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From the July 2, 1951, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: What does life hold for women between 50 and 60? Why do our children think that at that age we should be willing to fold our hands and sit in the chimney corner with no interests except in their interests? Why do they think that it would be terrible for mother to go out and get job and earn her own living, or even to marry again? Why can’t they realize that we find it hard to live in even our children’s homes and want our own, and our own independence and maybe somebody to love us. I am in my early fifties, strong and healthy, and I am tired of being ON THE SHELF

ANSWER: Good for you, sister! Up and at ’em. Now that you have got to the rebellion point, get out and do something about it. Head a revolt of middle-aged women against their dutiful, loving children who are enslaving them in the name of kindness.

Everyone knows that it seldom adds to the serenity of a home to have a mother-in-law in it. Most in-laws resent her presence. It brings about jealousies, interferences, daily conflicts of will, a thousand unpleasantnesses, and no matter how much her children love mother they would be happier without her.

And mother would be happier away from them. All of her life she has been busy. Now she has nothing to do. She has had her place in the sun. Now she is only John’s or Mary’s mother. And years of running her own house have totally unfitted her to live in another woman’s house and take orders instead of give them.

A dozen times I have said in this column that women quit work too soon. Life may not begin for them at 50, but a new career may if they have the courage to attempt it, and they are wrong and foolish to settle down and be dependent on their children. They should strike out for themselves. Make their own living and be happy and independent.

___

DEAR MISS DIX: I am 25 years of age, and my wife is 32. We have a baby three weeks old. My wife is an epileptic and last week, while having an attack, she fell with the baby. Luckily, neither was injured but there is always a chance that one of both could be hurt this way in the future.

I am not financially able to provide someone to stay with them at all times, so I took my wife to her sister’s. However, this arrangement is complicated by the fact that her sister has three children. My father and stepmother are willing to take the baby, but to his my wife will not agree. She says the baby is hers and she will not be separated from him. I am definitely confused as to what to do. Please give me your advice. GENE

ANSWER: Have you talked this problem over with your doctor? Perhaps he could get some help for you from a visiting nurse service. I certainly agree that your wife and baby should not be left alone, and in her present state of health it probably wouldn’t be wise to press the matter of separating her and the baby.

If you could get help from a visiting nurse, your father, stepmother and perhaps a neighbor or two might be able to offer supplementary assistance. Otherwise there seems to be be no alternative but for your wife to go back to her sister. During such times as it is absolutely necessary for your wife to be alone with the child, the baby could be kept in his crib and your wife wouldn’t carry him at all. That, at least, would avert the possibility of injury to the baby in the event of your wife had an attack.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the July 21, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

That clothes are women’s major preoccupation in life, no one will seriously deny. Let some good fortune happen to a woman, and her first impulse is to rush out and buy a new dress to celebrate her luck. In her hour of despair clothes are the staff and rod upon which she leans. And in between times, when existence is just one dull thing after another, there is toujours la toilette, as the French say, to put pep into things.

According to Holy Writ the first thing the first woman did after eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and thereby getting wisdom was to start out on a dress-making orgy, and her daughters have been at it ever since.

The absorption of women in clothes has caused endless debate as the why, and especially the who for, do women dress. Inasmuch as the arguments on one side of the subject were as convincing as those on the other, the matter continued to remain in doubt until recently when a survey was made of the various institutions of learning. This survey showed that girls who attended women’s colleges paid little attention to dress and wore loose, comfortable serviceable frocks and flat-heeled shoes, whereas girls in coeducational schools were dolled up to the limit and went in strong for glad raiment and the latest thing in fancy spiked heeled sandals.

This seems to prove conclusively that women dress to please men and that if this were an Adamless Eden we would throw away our corsets and slouch around in kimonos and save a lot of money. But I cannot wholeheartedly agree with this theory. While we recognize the value of a fluttering ribbon in flagging a man down and the potency of pink chiffon in snaring his fancy, still and all, it is to other women that we turn for a verdict on our clothes. Any old rag looks good to the average man provided it is of a gay color, but sister will know whether it is a Paris confection, or came out of the bargain basement shop.

Furthermore, if women dress to please men, it brings out some amazing contradictions in human nature. For women’s clothes, and especially women’s hats, are the butt of half the masculine jokes. And assuredly women haven’t taken to pants to gratify the masculine taste, for men’s fancy in women’s clothes runs to frills and frivols instead of britches.

As for women wearing shorts, nothing but blind self-conceit and overweening vanity and an absence of mirrors can account for it. For, alas and slack, the feminine legs that do not fill the beholder with ribald laughter are as scarce as hens’ teeth. Bandy shanks and knobby knees should be a secret between a girl and her Maker, and wise is the one who drapes the seven veils of illusion about her and conceals her defects.

All of which suggests that if women dress to please men they make some mighty bad guesses, and it is time they followed Mother Eve’s example and did some more apple eating.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the July 2016 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “How Proposed Ryman Auditorium Will Look” (1936); “Robot Killer Deadly Weapon of Future War” (1935); and “Performing Arts Center Fire Damage Slight” (1978).

From the Aug. 12, 1946, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: I am a 19-year-old Austrian boy who has been in this country only six years, but I have arrived at a sad conclusion. It is that the American man is the most henpecked one on the entire globe. What is your opinion on this subject? SWEATER BOY.

ANSWER: If you consider that for a man to treat his wife with tenderness and consideration and for him to make her a real partner in his life instead of a slave to him as an indication of his being henpecked, undoubtedly the American man heads the list. No other wives in any other country have the freedom that the American wives have, but that does not mean that they are female Hitlers, except in rare cases.

As a rule, the American wife is cooperative and a help to her husband instead of a hindrance. Many a man in this country owes his fortune and his success to having a smart, ambitious wife, who pushed his fortunes instead of being a millstone around his neck.

You are wasting your sympathy on the American husband. He is far more apt to marry an American girl than he is a foreigner.

___

DEAR MISS DIX: When a boy asks me for a date, my mother always accepts and says: “WE will be delighted to go,” which puts me in a very embarrassing position, to say nothing of the boy being left on the hot spot. What can I do? M. L. C.

ANSWER: Your mother must be very dumb if she does not know that the boys not only do not want her to step out with them, but they haven’t asked her, and that most of them cannot afford to have mother go along as excess baggage. You simply will have to tell her the truth.

___

DEAR MISS DIS: The girls are asking why so many of us ex-G.I.’s have an anti-date complex. I’ll tell them. It is because we guys who fought through the war aged a year with every month. We came back old men before our time and the girls we used to date and have fun with seem to us as silly and flighty as our kid sisters.

