Decrease Divorce Cases” (1939); “Profane Swearing” (1856); and “Tons Of Blackbirds Killed By Spray” (1975).

From the March 8, 1934, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I have been secretly married to a man for four years who gives me his time and money and idolizes me. To protect my position I have suggested that both he and I go out with other boys and girls just as if we were single. He will not consent to this. Says it would destroy our confidence in each other. What is your advice? J.B.

ANSWER: I think your husband is right, and that just because of the position you hold toward each other you need to be more discreet in your conduct than you would be if you were not married, and that you would be very likely to be filled with jealousy and suspicion if either went out with another girl or boy.

Also, it would not be giving the girl or boy a fair deal if you posed as single when married. Some worthy lad might fall in love with you and some girl set her heart upon your husband and be broken-hearted when they found that their affection was hopeless.

___

DEAR MISS DIX: My husband is 41, I am 37. We married very young, and both of us gave all that was in us into getting a start in the world. In those years of struggle together we were very close to each other and very happy. Now we are rich and I, at least, am very miserable. For my husband has absorbed himself so in his business that he hardly realizes that I am alive. He is kind and generous, but cold and utterly uninterested in me. There is no other woman in the case. Just business.

I have tried very hard to keep a little romance and understanding in our marriage, but I have failed, and my husband and I have drifted so far apart we live in different worlds. I have kept myself young-looking and up-to-date. I make my husband a comfortable home and wear a bright smile for him, but my heart is very sad. Aren’t we too young for this to happen to us? Is there no way to regain the old comradeship? L.W.W.

ANSWER: One of the common tragedies that befall wives is to discover that in their husband‘s business they have a more deadly rival than any platinum blonde half their weight and age would be. For with the other woman they could cope. They would have time for their side and could always hope that their husbands would tire of them, but in business their husbands have a mistress whose charms never wane and whose fascinations never pall.

For to the American man business is not just a means of making money. It is a sport, a diversion, something that thrills and stimulates and absorbs him. It is sitting in on a big game in which he matches his brains and skill and experience against those of other men equally clever and shrewd, and he gets so absorbed in this that he forgets everything else in life.

He forgets his wife and children and his duty to them. Or rather he absolves his conscience by saying that he is working for them, and he atones for not giving them any of this time or thoughts by lavishing money upon them. There are thousands upon thousands of women who have no husband but a checkbook, and multitudes of children whose only conception of their father is as a cash register.

There are plenty of rich homes in which the husband and father is almost as much of a legendary figure as Santa Claus. He is the one who provides luxurious houses and cars and trips and colleges and sport clothes, but he takes not part in the family life.

He is generally off on some business deal, or he is in conference, or he is meeting a committee, and he is always far too busy to take his wife anywhere, or to get acquainted with his children.

Of course, the man who really loves his family does not expect always to give all of his time and thoughts to his business. Some day he intends to retire and take up the old sweet life with his wife and make friends with this children, but he never does until age or illness tears him out of his siren’s arms, and then it is too late. This gulf between them has become impassable.

You often hear the wives of millionaire say that the happiest time of their lives was when they were washing their husbands’ shirts and cooking their dinners, helping them to get a start. For then they had their husbands’ interest, their thoughts. They were the center of their husbands’ lives. They had not then lost their husbands to business. And they would rather have that warm love than all the jewels and palaces and finery that they have lavished on them by husbands who have grown cold and whose only real thrill is a rise in the stock market.

Men make a terrible mistake when they let their business wean them away from their wives. Business success does not compensate for failure in marriage. You cannot make a happy home just with money. A man must give his heart and his soul to that. The really rich man is not the billionaire, but the one who is rich in the love and respect of his wife and children.

But when a man has once made business his god there is no way in which he can be separated from his idol, and his wife had as well reconcile herself to taking second place in his affections.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the March 20, 1941, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: I was greatly interested in your article about men having more influence over women than women have over men. Your argument sounds plausible, but still leaves two questions unsettled to which I can find no satisfactory answer. First is, why are women, young and old, devil-possessed to get into pants? Most men detest seeing them in pants, for it makes them lose feminine charm. In plain English, they look like hell. Is it because they wish to be like men in everything?

