‘The Best Part of Every Woman’s Life Is Gone at 38’

From the April 22, 1941, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: Will you please tell me how I can get something out of life again? I am a widow 38 years old, good-looking, quiet and refined. Have never smoked nor drank. Go to church and Sunday school. My husband has been dead four years and I am very lonesome and miss having a home and a husband to look after and cook for. I would like to marry again, but do not seem to attract men. It seems that the best part of my life has gone, but I would like to make something out of the remainder of it. How can I? BROKENHEARTED.

ANSWER: The best part of every woman’s life is gone when she is 38, and this is especially the case when she has had a good husband and lost him. Nothing can bring back her girlhood and the gay heart of youth. Never again can she know the thrill of first love, nor the joy and excitement she experienced in setting up her first home. Life doesn’t repeat itself. It goes on, but it is never the same and it is folly to expect it.

At 38, you must face the fact that your chances of marrying are far less than they were at 18, so you can’t count on getting a husband. The marrying men are the young men. There are plenty of them, but by the time men get in your age class—which would put them in the forties or fifties—they have been pretty well picked over and led to the altar, and there are not many eligible ones left. Mostly they are widowers who are enjoying their liberty, and who have no notion of slipping their necks in the noose again, or case-hardened old bachelors, who are marriage proof.

Of course there are exceptions to all rules and, perhaps, Mr. Right may come your way and see what a nice wife you would make and bear you off to a happy home. But, again, he may pass by on the other street and never even notice that you are sitting there on the anxious seat, with your fingers crossed for luck.

So my advice to you is to waste no more time in wishful thinking about matrimony, but to make yourself an interesting and happy life, with or without a man in it, as chance may decree.

You can do it if you will, because the world is so full of a number of things besides husbands that women should be as happy as queens if they would only content themselves with single blessedness, which, believe me, is not to be despised.

For marriage carries no guarantee of happiness with it, nor is every husband a prize package. According to statistics, one marriage out of every six is such a purgatory that the wife breaks out of it at any cost. 

And there are millions of other women who have husbands who are drunkards and philanderers and ne’er-do-wells whom they have to support, who never mention their husbands when they thank God for their blessings.

So why not give up the husband chase and devote your energies to the pursuit of happiness instead of a man? First of all, buy some new clothes. Nothing cheers a woman up and puts pep in her and gives her a fresh outlook on life as much as a smart outfit. Then change your mode of life. Get out of your rut and go somewhere where it will be different, where you will meet new people and do new things.

Above all, get busy so you will have something to think about besides yourself. Get a job if you can. If you have had no experience in any kind of work outside of the home, go to some vocational school, get yourself tested out for your aptitude, then study it. Make yourself so proficient in it that you can command a good salary. You will find doing all of that plenty exciting.

And, if you are rich and do not need to work, join some of the philanthropies and work with them helping others. You will never dare to pity yourself again when you see the real troubles that so many unfortunates are up against. There is no need for any woman to complain that she is lonesome and that she doesn’t know how to make a full life for herself in these days.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the April 2011 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Asks Banner To Find Him Good Wife” (1924); “Police Called To Quell Rock'n Rollers In Dell" (1959); and the collapse of Vine Street Temple (1955).

From the April 2, 1934, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

In the good old days when a man endowed his bride with all his worldly goods at the alar and expected as a matter of course to support her, marriage was a much simpler proposition for women than it is now. Then the husband brought home the bacon and the wife fried it, and that was that.

Grandpa no more expected grandma to be a money-earner than she expected him to be a nursemaid. Each performed his or her respective part in the domestic partnership and it made for the peace and prosperity of the firm. But modern economic conditions have changed that fair division of labor and given the heavy end of the bargain to the woman, who, in many cases, is forced to do double duty, to not only bake the bread but make the dough.

Primarily this state of affairs is no fault of the individual man. Probably every man would like to be a beneficent Providence to his wife and sit her down on a silk cushion and feed her on strawberries, sugar, and cream, like the lady in the fairy story. Probably it hurts every man’s pride not to be able to take his bride to his home and keep her safe and comfortable in it.

But it is the condition, not a romantic theory that the average young couple faces today, and the fact remains that thousands upon thousands cannot get married unless the woman continues on with her job. On what the man earns they could not live, or could exist only in the direst poverty, but with the wife’s pay envelop added to the husband’s they have comfortable support.

On the face of it, it seems an ideal solution of a difficult problem. It enables two young people to marry while the glamour is still on their love and before their wedding cake has got stale from being too long on the shelf. It puts marriage on a fifty-fifty basis, with the husband and wife both contributing to the upkeep of the home, both having their individual financial independence, and perhaps being more congenial and companionable with each other because they both speak the same language, instead of one talking of contracts and big deals and the fluctuation of the stock market while the other babbles of baby formulas and the price of butchers’ meat.

It seemed the modern romance, and one grew almost maudlin in contemplating the bliss that must ensue from these Dutch-treat weddings. But, alas, it appears that they are not only subject to all the trails and tribulations incident to the old-fashioned, man-supported marriages, but have an additional lot of troubles of their own.

The new arrangement seems to have given satisfaction to neither party, and loud and furious and frequent squawks of protest come both from husbands and wives. The men’s objection to the self-supporting wife is that she can’t be bossed and that she is uppity and independent and does not regard a husband as he-who-must-be-obeyed.

Also she lacks the sweet humility and forgiving spirit that made the wife who was financially dependent upon her husband turn a blind eye on his faults and overlook his side-steppings.

Of course, say these husbands, it is very comfortable and convenient to have a wife who pays her half of the bills, but it is a pain in the neck to have one who asserts her right to do as she pleases because she is self-supporting and who can put on her hat and walk out on a man if he doesn’t give satisfaction. So what?

On their part the women complain that a wife can’t help her husband without ruining him and that when George finds out that Mary can support the family he simply sits down and lets her do it. They further contend that the Lord intended a wife to be a goad in her husband’s side to spur him on to achievement, and that when he lacks this he never gets anywhere.

“When we were married to poor men,” say these disgruntled wives, “we thought it would be simply grand and thrilling to work at our old occupations for a year or two, and help our husbands get a start and commence paying on a little home. Then we were going to stop and get busy in our little white kitchens and have babies and live the normal life of women. And we never doubted that seeing us so bravely shouldering a double job, working all day in an office and then rushing home and getting dinner, would make our husbands roll up their sleeves and put in the hardest licks of which we were capable.

“But it hasn’t turned out that way. After five or ten years, most of us are still standing behind counters and punching typewriters, and, if we talked of resigning, our husbands would have fits. They have slacked down in their work and a lot of them have turned quitters because they know that we will pay the rent and buy the food if they don’t. And whatever money they make they spend on themselves, cause what’s the use of buying a hat for a wife who can buy one for herself?

“Maybe it is all logical enough, but two things are certain: One is that the self-supporting wife not only has to support herself but generally has to support her husband also. And the other is that the more a woman hangs like a millstone around her husband’s neck, the more he loves her.”

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the May 15, 1942, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: I am a one-date man. It is no trouble for me to get the first date with a girl, but generally the first one is the last one. When I take a girl out I do my best to show her a good time, but apparently it isn’t good enough to interest her. When I ask for another date I don’t get it and usually the girl won’t even speak to me again, yet I have no idea what I have done to offend her.

I am 27 years old, averagely good-looking, dress neatly but not flashily, but I have come to the conclusion from my experience that I am just naturally destined to remain a bachelor. What do you think is the matter with me? PERPLEXED.

ANSWER: I am sure I don’t know, for in these days when everything male, from the kindergarten to the Home for Senile Grandpas, is being drafted into the Army, and dates are as scarce as hen’s teeth, I should think that any bachelor would have to go about encased in steel armor to protect himself from the ladies.