What we want now are not bobby-sockers, but women. Silly chatter and childish pranks bore us. What we want, in reality, is a girl of 20 who is 35 in mind, if for no other reason than for peace and quiet. I have been dating girls who might easily be mistaken for my mother, but with them I feel at ease and find real companionship. EX-G.I.

ANSWER: Of all the hundreds letters that have come to this column from ex.G.I.’s and dateless girls discussing the unexpected problem of why the returned soldiers seemed to have lost their taste for the sweeties they left behind them, this particular lad seems to me to have come the nearest to solving it.

It is because under the cruel tutelage of war the boys have grown up, whereas the girls have stayed static. Susie and Sally and Mary Belle, in thousands upon thousands of cases, have lived their quiet home life, with nothing to break its dullness or stimulate them. They haven’t thought it worth-while to study anything, to try to improve themselves in any way or to make themselves more interesting. Their Joes liked them just as they were, so they stayed that way, with the same line of conversation, the same little tricks.

But Joe didn’t stay static. He went to the far corners of the earth. He saw cities and peoples that were new to him and he got an education that put him out of the class of girls he left behind him. Above all, he saw death and knew danger and suffering and became emotionally mature. That explains why not only so many boys find the girls they used to go with unattractive, but why so many of the boy husbands are equally disillusioned with their wives.

But, judging by this G.I.’s letter, the Joes are making the mistake that causes many a domestic tragedy. They are asking for the impossible. They want girls who look 20, but who are 35 in mind and character. And there isn’t any such an animal.

The little bobby-sockets, who are so fresh and pretty and good to look at, are silly and noisy and want to jump around, and their chatter is like the crackling of thorns under a pot, while the women of 35, who have acquired poise, wisdom, sympathy and understanding, no longer have the bloom of youth or are a treat to the eyes.

So there you are and there is no way of changing nature.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Aug. 11, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

An eminent divorce court Judge declares that marriage of persons past 60 years of age should be prohibited by law. Oh fie, Judge: Nonsense! Have a heart. Because one rich old man married a flapper under the fond delusion she loved him for himself alone, or one old woman has invested her late husband’s insurance money in a gigolo, don’t doom all the sixtyish to lonely old ages.

The Judge who believes that all people of 60 should be prevented from marrying also forgets that 60 isn’t age now as it used to be. It isn’t the winter of life. It is just Indian summer. There was a time when men and women of 60 were supposed to be senile and doddering, with no further interest in life and nothing to do but sit in a corner and reflect on their latter end. But most of the sixtyish you know now are up on their toes going places and doing things, and they haven’t the slightest intention of dying for the next fifteen or twenty years.

Personally, I am strong for elderly people marrying, provided they marry in their own age class. For an old man to marry a young girl, or for an elderly woman to acquire a boy husband is a fatal mistake because in such cases they are inevitably bound to miss the one thing for which they married, and that is companionship.

Young people find something ludicrous in gray-haired old men and women getting married but, in reality, it is the old who need marriage more than the young, because they must find their happiness in their homes. The young can go out and hunt up amusement and diversion, but the old must spend their evenings by their firesides and it is a dreary and lonely thing to do if there is not someone to bear one company, and to listen with unabated interest while one retells old stories that he or she has heard a hundred times.

Particularly should there be no bar raised against the marriage of widows and widowers in their sixties, because no man and woman who have ever been at the heads of their own houses are ever contented in anybody else’s home. And it makes for the happiness not only of themselves, but of their children and grandchildren when they team up with some other lonely old widow or widower and start housekeeping again.

It is a long, dark road, that last lap of the journey of life. Happy the old man and woman who can find a companion to treat it with them.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the August 2014 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city‘s past, including: “Citizen Prisoners” (1864); “Immigration, Anarchism, Crime” (1907); and “Fire At Lebanon—The Factory In Ruins” (1854).

From the Sept. 18, 1936, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

What is a wife to do with a philandering husband who is otherwise highly desirable as a husband—who is kind, generous, pleasant to live with and as fascinating to his wife as he is to other women?

This is one of the greatest problems in marriage and is one with which thousands of women wrestle helplessly, not knowing whether it is better to bear the ills they have than to fly to those they know not of.

And what makes the matter all the more complicated is that these wandering husbands seldom want divorces. They don’t want their homes broken up. They don’t want to be parted from their children. They don’t even want to lose their wives whom they admire and respect and to whom they fully expect to return to when they get tired of chasing every ruffled petticoat that crosses their pathway.

The other day a woman, married to one of these great and universal lovers, told me her tale of woe. She was good-looking, smart, charming in every way, but she had not been able to hold her husband and keep him from having affairs with other women. Her unhappiness was almost driving her insane.

She said that she and her husband had been married twenty-five years and had four children. Her husband was sweet-tempered, affectionate, indulgent to her and the children. He made a good salary and they had a lovely home and a car and all the comforts of life, but they never had accumulated any property, chiefly because he spent so much money on his lady loves. “I feel that I can’t stand it any longer,” wailed the woman. “My self-respect won’t permit me to live with a husband whom I know to be untrue and who flaunts his affairs in my face. What shall I do?”

“Do the thing that will bring you the greatest happiness,” I replied, “but think a long time and weigh well all the loss and gain before you decide to leave your husband and break up your home. Make certain hat you will be happier never seeing your husband, never hearing from him, not knowing whether he is sick or well, than you are now when you are a part of his daily life, and the charm that he radiates on other women shines on you, too. Sometimes half a loaf is better than no bread at all.

“Think of your children. They love their happy-go-lucky father. They won’t want to be parted from him. The chances are theat your youngsters will be bitterly critical of you if you leave your husband and will think that Mom was mostly to blame and she might have been better sport and not made a mountain out of a molehill of Dad’s little flirtations.

“Consider also your altered financial status if you leave your husband. Your husband makes enough to support one family in comfort, but it would be a meager living for two families if he married again, as he would be sure to do.

“Divorce isn’t the panacea for a hurt heart and wounded pride that wives think it is, and they are wise women if they think a long time before buying a ticket to Reno.”

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Sept. 24, 1940, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I love my mother-in-law. I know she is in deep grief over the death of her husband and I would not hurt her for the world, but she is simply killing my husband by writing him tear-stained letters that absolutely wreck him. He loved his father dearly and his grief over losing him has aged him five years in as many months, but he realizes he has to go on with life and is making a brave effort to do so.