Second, why do girls drink? The poor little fools! Don’t they know they are cutting their own throats? Women have always been the peculiar victims of booze. Always they have suffered from drunken men folks. Ninety per cent of men hate to see women drink. Do not misunderstand me. I like women and respect them more than most men do. I have a wife and three daughters, all splendid types of American womanhood. Not one of them drinks, but the girls do, on occasion, go in for pants. Help, please. Tell me the answer. W.M.S.

ANSWER: Why women do many things that they do is a mystery past all finding out. Why women will put on their heads hats that make them look like figures of fun; why they will wear knee-length dresses that expose how fat or thin or bowlegged their legs are; why they will starve themselves into anemia or T. B. in order to look like a rack of bones; why they will wear slacks and shorts looking the way you say they do, nobody can even guess.

Why girls brought up in decent homes will sell themselves out cheaper than the lowest woman of the streets and pet and kiss for the sake of being taken to the movies or on a joyride; why girls will drink when they know that the most loathsome sight on earth is a drunken woman is another riddle.

My guess at it is that they do these fool things because they think that it makes them attractive to men, and they are not canny enough to perceive that woman’s best bet is femininity and that when she threw away her seven veils of mystery and put on britches she made the mistake of her life.

But all of this merely emphasizes the truth of my contention that men’s influence over women is all-powerful and that they have only to use it to make them what they want to be. The modern girl drinks and smokes and jitterbugs with men because the boys won’t take her out on dates unless she does.

But if modesty and purity and propriety were the price of popularity, she would turn into a little Puritan before you could say Jack Robinson.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: A man who has been making love to me for several months has suddenly ceased coming to see me. What can I do to find out what is wrong? Should I call him up and have a showdown with him face to face, or is indifference the best policy? He tells me that he is not financially able to get married right away. I am willing to wait, but don’t like not knowing where I stand.  What should I do? WORRIED.

ANSWER: When a man drops a girl after he has been making love to her, it is because he is through with her and she saves her face by not asking for any explanation or making any protest. For there is nothing she can do about it. It is just that the game is over. The little romance is washed up. Finished.

Evidently that is your case. There is no rational explanation of the young man’s conduct. There has been no lovers’ quarrel. He just faded out of the picture because he had got tired of you, or because he realized that you were taking his love-making seriously and that if he didn’t break away he would become involved in an engagement, while the last thing he wanted to do was get married.

Love-making is just a line with many men, and it is a thousand pities that girls haven’t some way of telling the real article from the spurious. It would save them many a heartache.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor‘s note: This article appeared in the March 2014 issue of The Nashville Retrospect along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Dynamite Found On Tracks” (1967);  “The Elevator” (1882); and “NASCAR cancels races in Nashville” (1985).

From the April 26, 1949, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: My friend’s husband died four months ago and she would like to know if it is old-fashioned for a widow to wear black. Is it proper for a widow to wear costume jewelry and attend shows and dances? MRS. H. M. K.

ANSWER: Wearing mourning used to be obligatory and no widow would have been thought respectable who did not go about swathed in black. Now, however, customs have changed and it is a matter of individual preference whether a woman puts on black or not when she is widowed.

However, it would be considered extremely bad taste for a woman who had recently lost some member of her family to wear gay and conspicuous clothes, or to deck herself out in flamboyant costume jewelry, or to go to public dances. It is wrong to make a fetish of mourning, but we owe a certain respect to the dead.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: Seven years ago my sister’s husband died leaving her a childless widow, and being sorry for her, my husband and I asked her to come and stay with us. We did not expect this to be a permanent arrangement, but my sister does, and my husband has gotten so fed up with having her always under foot that he is threatening to leave me. What am I do do? My sister doesn’t dream she is in our way and I cannot beat to hurt her. K. L. S.

ANSWER: Your problem is a very common one, for there are few families in which there is not an in-law or a grandma or an aunt or an uncle who comes for a visit and settles down for the balance of his or her life. They are comfortable and they know that nobody has the courage to kick ’em out. Furthermore such is human vanity, they probably never even suspect that everyone isn‘t just crazy to have them around.

Certainly you are doing a very wrong and foolish thing to let your sister break up your home. Your duty is to screw up your courage to the sticking point and just write Sister a nice, affectionate, honest letter telling her that you love her, but that you and your husband want to have your home alone.