Of course, the dateless man is a far rarer species of fauna than the dateless girl, because a man can go out and hunt up girls to step out with him, whereas a girl has to wait until she is asked. But no doubt there are certain men who are allergic to girls and who date them only as a last resource.

When this is the case, it is almost invariably the boy’s fault, for Heaven knows girls are not choosy and don’t expect the average lad to have the looks of Robert Taylor and the technique of Clark Gable. So I would advise you to have a heart-to-heart session with yourself and try to find out what faults and foibles you have that makes you non grata with the feminine sex.

Are you, by any chance, one of the lads who think that the way to give a girl a perfectly entrancing evening is by making her listen to you monologue about yourself? Do you spend hours and hours telling your date about when you were a little boy with pale green freckles on your hands, and all your school days, and about your job and your automobile, and what you said to the boss and the boss said to you? If the price of being taken to the movies is being bored stiff, most girls would rather spend the evening at home with papa and mama.

Or, just as bad, are you a boy without a line? Have you the conversational range of a clam on ice so that a girl has to work like a coal heaver to keep the talk going? Can you never suggest any pleasant and amusing thing to do when you go out on a date? Do you never know what movie everybody is going to see, where there is a good band, a swell place to dance, where there is a restaurant that has good food? Do you tramp all over a girl’s feet when you dance so that she fears she is crippled for life? Do you argue with waiters? And—oh, horrors!—do you carry a little book and set down the price of everything you spend?

And are you a petter? Do you expect a girl to pay for a hamburger and a soft drink with five dollars’ worth of being mauled? If you do any, or all of these things you probably will find out why girls don’t date you but once.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the May 2014 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Nearly One-Third of Nashville Pupils 10 Per Cent Under Weight” (1922);  “Find Your Roots, Alex Haley Tells Youngsters” (1977); and “East High Tracksters Win 18 Trophies” (1959).

From the May 25, 1936, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

The feminine sex is the whining sex. The inability to take life on the chin without making a fuss about it seems a constitutional defect with women, though what they have to complain about more than have men, goodness only knows.

Nevertheless they do. When a group of men get together they discuss abstract subjects—politics, business, literature, art, the news of the day; they tell each other stories. But listen in on a group of women and, nine times out of ten, they are telling each other their troubles.

When we come to think of it we know that in reality life is no harder on women than it is on men and that women have no more sorrows to beat than have men. We speak of “poor working women,” “poor wives,” “poor mothers,” “poor old maids,” but we don’t even throw a kind word to husbands and fathers and old bachelors and working men.

Anyway, as a rule, men bear what they have to bear and do what they have to do without calling upon their fellow creatures to pass resolutions of sympathy for them, while women can’t be happy unless they are shouting their tribulations to the world and are objects of universal pity.

Take the matter of work, for instance. When a boy gets a job after he finishes school and starts in on what he hopes is going to be his lifework, he is simply tickled pink and goes about boasting of his good luck. But when sister gets a job she thinks it is just too bad that she has to spend her days in an office instead of gadding around to parties.

It is the wives who assume the martyr role and who never let their families forget for a single instant how they have labored in their behalf and how many hours they stood over the kitchen stove making the pudding, or how many times they were up with the baby in the night.

Fatherhood calls for sacrifices from a man. Many a father works himself into the grave to give his children a college education. Many a father walks so his children can ride in automobiles. Many a father never even has a necktie he can call his own after this boys begin to grow up. But fathers do not complain about what their children cost them in self-denial, and no one pities them because they are wearing their old clothes so John may have a Klassy Kollege Kut suit, or having their old shoes resoled so Mamie may have another pair of $10 sandals.

It is Mother who complains because she is tied down at home with the babies and who says that nobody has any idea how much trouble children are, and who tells everybody at the bridge game that you can’t do a thing with half-grown girls and boys now, and isn’t it true that when children are little they tread on your feet and when they are grown the walk over your heart? All the sympathy in the world goes out to “poor Mother” because Mother makes a bid for it.

And take the old maids and the old bachelors. Why should a woman be sorry for herself if she doesn’t marry, while a man glories in his freedom? Why should the old maid be lachrymose, while the old bachelor is jolly as a sandboy? Nobody knows. It just is.

Seeing that women complain whether they have anything to complain about or not, we are led to the conclusion that they whine because the enjoy it, and that they are never so happy as when they have a grievance that they can talk about.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the June 2, 1935, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: My husband rises in the morning, fixes the furnace and then picks up the paper, which he does not cease reading until he comes to breakfast. Then he comes to the table unwashed, uncombed and unshaven. I am very neat and good-looking and having to eat with a slovenly man is becoming unbearable to me. I have talked to him about it, but he does not seem to see that he is losing my respect and endangering the happiness of our marriage. When I look at him across the breakfast table I wish I was a thousand miles away. NEAT WIFE.

ANSWER: Men know how much importance they put upon their wives being easy on the eyes. It is strange that they do not realize that women, who put so much stress upon appearances, are even more offended by having to look upon a slovenly man.

But how you are to make your husband feel that you are worth dressing up for of a morning, I don’t know. You might tell him that you refuse to sit at the table with the great unwashed, or you might give him a dose of his own medicine and come to the table with your hair in curl papers and cold cream on your face and a dirty kimono on, and, if he objected, strike a bargain with him and tell him that if he will doll himself up for breakfast, you will too.

___

Physical Defects Need Not Stand In Way of Love

DEAR MISS DIX: I am 30 years old. Six years ago I met a boy of my own age with whom I fell deeply in love. We were planning to be married, but he had a motor accident which, after years of unspeakable suffering and vain hopes, cost him his right leg, making him a cripple for life. We tried to be sensible and part, and did for a long time. This man is fine in every way and he is so grateful for my affection, which he calls devotion, but do you think that I will regret it if I marry him? Personally, I cannot say I suffer walking by his side slowly and seeing him leaning on a stick, but I want to know your opinion so I can judge others. Will other women approve of me or think I am crazy? UNLUCKY.

ANSWER: If you love the man and he suits you, why do you care what other people think? You are the one to be pleased, not they.

Certainly you will have the approbation of your own sex for standing by your sweetheart in his misfortune. Women will think it was the right thing for you to do and what any of them would have done who had a heart in her bosom.

Women are not repulsed by physical defects as men are. You often see a woman marry a blind man, or one who is deaf or who has been maimed. She sees the man’s intelligence, the beauty of his character, his courage and the patience with which he meets his misfortune and she loves him with peculiar tenderness, but it is very seldom that a man marries a woman who is crippled.

Anyway, you can thank Heaven that your sweetheart is lame only in his legs and not in his brains, and that he is not debarred from making whatever he will of his life.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the June 2015 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Johnny Cash Asks Guests to Sing for Supper” (1976); “Smoldering Tempers Flare Anew After Square Dance” (1956); and “Cholera” (1835).

From the June 3, 1934, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I am a coed engaged to another student in the same university I attend. He is my constant companion during school days and comes to visit me three times a week. My mother objects to our being together so frequently because it will be at least five years before we can possibly marry, and she is afraid that he may tire of me before that time. Also, she says that this continual companionship takes away my chances to find another man if my sweetheart happens to get tired of me and leaves me. But my sweetheart gets jealous if I go with another boy and refuse to see him. We are both 20 years old. What is your opinion of the matter? T. A. S.

ANSWER: I agree with your mother that a young girl can do no more foolish thing than involve herself in a long engagement. Of course, it is possible that a boy-and-girl romance has in it the stuff that endures the wear and tear and unnatural strain of a relationship that is neither marriage nor freedom. Sometimes the girl doesn’t get tired of waiting and the man remains faithful and the belated wedding bells do ring merrily forth, but this does not happen once in a blue moon.