I try to cheer him and buck him up, but every time he seems to be getting back to normal here comes a letter from his mother telling him in minute detail of every pain, anguish, sorrow and loneliness she experiences. Says she will never be a bit happier, that she has nothing to live for, that she wishes she was in the grave with her husband, how she can’t eat and has to take drugs to sleep, and so on and on.

Every letter is like sticking a knife in my husband’s heart, for it makes him feel that his mother’s sufferings are almost beyond bearing. Is there any way that I can stop her from the cruel harrowing up of my husband’s feelings without offending her? AN ANXIOUS WIFE.

ANSWER: I am afraid your mother-in-law is getting a morbid joy out of dramatizing her grief and your husband is her most responsive audience. No consideration for his sufferings nor for the effect her letters have upon him is going to stop her, for of all emotions sorrow is the most selfish and self-centered.

The only thing you can do is to try to make your husband believe the truth, and that is that women don’t mean half they write and should never be taken too seriously.

There seems to be something in a sheet of good white paper and a bottle of ink that fires their fancies and sets their imagination working and makes them visualize themselves in romantic and tragic roles that causes them to write down things that they neither feel nor believe.

Look at all the foolish love letters that girls write to boys for whom they do not care at all, just because they feel that they are being poetical in pouring out passionate vows of devotion on paper. Think of the indiscreet letters that women write in which they tell family secrets that they should have their hands cut off for revealing.

And, believe me, the letters of hopeless grief that women write belong in the same category. They are the outpourings of a woman reveling in self-pity and trying to keep the spotlight turned on herself by calling the attention of others to her sufferings.

When they write they know that the reader visualizes them as Niobe [from the tragic Greek myth] leaning over a grave with every thought and every interest buried in it, when, in reality, they are quite chirpy and taking an interest in seeing that their new mourning is becoming and eating three square meals a day.

Somehow we all take the written word much more seriously than we do the spoken word, and that makes the writing of depressing letters little less than a crime. Yet it is one to which women are peculiarly addicted.

All of us have correspondents who are really quite cheerful, normal women, yet whose letters are so filled with gloom that we hesitate to open them. They never, by any chance, mention anything pleasant that has occurred, but they give us minute accounts of every tragedy that has happened in the community. Try to get your husband to look at his mother’s letters from this point of view.

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DEAR DOROTHY DIX: Recently my stepdaughter married a young man who didn’t have a cent above the marriage license, not even a part-time job, and they went straight from the marriage license office to the Relief Bureau. Neither the father nor I have ever met the young man. I have been married to the girl’s father for 15 years, and have worked hard side by side with him getting together the little business that makes a support for us two, but it will not take care of two families. Now the in-laws think it is my place to step out and give the girl and her husband all that I have helped build up, but I do not feel that I should give up my home, and my security to these young people who are stronger and more capable of coping with the world than I am, as I am a woman past 50. What should I do?  MRS. F. P. E.

ANSWER: Stick to your job. Hang on with both hands to all that you have made. Let these selfish young people shift for themselves. It is a terrible thing when a young man and woman have so little sense of responsibility, so little pride and self-respect that they marry without any means of meeting the obligations they have assumed, knowing that they are going to be parasites who will have to be supported by the work of others.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the September 2014 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “A Dark Mystery Solved” (1880); “Hoodooed” (1884); and “Grave Yields Catastrophic Find” (1978).

From the Oct. 6, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

One of the problems that is turning fathers and mothers gray before their time is what to do about their twelve-and-thirteen-year-old daughters who are boy-crazy and think they are in love; who want to have dates every night, go out to parties and automobile rides and enjoy all the privileges of grown-up young ladies.

Of course the adolescent girl has always been a headache to her parents, but heretofore the agony has not come on so soon. Mother had a brief respite between the time she ceased walking Janie with the colic at night and the time she began lying awake at night wondering where Janie was and picturing her mangled and lying under a wrecked automobile on the way to some roadhouse, but now that blessed season of rest and peace is gone. There are no more little girls.

The little girl of 11 or 12 who wore her hair in braids down her back, who played with dolls and “lady-come-to-see,” is as extinct as the dodo. In her place we have the young miss who cries for a latch key instead of lollypops; who paints herself up like an infantile Jezebel; who demands a black velvet evening dress; who loudly asserts that she is perfectly capable of taking care of herself and who does not hesitate to let her mother and father know that she regards their opinion as something musty and fusty that has been brought down from the hair trunk in the attic.

There are millions of bewildered and heart-sick fathers and mothers who are looking into the faces of the young rebels who have suddenly sprung up in their homes and wondering what to do about it and how they can save these headstrong little innocents from wrecking their lives by their folly. For mother and father know how faulty is a child’s judgment; how weak young shoulders are; how unfitted to bear the burdens of life and how easily a young girl’s feet stray into the path from which there is no returning.

It’s easy enough to say that Janie’s parents should turn her across their knees, give her a spanking and tell her to forget all about the boy friend. But the strong-arm method of ruling youngsters doesn’t work in these days of emancipated children. To lock Janie in her room would only mean that she would climb out of the window. To forbid the boy friend to come to the house would just send her out to meet him on the street corner. Nor does any one know any formula for making a love-sick schoolgirl think of her lessons instead of some curly headed lad who is the temporary object of her affections.

So there the parents are who have to deal with this problem of the twelve or thirteen-year-old girl who is still an ignorant, blundering helpless little child, but who thinks she is a woman of the world and demands her privileges, and how to solve it no one can tell them. One can only say to be very gentle with them. Drive with a light rein and use the diplomacy of Machiavelli himself in dealing with them. And with luck you will get Janie safely past the dangerous age.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the October 2012 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Seizure of Contrabands” (1861); “A White Rape Fiend” (1907); and “Baptist Children’s Home Reunion Brings Fond Memories” (1975).

From the Dec. 6, 1939, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

What is the best age at which to marry? Twenty-four for women, 28 for men. At least that is the conclusion at which the statisticians have arrived who have been analyzing and comparing the records of the Marriage License Bureaus and the Domestic Relations and Divorce Courts. They say that marriages under 20 are almost predestined failures, while next in point of risk comes the marriages of the 21, 22 and 23-year-olders.

But between the age of 24 and 30 is the auspicious time to enter into the holy estate, as after 30 the divorce rate soars and marriage again becomes a hazardous venture. Of course, even the least intelligent of us know that these marriages statistics are among the figures that don’t lie. Every one, except the young themselves, knows that marriage is a strictly adult proposition, calling for more strength and endurance than the young possess, and that callow boys and girls simply court disaster who undertake to cut their wisdom teeth on a wedding ring.