Perhaps she will cry a little over not being wanted, but it won’t take her long to realize that she will be a lot happier by herself than having to cater to another’s whims. For we all have our eccentricities.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: I have been married for 15 years to a man who still retains his bachelor traits. He enjoys spending his nights out with the boys far more than he does being with his family at home or going out with me. I have tried desperately to keep up appearances of a happy family but to no avail. His interests seem harmless enough, but it forces me into either a life of seclusion, or into a new world of my own.

Do you think I would be better off if I would let him go his own way, unhampered? It is a case of a peaceful household without him, or a turbulent one with him. MRS. B. A.

ANSWER: The problem that wives grow gray trying to solve is why the men who camped on their doorstops before marriage, after marriage can’t be induced to spend an evening at home. It isn’t that their wives fail to come up to expectations. On the contrary, their Mary Janes have retained all of their youthful charms, and there is nothing that these Wandering Willies enjoy more than bragging about what good cooks and housekeepers their wives are and quoting the smart things their children said.

Such being the case, it is not surprising that the bewildered wives ask, if their homes are such pleasant places, why their husbands object so much to staying in them. And why, if their wives are so attractive, do husbands prefer the society of bar-flies to theirs? The answer is simple enough. It is because there are men who are atavistic by nature, who always revert to type and can never be housebroken.

The wise woman, who has gotten one of these men’s men for a husband, should realize that the fact that he puts on his hat and goes downtown as soon as he has gulped dinner, is no sign that he is a woman-chaser, or that he has lost his affection for his wife. It is just because he craves the society of his own kind.

So Friend Wife should accept the inevitable and, instead of getting a divorce, should build her own separate life, keep her home intact, and give her children the advantages and the place in society they could not have without a husband and father to provide for them.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the April 4, 1941, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

A young girl, who is just starting out on her first job, asks me if I will give her a few directions for her guidance along the rocky road she is going to travel. Well, first, dress the part.

A woman’s clothes are always a part of her success or failure. Be neat and trim, trig and taut, with no floating chiffons or rattling jewelry. Look like an intelligent, competent business woman—not like a little flapper who has dropped into their office or store on her way to the movies or a cocktail party.

Use enough cosmetics to help nature out a bit, but don’t come to work painted up like a circus wagon and with a marshmallow nose and a mouth that looks like a cut of raw butchers’ meat. And, above all, eschew long, claw-like nails that appear to be dripping blood. We women are enough like cats, anyway, without emphasizing the resemblance.

Put all that you have in your job. Study it. Learn all about it. Try every day to make yourself more efficient in it. Go to it as if it were going to be your life work and not merely a temporary way of passing the time between the school room and the altar. Perhaps you will marry. Perhaps you won’t. Husbands are chancy things in these days and even if you get one he may die, leaving you with a house full of little children to support. Or he may desert you for another woman and then you are in hard luck unless you have some trade at your fingers’ ends.

And, anyways, it is the experts who draw down the big pay envelopes, so it will pay you to fit yourself to be one of them.

Watch Office Conduct

Toward the men with whom you work adopt the motto of Washington: “Friendship with all, entangling alliances with none.” A business office is no place for flirtations, so don’t drape yourself over the desk of every good-looking Tom, Dick or Harry, nor permit them to festoon themselves over yours. It doesn’t add to a girl’s popularity with her boss for her to show that her mind is more on her dates than it is on her work.

Don’t trade upon your sex and try to make your good looks take the place of good work, and vamping your superior atone for bad spelling and mistakes in your accounts. And, above all, remember that consoling your boss for having a wife who doesn’t understand him is no part of your job.

Good Manners Essential

Cultivate good manners. Be dignified without being haughty. Have self-respect without being touchy. Get an iron grip on your self-control. Learn to give the soft answer that turns away wrath to an irritable and unreasonable customer and a grouchy boss.

Take a human interest in those who stand on the other side of the counter and try to find them what they want. Don’t serve them as if you were a languid duchess deigning to bestow a favor upon an inferior. Don’t take dictation from your employer with an air that seems to say: “Heaven knows, I never thought I would come to this!”

Use common sense. Loads of it. All you have on the premises. Recognize that when a girl goes into business she comes into direct competition with men on their own ground and that she must expect to be treated as if she were a man.

Therefore, don’t keep your precious feelings spread all over the place and have hysteria and weep if your work is criticized, or a worn and harried employer speaks gruffly to you.