Many a man marches to the altar with set teeth and death in his heart with some woman who he has outgrown and long ceased to care for, because he got engaged to her when he was a boy, and he lacks the moral courage to break his promise after she has waited years and years for him. This is a tragedy for him, but it is an even bitterer one for his wife, because no woman wants to be married as a matter of duty, nor can any man be decently kind to the wife who represents a penalty to him instead of love’s young dream.

A girl simply gambles with her happiness when she enters into a long engagement because the chances are that the man will have grown tired of her and, if he marries her, do so as a matter of honor, or else, after having spoiled all of her chances of marrying anybody else, he will jilt her.

Hence the wise girl steers clear of a long engagement and she never lets any man monopolize her until the wedding day is set. In that way she is not only more apt to keep her man because she keeps him guessing, but gives herself an opportunity to marry someone else in case he tires of her.

___

DEAR MISS DIX: I am 23 and have been engaged to a boy for nearly five years. He has a fairly good job and does everything possible for me. For the last year, due to conditions in his family, we have been unable to go about much unless I financed the party, which he refused to let me do. Hence we have spent our evenings at my home and I don’t understand whether seeing him constantly for four nights a week and doing nothing in particular is to blame for my picking on him about everything and really being uncivil to him, or whether I am slowly losing interest in him. He loves me and I love him, but we don’t get along together as well as we did. In behalf of my boyfriend and myself can you suggest anything for us?  US.

ANSWER: I think that you are just fed up on each other’s society, and that if you would see each other for one night a week instead of four you would find that your appetite for each other has returned.

You see when you stepped out two or three times a week to some place of amusement you had the diversion of seeing other people, of light and motion that gave you new sensations; the interest of seeing a movie; the thrill and excitement of a dance. But when you couldn’t do this, when you had to sit at home with nothing to do but talk, you simply talked out and began to bore each other, and that led to your picking flaws in each other.

Yours is one of the modern-day problems. You are so accustomed to being entertained that you young people have lost the ability to entertain yourselves. You must always be doing something, going somewhere, seeing something new and exciting. You can’t amuse yourselves by sitting quietly at home talking, as girls and boys did in your fathers’ and mothers’ time when there were no radios, no movies, no automobiles.

You may well fear that if you find quiet evenings together so dreary now you will find marriage still more tedious. For that will mean practically every evening, instead of four a week, will be spent at home, with no livelier amusement than each other’s company.

So consider well before you let yourself into a lifetime of companionship that will have few thrills in it.

___

DEAR MIS DIX: I have been accused ever since I can remember by my many, many friends of being egotistical. Can you suggest a cure? ALEXANDER.

ANSWER: I can. A very easy one, only no conceited person will ever take it because they do not wish to be cured. They desire only to have their ego inflated still more.

The remedy is this: Consider the people about you who are so much better-looking, who are so much more intelligent, and who have achieved so much more than you have, and compare yourself with them. No vanity can survive the acid test.

(Newspapers .com)

From the July 22, 1941, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: Will you tell me what will make a man talk? My husband has a good education and is a great reader, but he simply will not talk. I never get more than “yes” or “no” or two or three other little words out of him. And it is the same way in company. He sits up dumb, although he knows twice as much about what people are talking about than they do. It isn’t because he is self-conscious. He isn’t. He just won’t talk.

I am very ambitious for him and I am very much afraid that his silence will be a bar to his success in his profession as a civil engineer. Aside from not talking to me, there isn’t a thing in the world my husband won’t do for me, and he hasn’t a single bad habit. But I hate him to appear stupid when he isn’t. Is there anything I can do about it? DOTTY.

ANSWER: Nothing, except to quit nagging him about not talking. If a man is constitutionally silent you just have to accept him as he is and thank heaven for the opportunity it gives you to do all the talking yourself.

Certainly a dumb husband does not make a very cheery companion, but you must recognize that there is a difference in silence. There is the silence of grouchiness, when a husband won’t talk because he is peeved and irritated about something. That is a deadly silence that gets on a wife’s nerves and makes them raw. And there is the silence of grumpiness that is like a wet blanket that chills every one within its radius to the bone and that sends the domestic temperature down to zero. No wife can talk against that, because she does not know what is the matter and is afraid that if she says a word she will start something.

Then there is the silence of the man who doesn’t talk simply because he doesn’t like to talk, but there is nothing sinister in that. Generally such a man is a good listener and is keenly interested in all the gossip of the neighborhood, and almost invariably he picks out a chatterbox for a wife.

Of course, it is pretty hard to keep up a one-sided conversation, and it is no wonder that you run down after you have monologued along of an evening, but you will have to comfort yourself with the reflection that it is better to have a dub husband who is a fireside companion and a good provider than to be married to a glib talker who is out handing some girl a nifty line.

You can’t have everything you want in a husband, and, believe me, for him to be silent is about the least fault a husband can have. Most husbands say too much of the wrong things. 

And don’t worry about your husband’s not talking being a handicap to him in his profession. It will not be. The most astute businessmen always let the other fellow do the talking. Besides, nothing gives a man such a reputation for sagacity and depth of understanding as for him to say little. People who keep silent are always believed to be turning great, impressive things over in their minds. Even a fool is accounted wise if he holds his peace, says the old proverb.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the July 2013 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Confederate Prisoners” (1863); “Inglewood Goat Runs Wilds; Gets Police In Tizzy” (1957); and “Demonic Darth Vader Unmasks True Self” (1980).

From the July 22, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: My mother is a middle-aged woman, a widow. She has a house that rents for $40 a month and $5,000 in the bank. She complains of ill-health, but we think it is just a mental condition. She has two children, myself and a brother, both married. My husband and I both work. We have tried every way we know to make mother happy and comfortable without avail. She has been in rooms, has boarded with strangers, has lived with an old lady, has lived with us and we have lived with her, and she is not contented with any of the arrangements. We are at our wits’ end to know what to do. How much money should my brother and I give her? What is my duty to her as a thankful, appreciative daughter, and yet as a loyal, helpful wife, for my mother objects strenuously to my husband and I pooling our earnings in a common fund? How can I balance home and husband, mother and career without losing my mind? X.

ANSWER: Evidently your mother is one of the querulous, ill-balanced, neurotic, selfish women who nobody on earth can place and who would not be satisfied and contented under any conditions, so it is folly for you to wear yourself out in the vain attempt to make her happy. She wants something to complain about, some grievance to whine over, and she gets a sadistic pleasure in making other people as wretched as she thinks she is herself.

Your mother’s grievance now is that her children married and her home is broken up, and so she is trying to break up your home and dissatisfy you with your husband. Under such circumstances, when your mother is always fault-finding and pecking at your husband and your husband naturally resents it, it will be disastrous for you to have her as a member of your household. So the best arrangement you can make is just to make her a monthly allowance and let her live where she pleases. If she has a $40 a month from rent, it would require only a modest sum from you and your brother to make her comfortable. She will be far better off among strangers than she will be with either of you children because she will have to control herself when with others.

Probably all of her ill health is imaginary. Why don’t you have a competent physician make a thorough examination of her, so that you will know whether you have cause to be really anxious about her or are worrying unnecessarily? But you have my sincere sympathy. A woman who has to act as a buffer between her husband and her mother gets some mighty hard knocks.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Aug. 13, 1947, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I am one of the married women with a fine husband and children she loves, with a good home that she has no intention of breaking up, but who cannot get another man off of her mind. And there are so many of us. We have all the bread we can eat, but we want white hyacinths as well. We are starving for romance. We are aching with the headlong need of a woman for a man who can make her forget that anyone else is near, who can give her a little thrill just to be with him.