All of us who have passed through adolescence know that children in their teens are undeveloped, with changing tastes, and that the girl a boy thought his idea of perfection at 19 or 20 is apt to bore him to extinction by the time he is 25; that the youth who thrilled a girl of 17 to the marrow of her bones can seldom raise a single palpitation in the breast of a woman of 25. The fires of love that warmed sweet [at] 20 have generally burned out and are nothing but a pinch of gray ashes at 26.

But if a couple wait until the woman is 24 and the man 28 they automatically eliminate most of these perils of matrimony. They are old enough to have settled down into whatever mold they are going to take; their tastes and habits are formed, hence they pick out for life companions those who are congenial and who will not change because they are also mature.

The woman of 24 and the man of 28 do not look upon their home as a prison from which they are pining to break and their children as excess baggage. On the contrary, they regard their homes as temples of refuge to which they can fly from the strife of the world, and they look upon their babies as little bundles from heaven. For they have waited to marry until they are ready to settle down. They are tired of running around and a quiet evening at home looks better to them than a night club.

Moreover, those who marry in the late twenties have a better chance of happiness because by that time a man has usually got on his feet in business and is able to support his family. So both husband and wife are saved the terrible strain upon affection that comes when their nerves are stretched to the breaking point over how the rent is to be paid and where the next meal is coming from.

The danger to those who wait too long to marry, however, is that after 30 we begin to harden in our characters. We are no longer plastic; we find it difficult to adapt ourselves to others; we acquire ways that are as the breath of life to us, and it irritates us to have any one interfere with our habits.

So common observation, as well as statistics, show that the proper time to marry is when we are old enough to know our own minds and young enough to change them.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the December 2018 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Christmas Special Upsets Cash; Vows He Is Ending TV Career” (1976); “A Second Rip Van Winkle” (1895); and  “Champion Bird Eater” (1878).

From the Oct. 1, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

A group of psychologists who have been delving into the why and whereforeness of marriage and trying to find out what makes it what it is, declare that it is inequality between husbands and wives that brings about most matrimonial failures.

But, continue these wise men, when one or the other of the high contracting parties in a marriage is superior to the other it should be the man, for a man can go on loving and being happy and satisfied with an inferior wife, but it is the essence of a woman’s love that she shall look up to her husband.

Of course, there is nothing new in these findings, but their truth is a matter of common knowledge. Many times it is the wife who is the go-getter in the matrimonial partnership. But the man whose wife makes him never worships his Creator. On the contrary, he resents her being able to do the things he cannot do, and almost invariably he turns from her to some inferior woman who will think him wonderful and great and burn incense at his feet. When the gray mare is the better horse there is likely to be a smash-up.

On the other hand, there is nothing that makes so much for the wife to regard her husband as a little tin god. No man wants a wife who see through him, or who judges him, or who criticizes him. He only wants one who admires him and who yes-lesses him. That is why so many men marry inferior women and are happy with them as long as the soft soap holds out.

Wives do not feel this way about inferior husbands. Perhaps it is the way they are built, perhaps it is because of the thousands of years of subservience of wives to their husbands, but every woman would a thousand times rather be the wife of a successful man than to be successful herself. It burns her up with shame for her husband to be a weakling, not able to old his own with other men. You never saw a bossy, hen-pecking wife who was a happy one or a contented one.

But if it makes for the happiness of a marriage for the husband to be superior to the wife, if one is better than the other, it makes for the good of the children for the mother to be superior to the father in case both parents are not equally intelligent and high-minded. A fine and noble man with exalted ideals can do little to raise his children to his level if their mother has lax principles and is common, ignorant and vulgar. He cannot even teach them manners and morals if their mother nullifies all his efforts by her example and precepts.

The moral of all of which is that in picking out your husband or wife it is best to marry your equal. Then both will be happy and the children with get a double break.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Oct. 22, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

What is a woman to do when she is 75 and feels “Like 17?” is the bomb that a woman threw into a feminine party the other day. What indeed? It is a problem that makes unriddling the riddle of the Sphinx as easy as a child’s guessing game, but no soothsayer has arisen to solve this modern mystery of how a woman should act her age when she is a flapper at heart and a great-grandmother in reality.

This was not one of the worries of the women of the good old times, when life was a simpler affair than it is now. Then a woman who was seventyish was seventyish, and that was all there was about it.

But times have changed and women with them. While we still have many estimable ladies in our midst, who are content to wear flat-heeled shoes that are big enough for them and to knit baby socks and enjoy the placid pleasures and perquisites of age, there are thousands upon thousands of others who want to dress like debutantes and do debutantish things. The question is how to reconcile a spirit that is so young with a body that is so old.

Many try to find their lost girlhood in the beauty shops and the specialty stores, but alas, it is a vain quest. What they find is only a grotesque caricature of 17, never 17 itself. They can dye gray hair golden, but they can’t put the young face under it. They can paint roses on a faded cheek, but they are as artificial as a paper flower. They can lift old faces until all the sagging chins and telltale wrinkles are gone, but no surgeon can take out of old eyes the look of one who has gazed for a half century and more on life.

And when the elderly woman decks herself out in flapper clothes she is old mutton masquerading as spring lamb, and she fools nobody but herself.

It is a terrible thing to have feet that ache to dance and no man willing to offer himself up as a martyr by hauling you around on a ballroom floor because you are stiff and heavy and old. But it doesn’t help the situation for 75 to hire a gigolo to dance with her, or to kid herself that young men hang around her for anything except free drinks and dinners and automobiles and theater tickets. She only makes herself a laughingstock.

But what, then, is 75 that feels like 17 to do? 

I don’t know except to take it, and try to like it. Keeping young is a fad of our day, and the propagandists of the Eternal Youth movement are always telling us that while we recognize that our bodies must grow old and infirm with age we can keep our hearts and minds young and still be mere girls and boys in spirit at 75 or 80.

I often doubt the desirability of this even if it could be accomplished for surely there can be no greater torture than the baffled desires of those who crave the pleasures of youth which their feeble old bodies prevent them from enjoying. Far better, it seems to me, the spirit and the body grow old together.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the October 2013 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Murdered Chickasaw” (1813); “Highway Robberies” (1864); and “Lighting The Streets” (1845).