Don’t Ape Men

Don’t copy-cat men unless you have some extraordinary masculine talent. Women are most successful when they stick to their knitting and do their own line of work in their own way. Women’s chief value in the commercial world is in bringing certain invaluable feminine qualities to their work, such as an almost fanatical loyalty and faithfulness, and the feminine gift for remembering just where everything was put and being able to lay their hands on it at a moment’s notice.

Finally, my dear, be proud of your job. Be proud of earning your own way in the world instead of being a parasite upon some one else. Never apologize for being a working girl. Never pretend that you pound a typewriter or stand behind a counter because you are bored with society.

You only make yourself ridiculous when you do, but the world takes off its hat to the girl who stands on her own feet and asks no odds of any one. She is woman at her best. Be one of her.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the April 2017 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Editor Warns Doctors: Time Short To Fight Medicare” (1962); “Loss of the Brandywine” (1832); and “An Infant Murdered” (1867).

From the May 2, 1929, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DORTHY DIX: I am a poor young man working hard to get a start in the world. Not long ago the girl I am engaged to had a birthday and suggested an article as a present that costs more money than I had in the world at that time. I explained to her, but she insisted on having it and I bought it by getting it for so much down and so much a month. Just a month later she startled me with a purchases where $100 was involved, which she seems to think was my obligation also, and she is continually reminding me of the desirability of an engagement ring. Her people are well-to-do—worth dollars to my cents—yet every time she calls me on the phone from her house the charges are reversed on me. I feel the need of competent advice. A DOUBTING MALE.

ANSWER: You certainly do, son, and mine is to escape from the clutches of this gold-digger while you still have a chance. If you don’t you will be one of those poor, miserable husbands whose wife keeps his nose to the grindstone all of his life.

If you marry this girl you spend your life toiling like a slave to buy her fine clothes and cars and to send her on trips and to provide her with an expensive home, and she won’t care a rap whether she works you to death or not. All she is interested in is getting the thing she wants, and no matter how much you give her she will be like the daughter of the horse lech, always crying MORE, MORE, MORE.

You will always be in debt and just about three jumps ahead of the sheriff, and you will be miserable and unhappy and nerve-worn and harried by debts, for she will always spend more than you make.

You will never get anywhere because you will never be able to save up enough money to go into any business of your own account or to make any good investment or even to leave a poor situation on a chance of getting a better one because you won’t have a dollar saved up and can’t risk being out of job.

Don’t marry that kind of a girl, son. There are so many easier and pleasanter ways of committing suicide than by being gobbled up by a greedy woman.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: The man to whom I am engaged and myself have agreed to let you decide the fairness of this proposition. He agrees to sacrifice smoking from ten to fifteen cigarettes a day to two or three a week provided I sacrifice my feelings on the subject enough to let the subject drop and never bring it up again. All that I ask is that he give up smoking cigarettes and in return I offer to give up any one of my pleasures, but if he continues to smoke he gives up the right to criticize anything I do. HOPEFUL AND PERSISTENT.

ANSWER: It seems to be that you are both making a mountain out of a molehill and that if all you have to quarrel about is a cigarette you are hard put for a subject of disagreement. However, it isn’t the cigarette you are fighting over. The man is fighting for personal liberty and the woman is fighting for the privilege of bossing him, and if I were the man I would stick to my cigarette if I died for it.

But be wise, children. Have enough sense to realize that tolerance is the greatest of all domestic virtues and that the less that you interfere with each other’s personal taste and habits the better chance you have for [happiness. Why should either one of you give up any innocent pleasure for] the other one? Can’t you see how much more comfortable you will be if each concedes to the other the right to indulge in his or her own personal ways?

If wives would let their husbands in peace and husbands would lay off their wives’ paint and powder and hair nets and short skirts, there would be a lot more happy homes than there are now.

___

MY DEAR DOROTHY DIX: Do you think it wise for a wife continuously and repeatedly to forgive a husband? When a married couple have reached middle age and the husband is disloyal to his wife and lies to her and neglects her, what course should she take when her affectionate remonstrations and persuasions have failed?

Is divorce remedy for such a situation? Does it bring lasting peace of mind? What effect is it likely to have on her married son and his young family? To what extent should this woman consider her son and other relations in the matter of this contemplated divorce? What is her duty to herself? Is it wise or right or just for her to bear so much mental suffering, loneliness of spirit and heartache in order to spare the feelings of relations?