We try very hard not to let our husbands and children know that we are not perfectly satisfied, and we do our duty and make good homes for them, but when we think of romance it is the Other Man.

Now if a woman can keep her head and be friends with a man like that, is it wrong to do so? Or should a person like that be entirely put out of one’s life just because one is married? I am not speaking of mere physical attraction, but the attraction of mental qualities, the finer things of life among people whose morals are high and who would never stoop to unfaithfulness. A GOOD WIFE

ANSWER: There are few tragedies in life greater than that of the men and women whose mates give them their all, but whose all is not enough, and who go through life starving for the things of the spirit when their wives and husbands can only provide them with the things of the flesh.

Yet they are so good, these dull, commonplace Johns and Marias! John is so faithful, tender and kind. He works so hard and feels that he makes her so happy when he gives her luxuries. Maria is such a good wife, such a marvelous housekeeper, such a devoted wife and mother, so cheerful and uncomplaining, so anxious to please John in every way. And neither one would do anything to make the other unhappy.

But always there is the aching desire for companionship, the loneliness of those who must walk apart with no hand to clasp their own. Always there is this longing for the romance they can never have, the thrill that they can never feel. Surely not the least among the martyrs are those men and women who endure these loveless marriages without even a glance towards the greener fields, and who pretend a happiness they never feel.

Whether this woman who has this longing for romance should keep it walled in a secret garden in her heart, or whether she should cast the thoughts out of her mind and throw ashes upon them, depends upon her temperament. Personally, I think she is safest and happiest if she accepts her husband “as is” and enjoys the filet mignon he provides for her, instead of yearning after caviar.

___

DEAR MISS DIX: I have been going with a man for six years, but no date has been set for the wedding. He is selfish, self-centered and tied tightly to his mother’s apron strings. He does not like to spend money on me and wants me to work after I am married. Do you advise me to give him up, or marry him? SUSIE.

ANSWER: Give him up so quickly it will make his head swim. If you marry that kind of a man, you will be nothing but a hard-driven slave as long as you live, and you will not even get a kind word from him. The man is showing you exactly what sort of a husband he will make, so you will have nobody but yourself to blame for unhappiness if you marry him.

Can’t you realize how much better off you are with your job, your own money and personal liberty than you would be with such a domestic tyrant? Don’t you think you will love him enough to overlook his faults. No love survives the treatment that such a husband gives a wife. Listen, Susie, it is your Guardian Angel speaking, warning you not to marry this boy. Lend an ear to it.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the August 2017 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Fort Negley Restoration Before Group” (1963); “McNairy County Sheriff Ambushed, Wife Killed” (1967); and “Tennessee Girls” (1867).

From the Aug. 22, 1934, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

What are you storing up for your old age?

Money, of course. The dullest and the most thoughtless realize the necessity of providing against the time when they will be old and feeble and no longer able to work. For in all the world there are no people so pitiable and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old age, and who find how steep are the stairs of another man’s house.

In youth, money is a convenience and an aid to pleasure. In age it is an absolute necessity, for when we are old we have to buy even consideration and politeness from those about us. This is true even in the households of our own children. For between the father and mother who are able to pay their own way and are the source of a never-ending flow of gifts and treats and the father and mother who must be supported is a great gulf fixed.

It is the difference between having the place of honor or the back seat. Between being listened to with respect and having one’s opinions derided. Between having one’s little peculiarities catered to as interesting characteristics and being snubbed for one’s old-fashioned ways.

Nor is this as unfeeling and hardboiled as it seems. The average young couple have all they can do in these times of the high cost of living to provide for their own wives and children and it adds a crushing burden to put upon them the extra weight of the support of the old people of their families.

The fate of the dependent old is so pathetic that it is a marvel that it does not frighten every one into trying to provide against it, yet it was recently sated in a journal of statistics that 80 percent of the men and women over 50 years of age were dependent either upon their children or upon public charity.

Don’t let this misfortune befall you. Guard against it. Begin systematic saving while you are young so that when you are old you will at least have the comfort of being independent.

But there are other things just as important as money to lay up for your old age. One of these is love. Are you providing against the days when you will be too old to go out and amuse yourself, when your charm will have gone and you will no longer be able to make friends, and when you will be dependent for your happiness upon the love you have stored in the hearts of others?

Most of us have a curious and naive belief in what we call natural “affection.” We befool ourselves into thinking that people must love us because they stand in a certain relationship to us and because there are blood ties between us. Never was there a more fallacious theory.

There is, to be sure, the mother passion for the child she has borne, and the instinctive clinging of the child to its mother, while it is young and helpless, but that is all. It doesn’t follow as a matter of course that grown-up men and women love their parents just because they are their parents.

As a matter of act, they don’t, unless the father and mother have won their love by years of tenderness and understanding and sympathy. You can’t be hard and tyrannical and selfish and stingy with your children and expect them to love you because it is their duty to do so.

If you want your children to love you when you are old, you have to begin winning their hears when they are in the cradle.

Have you laid up a good supply of friendship for your old age?

No complaint is heard more often from the old than that they are lonely. Few come to see them. They are seldom asked out. No one sends them flowers when they are sick. They are neglected and they crave the little attentions that we all like and yearn for the society of their fellow creatures.

Now, when old people are lonely, it is always their own fault. It is because they have neglected to lay up any friendships for the sere and yellow days when they have no longer the power to attract people to them.

They have gone their selfish way through life, sufficient unto themselves in their youth. They have never held out a helping hand to those in need. They have never wept with those who wept and rejoiced with those who rejoiced. They have not bothered to write notes of condolence or congratulation. They have never visited the sick and afflicted. They have never spent an hour listening to an old person’s garrulous talk, and so when they get old they are repaid in the same coin.

Are you laying up any mental riches for your old age?

I know an old lady so feeble that she cannot stir from her chair and whose eyes have failed so that she cannot tell day from night and who is so deaf that she cannot be read to, but who passes her days delightfully reciting to herself whole cantos of Scott and Byron and recalling word for word chapters of Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Austin. Her mind to her a kingdom is, in which she finds entertainment and amusement.

Will you be amused or bored when you are in your nineties, and have nothing but your own society?

I know another woman, middle-aged, who is deliberately laying up a treasure of memories of travel to solace her in her old age. She will never know a dull moment, for she will have something to thank about besides her rheumatic and her diet when she sits alone in the twilight of life.

Old age comes to us all. Don’t let it find you empty-handed or empty-minded. Thus shall you make it a time of happiness instead of torment.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Sept. 10, 1940, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: I am a young professional man, engaged to marry a girl much better off financially than I am. When I met her I was impressed with her expensive car, her furs, jewels and so forth, and I liked her personally, too, but I know that if she had been poor I would not have given her a second thought. Do you think I will be happy if I marry her? My friends say that she is only a bird in a gilded cage and that I should marry some sweet girl who has little, or less, than I have. Do you think it is a good idea for a poor boy to marry a rich girl? WONDERING LAD.

ANSWER: No. I don’t. I think no other marriage has as little chance of success as that in which the wife holds the purse strings, and that no other man gets so richly punished as the one who sins against love by marrying a girl for what she has instead of what she is. It reverses the law of nature for the wife to be the provider and the husband the dependent. No matter how kind and generous the woman he has married is, no man can have her dole out money to him without a sense of degradation. Nor can he keep from writhing under the half-veiled contempt he sees in the faces of all he meets who regard him as nothing but a parasite—a rich woman’s pet who rates along with her poodle.

To begin with, it is a fatal thing for a man to marry without love because all the circumstances of his life tend to make him critical of his wife and focus his attention upon her shortcomings.

Nothing but love can blind a husband to his wife’s faults and keep him from perceiving the superior attractions of other women, and the man who lacks this anesthetic to dull the pangs of the sacrifices that marriage inevitably demands is doomed to a life of misery.