From the Nov. 6, 1941, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I get so fed up on all the formulas on marriage. What the deuce did they do in Grandmother’s and Grandfather’s day? They married and spent their time rearing a half dozen or more children (without formulas, too). They didn’t have time to think of divorce. Is our generation so week-kneed that they can’t do the same thing? After all, if two people treat one another as two human beings, isn’t that enough to make a marriage happy? JIPPY JAPPY.

ANSWER: There are several good reasons why it was easier to pull off a successful marriage in Grandmother’s and Grandfather’s day than it is now. One of them is because in those times marriage was a binding contract. Men and women married for keeps instead of merely taking an option on each other, as they do nowadays, and there is something mighty stabilizing in finality. When you know you have let yourself in for a lifetime of anything and that you have to stand it, you go to work to make the best of the situation and make yourself as contented as possible in it.

Grandma and Grandpa knew they couldn’t swap their mates off for sheiks and glamour girls, so they didn’t let their eyes go roaming at every fascinator who crossed their paths. Also, divorce then was a disgrace instead of being fashionable as it now is, and the fear of social ostracism will do more to keep people walking the strait-and-narrow path than all the Ten Commandments.

Serious Business

Another reason why it was easier to make a success of marriage in Grandma and Grandpa’s day than it is now is because husbands and wives didn’t demand so much of each other, or of marriage, as modern youths do. In that horse-and-buggy era there was no “young married set“ that set the pace in fast living and hard drinking and flirtations with each other’s spouses. Then marriage meant settling down instead of the liberty to kick up your heels higher than ever.

Young people felt that their playtime was over when they took upon themselves the responsibilities of domesticity. They more or less retired from society. They rolled up their sleeves and went to work and saved their money to pay for a little home instead of going to night clubs. And that saved about 90 per cent of the marriages from going into bankruptcy, for nobody has yet devised a workable theory about how to be married and single at the same time.

Didn’t Expect Too Much

Also, in those days no husband expected his wife to remain young and beautiful and slim for forty years at a stretch, nor did any wife demand that her husband should be a great lover and dance like a gigolo. If a woman was reasonably amiable and a crackerjack cook and manager, her husband was satisfied. And if a woman got a husband who was a good provider and did only a fair amount of grumbling, she blessed her lucky stars. And so they kept marriage a going concern.

Of course, the formula that was suggested for making a happy marriage will work. If husbands and wives would only treat each other as human beings, with the same faults and weaknesses and crochets of character they have, and the same need for a lot of love, a lot of forgiveness, a lot of petting and pampering, there would be no unhappy marriages and no divorce.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Nov. 9, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I am a bride of two months and much in need of your help and advice in solving my problem. It is this: My husband is a few years older than I am and we are having a hard time getting adjusted to each other. Our pet peeve and argument is that I want to kiss him goodbye when he goes to work in the morning and greet him in the evening with another kiss to welcome him home. He objects to this and says that all I have on my mind is love and romance, while his mind is on his business. I contend that it is a man’s duty and loyalty to his wife to want to be kissed, but he gets sore when I go up to him to kiss him. I am everything that a man would want his wife to be—neat, good-looking, a good cook, easy to get along with. I want to give satisfaction as a wife, but when I try to cheer him up when he is feeling blue and kiss him he tells me to behave and act my age. What am I to do? DISTRESSED BRIDE.

ANSWER: How come, little bride, that you didn’t find out about your husband’s views on the kissing question before marriage? If he showed an aversion to petting in your courting days, why, then you have only yourself to blame if he wants to cut out all the sentimental stuff in marriage and refuses to either bill and coo or be billed and cooed over.

But you have a just grievance if, before marriage, he was a kissing bug, and after marriage turned into one of those insects that flee at a human approach and that are just about as affectionate and demonstrative as a frozen eel. Alas and alack, only too many men do all of their love-making and osculation before marriage. They drop it at the altar and expect their wives to be mind readers enough to know that they still care for them if they pay their bills. And there is nothing that the wives can do about it.

But, personally, I have always felt that kissing between husbands and wives should be a matter of inclination and not of obligation; that if there were fewer kisses they would have a lot more flavor. In reality, there is no more meaningless and grotesque ceremony in the world than the perfunctory daily kiss that husbands feel it is their duty to bestow upon their wives every morning, when they depart for business and that wives, for some unknown reason, consider they are slighted if they do not get, yet in which neither party puts a particle of heart interest.

So comfort yourself, little bride, with the knowledge that the ordinary, conjugal, common or garden variety of kiss isn’t worth having. Cut out the daily kiss and perhaps every now and then your husband will be moved to bestow upon you one that is born of the desire of the moment, and that is warm and sweet and has in it all the things a kiss should have to make it a thrill instead of a chore.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the November 2017 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Woman Charged In Abortion Attempt” (1957); “Police Hold Rites For 2 ‘Officers’” (1975); and “First Locomotive In Tennessee” (1849).

From the Dec. 6, 1936, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I have a sister, 34 years old; a good-looking business woman, earns a nice salary, dresses well, has a car and a bank account. She is the very neatest and most orderly person in the world and most systematic. A man of her own age wants to marry her. He is a widower with four children who do not know what it means to mind any one. He has no property, no system, never knows where any of his belongings are, always hunting for his golf clubs, pipes, cigarets, etc. He tells my sister that he needs a woman like her to bring up his children. Should she marry him? MISS T. J.

ANSWER: Not unless she feels a call to martyrdom. Such a marriage wouldn’t have a ghost of a show of being a success, because there are no people more antagonistic to each other or who get more on each other’s nerves than the orderly and the disorderly.

A slovenly husband and a neat wife never understand each other and are never able to adjust their different points of view. The man can’t see why his wife is forever sweeping and scrubbing. He thinks she is nagging when she reminds him to hang up his coat and his hat and not to muss up the sofa pillows.

And to the woman the man who is a scatterer is a perpetual thorn in the flesh. The mud tracked in on the floor has become the mud slinging in many a divorce case. A big fault one can forgive easier than the little habits that are continual pinpricks that keep one raw.

And another reason why this would be a dangerous marriage is the children. Being a stepmother is the hardest job that any woman ever tackles and no one save a woman with an overwhelming maternal complex should undertake it.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Dec. 17, 1951, Nashville Banner

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 17—Dorothy Dix, the spry little woman with nimble wit, biting logic and prolific pen in whom a nation confided its most intimate heartaches and problems for 55 years, will be buried here tomorrow with her own words as her eulogy.