This woman has given thirty-one years of faithful service to her husband and does not desire a divorce if any other course can be made to do. She does not need his support. It is only a question of choosing the right course in order to obtain peace of mind. Of course, in the end the wife must decide for herself, but anything you say on the subject will be helpful to her. MRS. E. F.

ANSWER: How often a wife should forgive a husband depends altogether on how much worth forgiving he is and on how much she cares for him. There are men who are born polygamists who are constitutionally unable to resist the flutter of every petticoat that crosses their pathway, but who are otherwise all that could be desired in a husband.

They are generous, affectionate, kindly, sympathetic, agreeable in the home, and they make love to their own wives as charmingly as they do to other women. Such a man a woman may well forgive seventy times seven. But when a husband adds infidelity to grouchiness and stinginess and fault-finding, once is too often to overlook his fault. He should be given the air if he even glances sideways at a flapper.

There are women who are so obsessed by their love for their husbands that they are happier even with a corner of their hearts than they would be with none. We often see the miracle of mother love, that loves most where it has to forgive most, extended to husbands. So every wife must judge for herself whether her husband is worth the price she has to pay for him.

As to whether divorce brings peace of mind or not, that also depends on the individual woman’s temperament. To a woman of strong, practical common sense to be divorced from a lying, immoral man is like a surgical operation that removes some cancer that poisoned all the sweet springs of life. She is healed and well and can set about rebuilding her life, but a neurotic woman can make herself miserable with vain regrets.

When a woman has little children who need a home and home influences and the authority of both mother and father, I think she should endure almost anything for the sake of her young ones, but it is a different story when her children are grown. Then she need consider no one except herself, and there is no reason why she should be tortured by the carrying-on of a worthless old rounder. Certainly a woman who has given thirty-one years of her life to the service of her family has a right to do as she pleases with the balance of it.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the May 6, 1935, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

“Life may begin for men at 40, as the optimistic Professor Pitkin declares it does,” said a woman the other day, “but for women life ends at 40. After that they are just has-beens. Just hangers-on to life. Their good looks gone. Their charm for men gone. No more romance for them, no more thrills. Their job is done if they have had children. Their chances of marrying nil if they are single. Nothing to do but to crawl up on the shelf when a woman is 40.

“Now with a man it is different. At 40 he is still young and he is generally better looking and more attractive than he ever was before. He doesn’t have to dye his gray hairs. They give him an air of sophistication. In plays, the villain who is a devil among the women always puts a little dab of white on the sides of his head. Generally he has got on Easy Street and can take a girl out and give her a good time without having to eat in beaneries for a week to pay for it. He is at the peak of his fascination for women and can marry whomsoever he chooses if he is a bachelor or a widower. At 40 he is on the up-and-up, instead of being in the down-and-out class as a woman is.”

“Oh, of course this is a man’s world and men have the best of it at every age,” said another woman, “but I don’t agree with you that a woman goes into the scrapheap at 40.” Of course, one phase of her life does end at 40, but another just as interesting and with far fewer disadvantages in it begins. True, the road after 40 may not have as many roses blooming along it, but neither is it so thickly strewn with thorns. There are fewer thrills in it and fewer tears.

“As a matter of fact, it takes a woman forty years to learn how to enjoy life. When we who are middle-aged look backward, the thing that amazes us most is that we made ourselves so needlessly unhappy. We worried so over trifles that amounted to nothing. We made such mountains out of molehills. We agonized over so many imaginary dangers. We borrowed so much trouble over things that never happened, after all.

“As brides we wept our eyes out if our husbands forgot to kiss us goodbye in the mornings. At 40 we don’t even give it a second thought because we know that they are worried about the stock market, or wondering if they can pull off some trade. As brides we were eaten up with jealousy of every woman our husbands looked at, from their grandmothers to their stenographers. At 40 we know that men aren’t half so susceptible as they are supposed to be, and that because our husbands make themselves pleasant to their dinner partners is no sign that they are about to elope with them.

“So far as marriage is concerned the best part of it comes to the average woman after she is 40. By that time love has sort of jelled into friendship. She has learned how to keep off her husband’s toes, or else she dances the rhumba on them. She has learned how to manage her man, or else she has given up the task entirely. She knows her husband is so bound to her that no love thief could steal him away, or else she is so tired of him that she would be glad to be rid of him.