Moreover, in addition to the imperfections that all wives have, the rich girl contributes still more drawbacks to the problem of how to be happy though married. Her money makes her independent, so she can snap her fingers in her husband’s face and tell him where he can go if he doesn’t like what she does.

Her whole rearing has cultivated in her selfishness and arrogance and made the pursuit of pleasure her main object in life, and she expects her poor little husband to earn his board and keep by trotting at her heels and yes-yessing her.

Of course, this isn’t always the case. There are girls who have had the misfortune to have been born millionairesses who have hearts and souls and brains, just as poor girls have, but even so, when the man loves the woman honestly and truly, for herself alone, her money nearly always destroys him.

I know, for example, a case in which a fine rich girl married an equally fine boy who was just beginning to make a brilliant success in his profession. The boy was loath to enter into the marriage because he was ambitious and independent and wanted to succeed on his own, but the girl agreed to live on his earnings and they started off happily in a moderate-priced little flat.

But the girl, used to cars and chauffeurs and chefs and to rushing madly from place to place, soon tired of riding in buses and doing housework and staying at home.

“Why,” she would demand to know of her husband, “should we live like paupers when we have thousands of dollars piling up every day in the bank? Why shouldn’t we travel while we are young and see the world? What’s the good of sticking to your old profession when there is no need for it? Why do you love your own independence more than you love me?”

And in the end she won out, as the persistent wife always does, and now they live in a splendor he hates and he broods bitterly over just being a rich woman’s husband instead of a famous man on his own account.

So don’t be a fortune-hunter. It doesn’t pay. It is the hardest way any man ever earned his living.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the September 2011 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Nixons Win Hearts Of Nashvillians” (1952); “8 Hurt In Toy Train Wreck At Fair Park" (1956); and “Submarine Chaser Launched" Nashville Bridge Company (1942).

From the Sept. 3, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

The wail of every discontented wife is: “My husband doesn’t understand me.” The alibi of every wandering husband is: “My wife doesn’t understand me.” It is true in both cases. No husband ever has the slightest idea of why his wife does the things she does the way she does them. No wife knows why her husband acts the way he does. It is impossible that two people of different sexes, with different inheritances, brought up in different environments, with different habits and modes of thoughts and purposes, can ever see eye to eye, or realize the poet’s dream of two souls with but a single thought.

No woman, for instance, can understand what it is in the marriage ceremony that turns a romantic lover into a prosaic meal ticket. She can’t understand why, when he married to get a home, he is not willing to stay in it; nor why he sets other peoples’ tables in a roar, but is the Great Silencer at his own. She can’t understand why, before marriage, he used to remember every anniversary and her taste in food and books and amusements, but after marriage, he has to be reminded of her birthday and Christmas, and tells her to go downtown and get something nice for herself and charge it; that he doesn’t know what she wants.

She can’t understand why a man is willing to trust his wife with his name, his honor, his children and his life, but isn’t willing to trust her with a few dollars. A woman can’t understand why, if her husband loves her, as he says he does, he should philander with other women. She never understands why men never grow up but stay little boys to the end of their lives, and why every now and then they are bound to play truant.

A man never understands why, after marriage, a woman isn’t satisfied to settle down and take marriage for granted. He doesn’t understand why women are so set on sentimental twaddle and want to be treated as brides even after they get fat and 40 and the mothers of large families, and why they put more emphasis on words than deeds.

A man never understands why women cry when they are glad. Why they go out and buy something to celebrate a happiness or console them in sorrow. Why they put such an inordinate value on love.

No, the sexes never understand each other. They always keep each other guessing.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Sept. 17, 1937, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

In spite of the prevailing masculine belief that all women are just crazy to get married, many women are celibate by nature. To them a man in the house is a pain in the neck. A rough, rude, untidy animal with coarse appetites who is always demanding food and disarranging the tidies and tracking in mud, and who makes a lot of extra work and trouble.

Many of these women who were spinsters even in the cradle have inherited comfortable fortunes. Others have good jobs that not only make them financially independent, but also that furnish them with an outlet for their energies and ambitions, and fill their days with pleasant and exciting work.

If they followed their inclinations they would remain in a state of single blessedness. But, emancipated as they are in other ways, they’ve not been able to free themselves from the traditional belief that unless a woman acquires a husband and children she is bound to spend a miserable and lonely old age. Also, that there is something discreditable in being an old maid.

So a lot of women, whom Nature never intended to marry, fall into a blind panic when they get along in their thirties, grab up the first man they can get their hands on and rush with him to the altar, no matter how unsuited he is to them, no matter how little alluring the holy estate is to them.

That such marriages turn out disastrously is a foregone conclusion because it takes not only a lot of love, but also a lot of aptitude to make a marriage a success. The woman who is not a “natural” wife and mother simply cannot do this. To her a husband is an enforced companion who must be endured. Her children are a burden. Her housekeeping a bore. She wasn’t intended to marry any more than the tongue-tied man was intended to be an oracle or a homely woman to be a bathing beauty.

Of course, in the olden days when a husband was not only a meal ticket and a card of admission to society, but also a badge of respectability, it was obvious that every woman would marry who could. If she failed to do so it was an indication of her lack of charm or enterprise and branded her as a failure as a woman. But in these days the old maids are sitting on top of the world with their pay envelopes in one hand and their latch keys in the other. No other women are so free and independent as they are. Why any woman should dread joining their ranks and be willing to marry a man she doesn’t care for to avoid it passes comprehension.

For a woman to marry the man she loves and without whom she feels life would be cinders, ashes and dust is the happiest of all fates for her, but the most miserable is for her to marry a man for whom she cares nothing just to keep from being an old maid, or because she is afraid of being lonely when she is old. For only too often she has the loneliness plus the uncongenial husband. Two griefs instead of one.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the September 2017 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Horrible Outrage” at Colored State Fair (1911); “Crescent Theater closes doors after 30 years” (1982); and “The Largest Man” (1895).

From the Oct. 3, 1927, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

It’s not vanity that sends women to beauty parlors; it’s humility. But men have so much confidence in their charms that they don’t attempt self-improvement. Being males, they are automatically superior.

Of course, men will arise en masse and deny this assertion and in proof of their assertion that women are vainer than men they will point to the millions of dollars and eons of time that women spend in beauty shops, they will cite the fact that women give more thought and effort toward preserving their figures than they do to saving their immortal souls, they will allege, and none can contradict them, that about nine-tenths of a woman’s thoughts and interests are centered about her clothes and general appearance; they will remind you of the tortures to which women voluntarily submit themselves in order to reduce.

And lastly, but not leastly, they will call your attention to the women who, in restaurants, at the theater, on cars, in all sorts of public places, calmly and deliberately draw out their vanity cases and proceed to make up their complexions and then, after having given a last long lingering look at their reflections in their mirrors, turn away with an expression of supreme satisfaction on their faces, as one of who has just beheld a masterpiece.

All of this is perfectly true. And it is also true that men do not, as a sex, frequent beauty shops, nor spend much time or thought upon their clothes, nor do they deny themselves the things they want to eat for fear of losing their boyish figures.

But all of this does not prove that they are less vain than women are. On the contrary, it shows that they are more so.

It is not vanity that sends women to the beauty shops and causes them to dye their hair and paint their faces. It’s humility.

It’s because the average woman realizes that she is not much to look at that makes her devote so much time and money and effort in trying to improve her appearance. She is determined not to remain ugly as God made her if human ingenuity can circumvent nature. Hence, the chiffons and the rouge pot and the lipstick and the calcimine and the permanent wave and all the rest of it.