The pioneer newspaperwoman and original “sob sister” of the journalistic world—whose real name, Mrs. Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, was as obscure as the sorrows, troubles and sacrifices which dogged her 90 years of life–died at Touro Infirmary here at 1:40 p.m. yesterday. For the past 20 months she had been a semi-conscious invalid as the result of a stroke of paralysis.

Funeral arrangements were tentatively schedules for tomorrow afternoon, but exact time and place were yet to be announced. A family spokesman, when asked for a statement, said Miss Dix—whose words of wisdom were read everywhere the English language is known—wrote her own eulogy in 1929.

“I had a passion for newspaper work and I set about learning my trade with the zeal of a fanatic,” she wrote in a short autobiography. “I studied the backs off books of synonyms and word books and dictionaries.

“I lived newspapers, I ate newspapers, I dreamed newspapers and I dare say I shall go on doing this until I die. For when you are born with a thirst for printer’s ink, there is no cure for it until death writes 30 at the bottom of your life copy.”

Miss Dix wrote seven books in her lifetime but she was best known and loved by her millions of admirers for her column, “Dorothy Dix Speaks,” a frank and often harshly critical analysis of problems submitted to her by mail. Her files contain letters numbered in the millions, each one of which received an answer either in print or by personal letter.

She developed a journalistic style which revolutionized writing for women. She began writing her advice to the loveless and the loved alike while on staff of the New Orleans Daily Picayune from 1896 to 1901. She began by tossing out all the rulebooks for “highfalutin, flowery language” recommended for women’s copy in that day.

“I kissed the fine writing goodbye and struck out on my own, telling [women the truth about themselves instead of flattering them, lambasting] them instead of jollying them and using the vernacular writing into poetic phrases.”

Miss Dix rebelled when first asked to write a column of advice. Her first love was reporting sensational murder trials and writing dramatic interviews, a talent which made her a star reporter for the old New York Journal from 1901 to 1917.

“The task of a column almost slew me and I spent a sleepless night agonizing over it,” she recalled in one of her books.

Her writings never gave hint of the tragedy of her own life.

Born on a farm in Montgomery County, Tenn., Nov. 18, 1861, she married George O. Gilmer in 1888. He was stricken with an illness two years later and Miss Dix devoted the next 35 years of her life to nursing him.

Although she always advised widows and widowers to marry again, she never followed her own advice.

Her journalistic career started on the Gulf coast where she and her invalid husband took a cottage next to that of Mrs. E J. Nicholson, owner of the Daily Picayune. One day she showed Mrs. Nicholson some of her writings and immediately found herself a job.

She worked for the Picayune from 1896 to 1901, switched to the New York Journal and returned to New Orleans in 1917. She took a dignified home on exclusive Prytannia Street and lived and worked there since.

The pseudonym “Dorothy Dix” was the hybrid invention of her love for the name “Dorothy” and the respect for a servant “Dicks.” She liked privacy and took great care not to associate the private life of Mrs. Gilmer with the professional life of Miss Dix.

She was seldom seen socially, protesting to invitations that she was “too busy.”

In later years she hired secretaries to handle her routine affairs, but she personally wrote her column and answered many letters until stricken. The author of her columns since her illness is a secret known only to her few survivors and the Bell Syndicate of New York.

(The Bell Syndicate advised The Banner this morning that sufficient Dorothy Dix columns are on hand to last for some time and that a decision will be made later as to its continuance under another authorship.)

So far as is known she never sought help or advice in propounding solutions to knotted lives. She attributed her answers as well as her ability to change with the times to “innate common sense.”

She died a deathly woman. No one knows the exact value of her estate but it was speculated that it runs high into the six figures.…

Her writings include the books “Miranda,” “Dorothy Dix, Her Book,” How to Win and Hold a Husband,” “Miranda Exhorts,” “Tale for the Elite,” “Hearts a la Mode,” and “My Joy Ride Around the World.”

(Newspapers. com)

Editor’s note: For reasons unknown, the Nashville Banner edited out the lines seen here in brackets.

From the Jan. 2, 1939, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

A young man asks my assistance in finding a wife as he has not yet been able through his own efforts to locate a young woman who meets his demands. He says he wants a wife who will treat him just as his mother has always done. He desires a wife who will make his pleasure and comfort her object in life. She must always lay out his clothes for him and keep them brushed and mended; cook the things he likes the way he likes them. She must always be bright and cheerful and attractive looking, and meet him with a smile when he returns home. Above all, she must not pout and get sully, no matter what he says or does, but must make excuses for him and feel that she is to blame for having irritated him.

I regret extremely that I can be of no help in putting my finger on this paragon of wifehood. Indeed, I fear that no such subservient young woman now exists; that the wife who treated her husband as his mother treated him has passed out along with the dodo and the phoenix and the other mythological birds. Certainly the modern girl does not contemplate marriage based on the slave and master pattern. She believes in a 50-50 partnership and expects her husband to zipper her up in the back as often as she puts buttons in this shirt, and to make as much effort to make her happy as she does to keep him glad he married her.

Not many men and women are as yet honest as my correspondent in admitting that what they want in marriage is not adult companionship, but somebody to baby them. Yet such is the case. Oftener than not when disgruntled husbands and wives talk about the disappointment and disillusion of marriage and not being “understood,” it simply means that the women and men to whom they are married do not treat them the way their mothers treated them.

So when Janey and Susie and Tommy get married and find that their husbands and wife expects them to act like grown-ups instead of spoiled children, they simply can’t take it. Mother always called Janey’s temper “nerves.” When Janey stormed and shrieked like a virago when everything didn’t go her way, Mother always said that the poor, dear child was so highly strung that she couldn’t bear disappointments as people of coarser fiber could. And Mother gumshoed around all of Janey’s antipathies and tried to keep everything pleasant so she wouldn’t be irritated.

But when Janey married, her husband used no such finesse in dealing with her. He called her temper by its middle name and when she raged back [he] told her what he thought of a woman who didn’t have strength of character enough to use decent self-control, so Janey wailed and beat upon her breast and cried out that her husband “didn’t understand” her because he didn’t treat her like Mother treated her.

Mother also catered to Susie’s selfishness by giving her the best of everything and saving her from every hardship because Susie was so sensitive she couldn’t bear anything but silk on her skin. Susie was so delicate that she couldn’t do any housework—although she could walk miles on a golf course—was the reason that Susie threw up her hands and quit and went back to Mother when she found out that marriage meant work and worry, sacrifice and pulling her weight in the boat.