“Anyway, at 40, sensible women quit worrying about men. They are either married, or have accepted spinsterhood as their lot and have given up on the struggle. They are no longer on the look-out for the Fairy Prince of their girlish dreams. They no longer suffer from the delusion that they are vamps and, believe me, no woman ever really knows peace and happiness until she gets to the place where she knows no man is going to give a second look at her and she doesn’t care if he doesn’t.

“The woman of 40 has really come to the holiday part of her life. If she has reared a family, she can look back upon a good job well done. They are off her hands for the first time since her first baby was born, and she has leisure in which to enjoy herself and to do the thousands of things that she has always planned to do. She couldn’t belong to clubs when there were babies to look after and children coming home from school and asking for m-o-t-h-e-r.

“She couldn’t have pretty clothes when every dollar had to go to the boys’ college expense and to buy the girls pretty frocks, but with the children off on their own she can indulge the tastes she has denied for years. And she does, as is amply proved by the fact that most make fortunes, and that three-fourths of the people who travel for pleasure are middle-aged women having the time of their lives.

“Oh, you are wrong in saying that life ends for a woman at 40. It simply opens out for her into new delights, unless she makes the fatal mistake of trying to remain a perpetual 39.”

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the May 2015 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “The Lost Child” (1834); “‘Get a Wife for a Dime’ Creates Letter Mania” (1935); and “Criminal Justice Back Then” by Larry Brinton.

From the June 30, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: We recently celebrated Mother’s Day. Throughout the land we heard of the love that a child should bear its mother and of the things that the mother has done for the child for which she can never be repaid, and in my bitter soul I wondered why stress is never laid on the duties which a mother owes her child. For I am one of the mothers who, through misguided possessive mother love, ruined the life of her child.

I had an only child and I thought it my right to dominate him in every way and brought him up to do my will. When other children were playing, I made him study. I kept him from all the things which a boy enjoys. Later in life I chose the girls whom I thought were suitable for him to go with. Always he gave in to me.

Finally he fell in love. The girl was kind and good and everything for which a man looks in a woman who he has decided to make his wife and the mother of his children. But, most of all, he liked her dauntless courage and her smile.

I ordered him not to see her any more, as she was not only poor, but also she was of a religion which to me was odious. It took me a long time to break off the match and induce him to marry the girl of my choice, a girl of good standing and a leader in our church who had well-to-do parents.

That was several years ago. They live with me and now have a little son. I have stood by and seen the fruit of my work. My son is old for his years. He is unhappy. His boyish good humor is gone. His life is humdrum and unenjoyable. And the child is without a mother’s real care, for his mother is so wrapped up in church work and clubs that she has no time for her little son.

I have now met the girl my son wanted to marry and I find she is the kindest, sweetest thing, just the sort of wife my son should have, and that the two things I objected to most are responsible for the goodness and strength of her character.

I have not long to live now and I go to the grave knowing that I ruined my son’s life and probably that of the woman he loved, and my conscience troubles me. There is nothing I can do to undo what I have done, but I can beg mothers not to interfere too much in the lives of their children. A HEART-BROKEN MOTHER.

ANSWER: I print this letter because it is a chapter out of a real life and sets forth more vividly than I can do the tragedy of possessive mother love. I hope that those women who feel that “mother always know best” and who believe that a mother has a right to dominate her children’s lives will lay its warning to heart. For mother love can be a child’s greatest blessing or its greatest misfortune.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the June 2012 issue of The Nashville Retrospect along with other articles from the city’s past, including: “Fan Fair Followers Spent $1 Million” (1975); “Yorks Center of Attraction” Alvin C. York (1919); and “Sevier Park Presented To City” (1948).

From the June 9, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

Undoubtedly much domestic misery would be saved and many divorces prevented if in the days of courtship the enamored youth and maiden attempted to ascertain each other’s views on a few practical points.

Before marriage good looks, devotion, charm, gaiety seem the most desirable attributes in a husband or wife. After marriage you know that an entirely new line of qualities makes a man or woman endurable as a life partner.