But man, apparently, is perfectly satisfied that, just as he is, he is a living picture which is a treat for anyone to behold. He does not feel that he needs to camouflage his defects as his sister does hers.

He may have a head as hairless as a billiard ball, but he is rarely modest enough to hide his baldness under a toupee. He may be fat and pudgy and bay-windowed, but he doesn’t count his calories and go on a starvation diet to regain his boyish figure. He considers himself good-looking enough as he is.

Indeed, so superhumanly conceited are some men that they don’t think it even necessary to keep themselves shaved and their hair cut or to have their clothes pressed. They esteem themselves a knockout, bristles and all.

Men show that they are vainer than women in their attitude toward love. Virtually every man believes that he is irresistible to the feminine sex and that he has only to throw the handkerchief to any woman to have her break her neck to pick it up. And this self-confidence in his own attractions is not even shaken by half a dozen women having failed to fall for his charms. He always attributes it to the dumbness of the women and lets it go at that.

Nor does any man ever get too old to believe that his hypnotic power has waned. Every day we hear of aged millionaires marrying girls young enough to be their granddaughters in the perfect faith that they are loved for themselves alone. Nor does any husband ever lie awake at night worrying over losing his wife’s affection because he is growing fat and middle-aged and grizzle-haired.

Women have no such confidence in their own charms. Even the prettiest young girl goes through tortures of anxiety, wondering if she is going to have that mysterious appeal for men that will make her a belle, or whether she will be doomed to be a wallflower. No woman feels certain that the man she loves is going to love her or that she will be able to capture the man she wants for a husband. And even after she does get him she lives in eternal dread of losing him.

Another way that men show their superior vanity is in thinking that every woman is interested in hearing every detail about themselves. They monologue to her by the hour about their hopes, their plans, their love affairs, their cars, their dogs, their guns. They come to her for sympathy in their sorrows and to boast of their triumphs.

But no woman is vain enough to think even for an instant, that a man wants to hear the story of her life, or to listen to her tell of what she said to the cook and the cook said to her, or of how she is planning to have her new dress made. The only popular women are the listeners and those who give men the glad hand without expecting a return compliment.

Men show that they are vainer than women in being much more easily flattered. Of course, both sexes gobble down compliments as a starving dog does a juicy filet mignon, but a woman eyes her compliment a bit suspiciously before she swallows it, while a man gulps his down whole.

You can tell the homeliest man that he is an Apollo, the dullest bore that he is a wit, the old bachelor who has been flouted by every woman he knows that he is a sheik, and he will believe it and puff out with pride until he bursts his shirt buttons.

But you cannot use any such raw methods in flattering woman; you have to tell the ugly woman that she is chic and has personality. You have to tell the dull woman that she is beautiful and the one who makes no hit with men that she is intellectual. For they know their limitations and realize their shortcomings.

And the final proof of man’s superior vanity is that he believes that just because he was born of the masculine persuasion he is superior to every woman in the world and that every woman should look up to him.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the October 2015 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including:  “Belle Meade blast fatal to housewife” (1985); “Grand Ole Opry To Be Nationally Telecast” (1955); and “Drawing the Color Line” (1907).

From the Oct. 1, 1938, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: I married a widower with children and I earnestly desire to do my duty by them and make them happy, but I am being made perfectly miserable by my husband, the children and the first wife’s relatives all telling me perpetually what my predecessor used to do. They use her as a club over my head. Everything I do I am criticized and told that wasn’t the way my predecessor did it. My husband isn’t my husband. He is still the husband of the dead wife. My home isn’t my home. It is hers. I have tried to please all of them, but in vain, and I am tired of trying to pattern my life after that of some one else. I feel I have a right to my own opinions and my own way of running a house which should be mine. I love my husband and the children, but being the underdog is no fun. Will you please write a little advice to a stepmother who wants to do what is right but is tired of playing second fiddle. MARYANNE.

ANSWER: The only way any of us can keep from being the underdog is to fight our way up, and I strongly advise you to do so. Give your stupid husband, your impudent stepchildren, your meddling in-laws a few good hard bites that will make them afraid of you and keep their hands off of you.

It will probably precipitate a grand old family row, but when the dust is cleared away you will find that what you have gained was worth the battle, for you will have got possession of your home and you will have won the respect of your oppressors. More than that, you will have put yourself in a position to be of some help to your stepchildren, which you cannot be as long as they see you a poor, weak, spineless creature who lets everybody trample over her and hasn’t enough backbone to stand up for her rights.

There is nothing that children have such a contempt for as they have for cowardice, and you try in vain to control and guide youngsters who see you meekly swallowing insults from their relatives and who permits them to tell you where you get off. The only way you can establish your authority with your stepchildren is just to make yourself head of the house in reality—as you are in theory—and tell them that while their mother’s way of doing things was no doubt an admirable one, that it is now outmoded and that you have established a new modern regime.

As for your husband, have a plain talk with him and tell him that if he is still more in love with a memory than he is with you that you are leaving; that you are a flesh-and-blood woman and you are not going to play second fiddle to a ghost. That will wake him up, for the chances are that he doesn’t realize how he is hurting you by his continual references to his first wife as a model of perfection and his giving you to understand that he considers you a poor substitute for this paragon.

Anyway, any man who is always throwing his first wife up to his second wife and who hasn’t intelligence enough to know that a second wife is always more jealous of a first wife than she could be of any living siren hasn’t got the sense of a fishing worm.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Nov. 26, 1936, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: Can anything be done to a wife who has suddenly gone vitamin crazy? I am a middle-aged man, heretofore happily married to a noble woman, and all has been peace and happiness between us until the present.

But here is how trouble has reared its horrible head in our home; I am a strong, robust 200-pounder and having led an active life, I am all bone and muscles. All my life I have been accustomed to eating real food. Understand, I am not subject to obesity nor am I gluttonish, but I just have a regular he-man appetite to which, up to now, my wife has catered. But recently she has joined some sort of a circle and the diet fad she has picked up there she is trying out on the family dinner table and especially on me. The bread slices are as thin as a paper napkin and the butter patties are transparent. I can’t have potatoes if I eat bread.

And as for pie, that is anathema. Some evenings when I go home after an active day’s work in my law office or looking over the farm all I find is a note saying that she and the children have had their supper and gone to an early movie and that I’ll find my supper in the refrigerator, and lo and behold, when I open up that air-conditioned metal box all that I discover are several thin slices of tomatoes and a lettuce leaf guarded on the side with a few ripe black olives. In a word, vitamin D or H or X, or whatever its alphabetical name is, is wrecking my home and my wife’s nerves and reducing my mental as well as physical powers. If this is part of the new life, I am against it. Really, Dorothy, don’t you think this diet stuff is all tommyrot? I wish you would tell my wife so. E. PLURIBUS UNUM.

ANSWER: Well, Mr. Unum, I certainly do agree with you and am against the whole diet racket, especially as practiced upon husbands by wives. It is my honest and considered opinion that the increase in divorce, which so alarms the moralists,  is chiefly attributable to the present mania among women for keeping thin by the process of not having anything fit to eat on their tables, and also to the fact that being hungry makes a woman as bad tempered as it does any other half-starved animal.

It isn’t just merely a coincidence that domestic life isn’t what it used to be. Always the center of a happy home has been the dining-room. Our ideal of family life has been father and mother and children gathered about a table that groaned with its load of good food.

But no imagination is strong enough to picture a happy family gathered about a table sparsely furnished forth with a dab of spinach and a fragile lettuce leaf or two and some gosh-awful mess warranted to be nonfattening but to include the proper vitamins that will sustain life, though why anybody wants to sustain life under such conditions remains a mystery only a dietitian can fathom.