So it is pathetically true that a great deal of the unhappiness in marriage is due to both men and women not being willing to face the duties and responsibilities of matrimony, but wanting their mates to spoil them and treat them the way that Mother did.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: For more about the above Rich-Schwartz “Red Tag Sale” advertisement, listen to Episode 03 of the Nashville Retrospect podcast, which features an interview with Frank Schwartz about the longtime downtown clothing store.

From the Jan. 2, 1948, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I am the mother of a son and several daughters. Like most mothers, I wanted my daughters to marry and have families, but it almost killed me when my son married. Even now, after he has been married several years, I can’t stand to see him show any affection for his wife. She is good and kind to him and is a smart, efficient wife and a good housekeeper, and the only way I can make him cross with her is to slip around and tell him of her faults, which worries him very much and of which he would never know if I didn’t tell him, because they are just little mistakes that anybody would make.

I encourage my daughters to have children, for that binds a couple closer together and makes them happier, but I warn my son against having children and a home of his own, because I think that will separate him from me. Is it old age, or have I always been selfish? What must I do about this? MISERABLE MOTHER

ANSWER: I should think that a woman who is capable of committing the crime that you are against your son and his wife would have a conscience that would keep her awake at night. I have never heard of a more wicked deed, and it makes me wonder if some mental disease keeps you from realizing what the law calls the nature and quality of your acts. For it does not seem possible that a mother in full possession of her faculties would be willing to wreck her son’s life to satisfy her jealousy.

Think over the results that would ensue if you carry out your nefarious plans. Suppose you do poison your son’s mind against his wife with your lies. Suppose you break up his marriage. Can’t you see that you will at the same time break his heart, for he loves his wife and is happy with her?

Perhaps in his despair and bitter disappointment he will take to drink, or leading a wild and disreputable life. When you shake a man’s faith in his wife you break down his standards. Do you think that will make you happy? Don’t you know that when he finds out, as he surely will, how you have lied about his wife that he will hate you?

It is a terrible thing to try to break up a happy marriage. Repent of your sin before it is too late and try to make amends for it.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: My wife lies to me day after day. We have been married two months and in that short time she has told me nothing but lies. I come home from work to find the house dirty. My wife explains it by saying that she has gotten a big job and she hasn’t had time to do any housework. Every night she tells me about how wonderful her job is and how she likes it and about her fellow workers; then I find out that she hasn’t any job and no fellow workers.

That is just a sample of her lying. She never tells the truth about anything, and when I ask her why she lies she says she can’t help it. What shall I do? Believe me, it is no fun living with a person you love and can’t trust. WORRIED HUSBAND

ANSWER: I do not believe that there is any cure for lying. It is just a screw that is loose in some people’s minds that makes them prefer to lie rather than to tell the truth, even when the truth would serve their purpose better. All of us know people who tell us about things they have seen and known and done that they are bound to know that we know haven’t a word of truth in them, and that makes us have contempt for them. Yet they do it.

Your lot will be a terrible one if you are doomed to spend it with a liar whom you cannot trust and who will be constantly getting you into trouble. Perhaps if you would tell her that you are going to divorce her unless she reforms, it might have some effect.

___

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: My husband left me before my baby was born, without a nickel or any clothes for the child. He now says that when the child is 2 years old he is going to take him. Can he? FRIGHTENED MOTHER

ANSWER: Don’t be scared. Your husband is only putting up a bluff. He doesn’t want to be bothered with the baby, and no court in the world would give a child to such a father.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor‘s note: This article appeared in the January 2019 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Senate Vote Ousts Fulton” (1955); “Earthquake” (1842); and “Some Reminiscences of an Old Nashville Citizen” (1916).

From the Feb. 2, 1939, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: We have made many sacrifices to give our daughter, who has an exceptionally good mind, a fine education, and our disappointment is not in what she has done at college, where she has made a fine rating, but in her vacations when she comes home. It is always an ordeal because it is a wild round of her rushing from lunch to lunch, dinner to dinner, party to party, movie to movie, and automobile rides, etc. She seems to have a mad desire to see all of her old friends in the few days she is with us, and when she is not with them our house is overflowing with boys and girls. Nice young people, and we want her to have a good time, but we would like to catch a few glimpses of her and have a few words with her, which we never have. She never has time to sit down and tell us something of her college experiences that we long to hear. Aside from a few crumbs of conversation between dates, we are no wiser than we were before she came home as to what she does. She doesn’t even appear at meals except occasionally. It is go, go go all the time. How can we arrange it so that on her next vacation we may see something of her? THE PARENTS.

ANSWER: You can’t. It is an utter impossibility. Human ingenuity balks before the helpless task of trying to calm down the exuberant spirits of a young girl just having her first fling and making her want to sit down and have a nice, long, cozy chat with Mama and Papa instead of going on some gay party.

I don’t want to be discouraging, but the first coherent, intelligent conversation you will have with your daughter will be after she is married, has had a baby and has settled down in the real business of living. Until then you will never see her except when she is flitting from place to place. The principal communication you will have together will be “gimme-gimme” on her part and “don’t-don’t” on yours.

But take heart of grace. Don‘t be too disappointed in your daughter and don‘t be discouraged. You are just facing for the first time what all the other parents of pretty and popular girls have to go through. Probably there isn’t a father and mother in the world who haven’t looked at their Mamies and Sadies when they were boy-cray and gadding-crazy, and when the only things on earth they were interested in were dancing and movies and tearing madly around in jalopies, and when they had time to talk to some pimply-faced lad for hours, but couldn’t give Papa a few minutes, without wondering why on earth they didn’t drown them in the bathtub when they were born.

But they get over it and turn into sensible women. That is one of God’s miracles at which their parents never cease to be surprised. It is hard, of course, for fathers and mothers ever to face the truth that their children are not interested in them as they are in their children; that while they long to be with their children, their children are bored with them and yearn to get away to youngsters of their own age, who speak their language and want to do the things they do. But it is one of the inescapable facts of life that we have to accept with what philosophy we may.

But, in reality, your daughter wanting to spend all of her time playing around instead of being with you doesn’t show that she does not love you and appreciate you. It only means that she is at the age when a good time means more to hear than anything else in the world. Let her enjoy herself while she can. Youth is so short.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Feb. 1, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

Not long ago a woman who has met the trials and tribulations that are the inevitable lot of humanity with tears and whines, instead of taking them on the chin, said to me:

“I suppose disappointments and hardships hurt me worse than they do other people because I was such a spoiled child. My mother protected me from everything that was disagreeable. I was never made to do anything I didn’t want to do. I was never denied anything. Everything was made to turn out just as I wanted it to do. So naturally when I find out that things are different, I just can’t stand it.”