So I would suggest that the engaged girl would lay off of the sentimental goo-goo talk long enough to submit to the boy friend a few pertinent inquiries as to his point of view and convictions and reactions on the following subjects. Such as:

The money question. Are you a spender or a saver? Will we be always just one leap ahead of the Sheriff because you have no sales resistance and will buy anything you can get on time? Or will you handle what you earn prudently and wisely so that we may look forward to living on Easy Street in our old age? Are you going to give me an allowance on which to run the house and for my own personal use as my right? Are you going to be shocked and resentful at the cost of marriage, or feel that it is worth its price?

If I marry you, will I have an agreeable steady date for my evenings or spend them alone reading an improving book or trying to corkscrew a conversation out of a man who has about as little talk in him as a store dummy?

Do you regard children as a blessing or brats? Would you look upon Junior as a well-spring of joy or just more expense?

Do you think a wife is entitled to a night off now and then and some amusement? Or do you think that just being married is entertainment enough for any woman?

And what about relatives? Would I have to run a free hotel for your people, while you look like an early Christian martyr if mine dropped in for a meal?

Have you the head-of-the-household complex? Or do you think that an intelligent, educated woman is entitled to her personal liberty and is capable of managing her own affairs?

Are you going to do your part toward making a happy home after you are married, or are you going to dump the whole responsibility on your wife and expect her to do all the smiling while you do the grumping?

These are some of the questions that every engaged girls should ask her fiancé. And by the way he answers them she can form a very good idea of what sort of a husband he will make.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: Regarding the 1937 Rich, Schwartz & Joseph advertisement on this page, be sure to listen to our podcast interview with Frank Swartz, who recalled not only the store’s history but also downtown Nashville history, including shopping, society bootleggers, and streetcars. Also see our article “Rich-Schwartz: The World’s First ‘Ready-To-Wear’ Women’s Store” by Jean Roseman in the July 2012 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper. 

From the June 5, 1945, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

It appears that the teen-agers do not now speak of certain events in human history as having taken place so-and-so. A. D. or B. C. They say it happened “B. B. S” or “D. B. S.,” which being interpreted “before bobby-socks.”

This method of designating time probably will not upset the calendar and might be passed lightly over as one of the vagaries of youth, were it not for the fact that it has produced a near panic among so many parents whose children already were babbling a jargon they could not understand. They are apprehensive that this last addition to their vocabulary indicates that they have gone insane.

“I used to think that my youngsters were unusually intelligent,” writes one perturbed mother to me. “But now when Sammy demands a new bicycle because his old one dates back to B. B. S., and Betty asks me if I expect her to wear the same hat she has had all D. B. S., I can but wonder if they have been stricken with some terrible mental disease. I don’t know whether to give them a good spanking or take them to a psychiatrist.”

To this mother and the many other mothers who are going through the same ordeal with their adolescent youngsters, I would say: Do neither. Just relax and pray heaven to send you patience and a sense of humor.

And, above all, do a little memory work. Think back to the time when you were a teenager yourself and you will recall that you did practically all of the foolish, funny things that your children are doing now. Even to making up a language that did awful things to the dictionary, only you didn’t call it bobby-socker talk then, you called it Pig Latin.

Try to remember how avid you were for pleasure when you were very young, and how you thought you would just lie down and die because there was no use in trying to live in a world so full of sorrows, if it rained so you couldn’t go to the picnic. If you do, you won’t keep Betty home from the party because she has the sniffles. You will wrap her up and let her go and have the thrill that only comes to us once in a lifetime.

Remember your first date and how stiff and self-conscious you and the boy were when he came to call on you and how tongue-tied you were when you tried to think of something to talk about? If you do, you will not put Betty and Sammy through that ordeal. You will make papa read his paper in the dining room, put little brother to bed and clear the premises so they will know that nobody is listening in on them. 

Remember your first love affair and how you saw some freckle-faced lad as a fairy prince, and how you tied up a lock of his hair with a blue ribbon and hung it on your dresser, and how you wrote each other mushy notes, although you saw each other every day at school? If you do, you won’t tease Betty about it, make a funny story of the shy secret she has whispered to you or give her a curtain lecture when she asks you if a boy ever kissed you. You would walk reverently because you would know you are on holy ground.

In dealing with their children, the thing parents most need to remember is their own youth. Their daily prayer should be: “Lord God of Hosts, be with us, yet, lest we forget.”

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the June 2017 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Happy Opry Tradition Coming To End” (1973); “Thos. A. Edison In Nashville” (1906); and “Indian Village Uncovered In Granny White Area” (1973).