Of course, it would be all right for a vitamin hound to starve herself if she wanted to, but, alas, when a woman suffers she never wants to suffer alone. And so, Mr. Pluribus, I can offer you no help in solving your problem. Only sympathy.

But—here is a thought—if you could only induce a few widows, known for the table they set, to ask you to dinner a few times I think it would slay the vitamin bogey in your house.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the November 2010 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Vanderbilt Bests Tennessee, 13-7” (1937); “Police Push for Killers of Stringbean, Wife” (1973); and “Day of Thanksgiving” (1820).

From the Nov. 3, 1938, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR MISS DIX: What chance of happiness is there in a childless marriage? MABEL.

ANSWER: It depends altogether upon the individual. There are men and women who have the paternal and maternal instincts so strongly developed in them that they are utterly miserable without children. Life to them has no meaning without little arms around their necks, baby heads snuggled upon their breasts. No love from their mates, no tenderness, no kindness atones to them for the lack of children. Their houses are empty and lonely if there is no patter of little feet on the floor. There is nothing to strive for or work for if there are no sons and daughters on whom to lavish the fruits of their success.

It is because children are such a necessity to the happiness of so many people that the baby problem should be frankly and honestly discussed before the marriage and settled before the marriage as far as possible. No man or woman has the right to marry if he or she knows that he or she is unwilling to have children or cannot have children, if the other one desires a family.

There are many men and women who have no special affection for children and who do not desire to be bothered with them. Other cases in which there are hereditary taints that they feel that they have no right to pass on to their offspring. Still others who are so poor that they feel it would be an injustice to bring children into the world to whom they could give nothing but starvation and hardships. These cases automatically settle themselves, but they should be threshed out before marriage instead of afterward, so that neither party may feel aggrieved or defrauded.

But if a couple only discover after marriage that their home must be childless, certainly the only thing for them to do is either to reconcile themselves to the situation, or else to adopt the baby fate has denied them. Many persons do this and seem to feel an affection for the child as warm and satisfying as if it were their own.

Unless either the man or the woman has an actual obsession about children, there is no reason for them to be unhappy. Nor, as a matter of fact, are they unhappy as a general thing. On the contrary, the old theory that children draw a husband and wife closer together does not always work out in real life. In most cases it has the opposite effect. Particularly are women so likely to become absorbed in their children that they lose interest in their husbands and cease to try to make themselves attractive to them or to amuse them.

The childless woman having nothing to mother but her husband, devotes herself to spoiling him and making a fuss over him, and the childless father babies his wife, and so all goes well. You will find that most childless couples are very devoted to each other and that they play together and chum together much more than do the couples who have children.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

From the Dec. 20, 1933, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

A girl asks me how she can tell whether she is in love or not.

Well, it isn’t easy to diagnose a heart affection, because the symptoms are so misleading. Every time you have a fatal attack, whereas it may be only a flutter caused by indigestion from indulging in too much sentiment. Girls are particularly apt to be misled in this way because they are always sitting with their fingers on their pulses counting their heart throbs and expecting to be stricken down at any moment.

So the principal advice that I would give any young woman who is wondering whether she has contracted a chronic case or is merely suffering a temporary indisposition is to give herself the benefit of the doubt. For when you don’t know whether you are in love or not you are not. When you are really head-over-heels in love for keeps, it breaks out all over you in a million places like the measles.

Still and all, there are certain indications of the state of her feelings which a girl does well to take into consideration in trying to decide whether the thing that ails her is a heart trouble that she will never get over so long as she lives or is just a passing fancy that the next good-looking youth she meets will cure.

The first thing then is whether she can detect a heart murmur or not. The modern girl may be too husky and practical to tremble at the sound of a footstep as her mother did, but all the same if she is really in love she gets pretty much the same reaction to some particular lad that mother did. His coming turns on the lights and sets the joy bells ringing, and makes this the best of all possible worlds and a grand old place to live in.

So unless some man is necessary to you, unless without him the gayest party is a flop; the finest dinner dust and ashes in your mouth; the brightest day dull and cloudy; you are not really in love.

Nor are you in love as long as you have to justify your love and give a reason for it. If you have to say I love John because he is so intelligent or Tom because he is a go-getter or Sam because he is kind to his mother, what you have is only synthetic love. When you are really in love with a man, you love him because you love him and without any reference whatever to what he is or is not. It is just because he is he and you are that way about him.

Then consider whether you have hallucinations or not. If you think some snub-nosed, carroty-haired youth is handsomer than Ramon Navarro and you live in terror of the movies snatching him away to Hollywood or if you think some ordinary youth without two ideas to bless himself with an oracle upon whose words you hang and whose opinion you quote about what the President should do about the gold situation, then you may be sure that he is IT so far as you are concerned. No girl in love ever sees a man as he is. As long as she can discern his faults and his weaknesses she hasn’t got even a rise in temperature. She is perfectly normal.

Next, pay careful attention to your reactions to his society. Do you get fed up on him when he hangs around a lot or do you never get enough of his company? A great poet declared once that the test of love was whether you could muse all day on an absent face that had fixed you. That’s hooey. Anybody can long for an absent face. The trick is to stand the one that you have to gaze upon 365 days a year and still like it.

Nothing else on earth would save so many unhappy marriages as for engaged couples to have to spend a week together, preferably in August, and thus get a chance to find out if they really interested each other enough and loved each other enough to tackle a life job of companionship.

Next, consider whether you are in love with the boy or the good times he gives you. Is he all mixed up in your mind with flowers and candy and night clubs and automobiles and do you think of life with him as a prolonged whoopee party? Would he look just as good to you if he were poor and shabby and didn’t have the money even to take you to the movies often, and if being married to him meant hard work and pinching the pennies and wondering where the rent money was coming from?

If when your date calls, you come down with your hat on ready to step out to some place of amusement, it is a sure sign that your affection will last only as long as his good job does. But if you would rather spend an evening at home with a lad listening to him telling all about his college days and what he said to the boss and the boss said to him, you’ve got the love for him that is all wool and a yard wide and that will stand the wear and tear of matrimony.

And finally, note whether you want to mother a boy or not. All true feminine love is half maternal. It has to be that way or else every woman would be a divorcee. A woman who is really in love with a man doesn’t see his faults or she thinks they are all right because they are his and she begins worrying over his health.

So, if you are sure you have found the one perfect man, and you telephone to know if some strapping six-footer has got home without being run over by an automobile, that’s love. You’ve got it.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the December 2012 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “‘Giant Maniac’ Jailed Here as Axe Murderer” (1934); “‘Jesus People’ Hold Jail Prayer Vigil" (1973); and “Street Beggars Seen as Fakes, Thriving on a Gullible Public” (1938).

From the Dec. 17, 1933, Nashville Banner

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: I am very much in love with a man who, in spite of my disapproval, has recently become an ardent nudist. I have been brought up very strict by parents who are very much opposed to my being engaged to a man with such beliefs, and if I should marry him they would refuse to ever see me again. I cannot give up my parents or the man I love. What shall I do? In case I should decide to join my fiancé in his mode of living, could you give me any information about such a life? WORRIED.

ANSWER: Like Will Rogers, I only know what I’ve read in the papers about the nudists, but that little suffices me. I can imagine no spectacle so hideous and repulsive as a lot of fat and flabby or thin and bony men and women going around in the altogether with not even a fold of chiffon to hide their anatomical blemishes.

Believe me, clothes are mighty kind to most of us. They are like the mantle of charity that covers a multitude of sins, and purely as a matter of common humanity to our fellow creatures we should be as easy on the eyes as we can and not blast their vision with the grotesque spectacle that we would present if we were as Nature made us.