“Your mother gave you a poor preparation for life,” I replied. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said complacently; “I have such a happy childhood to remember.”

“But childhood is so short and the balance of life so long,” I protested. “At best, a mother can only satin-pad the world for her children for a few years. Then they are bound to face realities and it is a bitter price they must pay for her folly in making them unable to cope with the difficulties that they are inevitably destined to encounter.”

It is the spoiled children whom overfond mothers could never deny anything they wanted and who were never spanked or disciplined, or made to do anything they didn’t want to do, who furnish the headaches of the world. Mother wants Mary to “have a happy girlhood,” so she waits on her; goes shabby so she may have the latest thing in smart clothes, and she never dreams of such a thing as making Mary do her share of the housework, or teaching her to make any return for what is done for her. Then when Mary goes to work or gets married and finds out that she has to pull her weight in the boat and give as well as take, she can’t do it.

It is the “Mamma’s darlings” who are the failures in life because Mamma has made them so soft that they can’t take any punishment. Look about you at the men who are always changing their professions or giving up their jobs. Mamma’s pets, every one of them.

Look at the young couples who are getting divorced. Spoiled children who are wrecking their homes and orphaning their own children because their wives and husbands didn’t treat them the way their mothers did. Mother always called Mary’s temper “nerves” and humored her out of her tantrums. Mother always spoke of John’s selfishness as his “little ways” and gave him what he wanted.

When a mother unfits a child for life by the way she rears it; when she takes away from the child the chance for happiness and success that it should have, she does something far worse to it than if she had murdered it. Yet the mother counts it unto herself for righteousness, instead of realizing that she has done to the child she loves the worse wrong that one human being can do to another.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the February 2017 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Child Marriage Bill Quickly Passes Senate” (1937); “Timothy Demmbruen” (1811); and “Colored Celebration at Columbia” (1867).

From the March 21, 1934, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

If, with your experience of matrimony, you were a bridegroom just starting out in domestic life, what would you do? I asked a number of middle-aged husbands who were discussing the divorce problem and why marriage is so often a failure.

“If I were a bridegroom,” said the first man, “I would make very certain that I got off on the right foot and to a good start, for the first year is the crucial one that determines its fate. It settles many things. Among them, who is the head of the house, and whether it is to be ruled by the husband, the wife or the mother-in-law. Likewise it determines, almost without exception, its financial status and decides whether a couple at middle age will be sitting pretty on Easy Street or grubbing along on Poverty Flats.

“Of course, I don’t mean that I would set myself up as the family dictator, the he-who-must-be-obeyed who tramples over women and children because they are weak and can’t defend themselves, but I would have sense enough to make it plainly known from the very beginning that the man who pays the freight is entitled to proper consideration in the home he supports. And the main reason I would do this would not be to minister to my own vanity and self-importance, but to maintain my wife‘s affections, because I have observed that no woman respects or loves the man she can henpeck.

“The trouble with bridegrooms is that they are so much in love and so afraid of disenchanting the glamorous creatures they have just married that they haven’t the courage to say ‘no’ when their young wives run them in debt by starting out to live in a style they can’t afford and making big bills at the shops, or when they drag them out to places of amusement night after night. And by the time they do summon up enough spunk to make a feeble resistance their wives have got the upper hand and it is too late. They are sunk, and there is nothing left for them to do the balance of their lives but to kowtow to their rulers, and try to make as much money as is expected of them.”

“If I were a bridegroom,” said the second man, “I would regard marriage as a new business into which I had just entered, and I would make just as much effort to make it a success as I would any other enterprise that I had undertaken. We men don’t, you know. We expect marriage to be a sort of miraculous good thing that will pay 100 per cent dividend without ever having to work at it, or scheme about it, or do a thing to foster its prosperity. And that is why so many marriages go into bankruptcy.

“So if I were a young man getting married, knowing what I do, I would put as much time and thought and patience and plugging into my marriage as I do into the grocery trade. I would try as hard to get along with my wife as I do my customers, and I would pay her allowance for her services in the home just as regularly as I pay the salaries of my women employees.

“And I’d regard my wife as my partner and treat her as such. I would talk over all of my business affairs with her and make her feel that she was just as responsible for the success of the firm as I am. I would make her feel that when she did without a new car to put the money in a good investment she was going to get her percentage of the profit.

“The reason so many wives are jealous of their husband’s business, and unwilling to make sacrifices for it, is because they are never made to feel that they have a part in it. There are not many women who are not willing to work with a husband. What makes them peevish is having to work for a husband without even getting a cook’s wages for the labor.”

“If I were a bridegroom,“ said the third man,“I’d try to train my wife up in the way I wanted her to go. When most girls get married they are young and adaptable and in love, and most of them could be made into good wives if only the husbands would take as much trouble to train them as they do a new stenographer.

“I would want my wife always to be attractive, and so I should compliment her when she had on a new dress, or did her hair in a becoming way. I should want her to be a good cook, so I should talk over menus with her and take an interest in the housekeeping and I’d boast of her triumphs and make her feel that she had a standard of good housekeeping to live up to.

“I should want her to [be] thrifty and economical, so I should help her with her budget and make her feel that she was a real business woman. I should want her to be an interesting companion, so I should read with her, and take her out to places of amusement, and teach her to play my games. Most of the women who are slouches and poor housekeepers and extravagant are the wives of men who never pay the slightest attention to what they do, or try to help them to do their work more efficiently, and who simply growl when an untaught girl, who doesn’t know what her husband expects of her, turns into a discouraged makeshift sort of wife.”

“If I were a bridegroom,” said the fourth man, I would try to make life interesting and entertaining to my wife and to keep her glad she married me. I wouldn’t expect her to think that just being married to me spending her days cooking and sewing and scrubbing and baby-tending were all the amusement any woman needs. I would try to be as entertaining at home as I was abroad.

“I would take her out to places of amusement as often as I could, and I would continue to try to ‘sell’ myself to her as much as I did before marriage. In that way I would secure to myself a cheerful and amiable wife who would be an entertaining companion and who would not nag. For I have observed that the fretful and complaining women are those who are bored by marriage, and the naggers are those who have so few interests in life that they harp on the same old theme, year in and year out.”

“What I pity,” said the first man, “that our experience in marriage comes too late to do us any good.”

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)