If we were all built along the architectural lines of a Ziegfeld chorus, there might be some justification in our casting away our snappy suits and our flattering silks and satins, but, alas and alack, few there be who qualify in the chorus girl class. Where there is one pair of prefect legs, there are multitudes who are knock-kneed and bowlegged or whose underpinning was built after the similitude of laths or the limbs of a piano. Where there is one perfect “36,” there are scores of living skeletons and tubs of fat. Where there is one back that is a thing of beauty, there are hundreds that look like a side of beef or an anatomical display of vertebras.

Just to think of what it would be to have to look at all the bay-windows in the world without any concealing draperies about them is enough to make the boldest shudder with apprehension. All this talk about the human form divine is hooey. The human form is seldom divine. It is mostly a caricature. 

Nudism is a reversions to the primitive, so to speak, for just as soon as the first man and woman acquired knowledge their initial act was to hide their nakedness. To put on clothes was their first step toward civilization, and the evolution of clothes from Adam to [Jean] Patou [the famous fashion designer] has continued ever since. And the more enlightened people have become, the more beautiful and artistic have they made their apparel.

All of this isn’t going to be stopped by a few people who take a morbid and decadent pleasure in going around naked. So my advice is not to take your faddy sweetheart too seriously. Play for time. Advise him to go and try out his nudist colony as the surest and quickest cure for what ails him. The first good sharp frost will send him scurrying back into trousers, and the sights he sees will convince him that humanity needs all the aid that art can give in camouflaging its ugliness.

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DEAR MISS DIX: I have been married for about six months to a kind and loving husband, but he is subject to melancholia. I have done everything I know to make him see the brighter side of things and make things pleasant. I have even suggested his going free to see if that would help him, but he insists that he doesn’t want to do this and only wants to be happy with me. I am very amiable, easy to get along with, good company and a loving and true wife, yet it all seems to be of no use in cheering him up. What can I do? MRS. A. H.

ANSWER: A wise man said that whether life is worth living or not depends upon the liver. Perhaps your husband is not well and needs to consult a doctor. It is pretty hard to be bright and cheery when you are feeling half sick. So the first thing to do is get him around to some good physician and have a thorough examination made.

Dyspepsia [indigestion] is another source of pessimism. A lot more grouchiness comes from the stomach than from the heart. So if you want your husband to be a little ray of sunshine in the house, feed him on wholesome and easily digested food.

But there are some people who are just morbid by nature, and who get a great kick out of glooming around the house and taking a depressing view of things. If your husband belongs to this type, nothing that you can ever do or say will turn him into a merry rollicking lad. So all you can do is to let him enjoy himself in his own sad way. But don’t take it too seriously. Just reflect that he is having the time of his life when he looks as if he were about to burst into tears, and that when he appears most sunk in melancholy he is really on the peaks of pleasure.

Of course, a human wet blanket is no woman’s idea of a comfortable life companion, but having married one, you will have to make the best of it and not let it chill you too much.

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DEAR MISS DIX: How much is a girl to be judged by her friends? The girl I want to marry has two very close girl friends and a sister, all of whom I know to have been unfaithful to their husbands. I am afraid to marry this girl, but I love her. In a case like this, what is the part of wisdom? P. H.

ANSWER: The old adage says that we are known by the friends we keep, but this is not always true. Sometimes our friends are a warning to us instead of an example. Why do you not talk to the girl and try to find out what her ideas are concerning loyalty and wives? If she thinks that her sister and friends are right the their loose living, I should certainly consider her poor wife material.

(Newspapers .com)

From the Jan. 26, 1936, Nashville Banner Magazine

By Dorothy Dix

DEAR DOROTHY DIX: Several months ago my husband’s father died, leaving his widow and a son of 24. The mother is a selfish, indolent, incompetent woman who has broken up her home and gone to live with a sister because she does not want to make an effort to keep a home for her son. He is lazy and has not worked for years, not because he couldn’t get a job, but because he preferred to sleep until noon, or play tennis or enjoy himself otherwise all afternoon.

Now he has just started to work and, of course, is getting a small salary, and my husband insists that I take him into our home, which would involve my getting six meals daily as his meals do not coincide with ours, and do his washing. We would also have to take a much larger apartment in an unheated house and I would have to stoke the fires. I could count on no help from the brother-in-law who never lifted a shovel of coal at home even when his father was ill.

I have told my husband that I will be willing to help his brother financially to live at the Y, which would be less expensive than having him live with us. I have even told him that I would gladly go back to work to help him support his mother if he is unable to do it himself. It would ruin our lives to have her with us because she irritates him and makes him ill with her fussing.

I have worked hard and do work hard to help my husband, but this putting more work on me is more than I can stand. What shall I do? WIFE.

ANSWER: Stick to your determination not to let your brother-in-law come to live with you, for if you once let him get his foot in the door you will never get it out, and you will spend the balance of your life toiling to support a lazy male parasite. And there is no virtue in that.

There are hundreds of thousands, millions, of deadbeats like your brother-in-law who will never work as long as they have a place to sleep and three square meals a day, and they are encouraged and abetted in their grafting by their families, who lack the courage to turn them out into the world, where they will either have to work or starve. There is no use in appealing to the pride of such men, or to their manhood, because they haven’t got any. All they want to do is to sit down on the do-nothing stool and let others support them.

You can tell your husband that he is doing his brother a deadly harm instead of a kindness in encouraging him in his loafing. Tell him that now is the crisis of his brother’s life and that unless he forces him to stand alone he will never do it. Once he gets into your house and finds that he can sponge on you for his living his fate will be sealed. He will give up his job and just settle down contentedly to be a mendicant as long as he lives.

This young man has a job, but he will throw it up as soon as he gets tired of it, or he will stick to it because it is his only meal ticket, according to the way your husband deals with the situation.

No man has a right to sacrifice his wife to his family. She should come first with him, and if he doesn’t care enough for her to feel that way about her, she has to protect herself. So whatever you do, don’t let brother-in-law settle down on you. Give him just as little money as he can possibly live on and force him to fend for himself. That will make a man of him if anything can.

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DEAR MISS DIX: I am a very puzzled young man in my second year of college. My sweetheart, now that leap year is here, says: “I want to settle down and plan for the future.” She would make a very nice wife, but I feel we are too young to get married. Can you advise me in my distressed position? I.W.

ANSWER: I can, and if you will take my advice it will save you a lot of grief. Say positively and unequivocally “NO” and stick to it. This is a time when you need more backbone than heart, and may the Lord stiffen your spine.

You are too young to marry. You are in no position to marry. If you let a girl badger you into marrying, you will spend the remainder of your life in repenting your weakness. Don’t do it. If the girl had any sense, had any real affection for you, she wouldn’t want to jeopardize your future by forcing marriage upon you before you are ready for it.

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DEAR MISS DIX: I have been married three years to one of the grandest men in the world and we are very happy. When we are alone at home he is the most gentle and loving husband any woman could hope for, but in public he frequently causes me embarrassment by correcting everything I say. He never lets me finish telling anything. He interrupts me and starts the story all over again, saying I am wrong, and finishes it his way. That starts an argument unless I shut up, which I do to save the listeners from a scene. Will you tell me how to handle this problem tactfully? L.T.

ANSWER: You seem to be doing that already, and I salute you as a feminine diplomat of the first order who carries on under trying circumstances. Not many women would have either the finesse or the self-control to hide their chagrin at their husband’s unwarrantable rudeness behind a smiling face, and to keep silence to save other people from the embarrassment of having to witness a family spat.

(Tennessee State Library and Archives)

Editor’s note: This article appeared in the January 2012 issue of The Nashville Retrospect newspaper along with other stories from the city’s past, including: “Cut Spending; Not Hike Taxes: Fulton" (1966); “Battle of Fishing Creek; Death of Gen. Zollicoffer” (1862); and “Fires, Fire-Companies, &c." (1826).