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Chapter 5 continues this examination of how these changes affected the emotional landscapes of young men's lives by scrutinising how the ‘male world’ of youthful feeling was expressed through the advice columns of popular newspapers and magazines, which expanded significantly in the 1930s. The chapter samples letters from boys and young men to illustrate a complex interplay of discourse and mediated experience to help illustrate their responses to the period's informalising expectations and changing social relations.

Family reunification provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (the McCarran-Walter Act) allowed ethnic women, for the first time, to sponsor the migration of their alien husbands and children outside the limited quota slots for Southern and Eastern Europeans. This chapter explores advice columns in New York’s Il Progresso Italo-Americano to examine the gendered implications of the 1952 act on postwar Italian migration. The 1952 act granted Italian women a new and controversial visibility in the Italian-language press and in the larger ethnic community as instigators of immigration. During the 1950s, this chapter argues, advice columns about the 1952 act turned into platforms for both exalting and policing Italian women’s roles in initiating postwar migrations, marriages, and families.

This chapter examines the life and work of African American writer Gertrude Bustill Mossell in the mid-1880s, with particular emphasis on her two-year editorship of the advice column, “Our Woman's Department,” for the New York Freeman. It first provides a background on the Bustill and Mossell family histories before discussing Mossell's editorship of the woman's column of the New York Freeman using her professional name, Mrs. N. F. Mossell. It then explains how Mossell used her column, published between 1886 and 1887, to promote models of public citizenship that widened the boundaries of black women's purposefulness in the postbellum period. Tackling topics ranging from child care to education, Mossell encouraged parents to view their daughters as useful members of the household and advised black girls to negotiate equal relationships with employers. The chapter also explores the complex and multivalent views of the present and future prospects for black girls Mossell offered in her columns.

This chapter recounts how, soon after completing The Mysteries of Myra, the Wharton brothers undertook a new production, Beatrice Fairfax (1916). This serial was financed once again by William Randolph Hearst and distributed by his International Film Service through the Pathé Exchange. Originally titled Letters to Beatrice, it capitalized on the recent trend of real-life female reporters, who “became familiar, consistent personalities, much like serial queens” and who sought out “novel and thrilling experiences that extended the experiential sphere of women” by vivifying places and activities that were typically “out of reach to women, restricted by virtue of either their danger or their indelicacy.” The Whartons' serial, which reflected the strong real-life collaboration with newspapers that had made the serial genre so popular, was based on Fairfax's widely read “Advice to the Lovelorn” column syndicated by Hearst. But, in fact, there was no actual Beatrice Fairfax; that was a pseudonym used by Hearst employee Marie Manning.

In the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, newspaper advice columnists and letter writers came together to create a complex and interactive exchange of advice that both responded to and contributed to the making of modern American society. This chapter offers an in-depth analysis of both the letters written to advice columns and the worldviews advocated by the nation’s most influential columnists. It demonstrates that advice columns were essential public forums where Americans critiqued and learned to cope with the dislocations of modern urban life. Advice given by popular columnists upheld both the structural racism undergirding American society, as well as the increasingly unrealistic gender norms to which women were held. Yet the interactivity of the columns transformed advice into an ongoing dialogue that allowed participants to seek guidance and empathy in a public yet anonymous forum.

This chapter analyzes “Experience,” the popular and long-running Detroit News advice column that transformed into a vibrant virtual community. “Experience” letter writers became longtime, regular contributors, addressing their letters not just to columnist Nancy Brown but to other participants—and to readers writ large. They crafted a collective narrative around the loneliness of city life and assuaged their sadness through the anonymous comfort of strangers, with whom they fostered long-term and deeply felt virtual friendships. The column’s anonymity promised its participants freedom of expression and a space for authentic confession—even as many of the biographical details participants shared were likely embellished or altered. Columns like “Experience” established the language and practices of virtual communities decades before the emergence of the Internet.

Melanie Tebbutt’s essay traces some of the changes which transformed working-class culture after the Second World War through an analysis of the personal advice pages of teenage magazines, an important expression of girls’ culture between the mid-1950s and late-1970s. Tebbutt takes as her subject Mirabelle magazine, widely read by girls in this period, although its popularity has been largely over-shadowed by the most popular teenage magazine of the time, which was Jackie. Advice pages in teenage magazines from the 1950s and 1960s have received less attention that those of the later decades of the twentieth-century and Tebbutt traces the changes which took place in queries and answers, from the time of Mirabelle’s publication, in 1956, when its advice column was identified with a marriage bureau in central Manchester, to ceasing production in 1977, by which time discussion of sexual matters, including pregnancy outside marriage, had become more open. Magazines aimed at the teenage market were an important source of sexual information for young people and this essay offers a nuanced analysis of Mirabelle’s advice pages which suggests there is considerable scope for comparative studies.

This chapter introduces the idea that early advice columns were essential but overlooked precursors to today’s virtual communities. It contextualizes the genesis of advice columns in the history of media and the press, changing notions of modernity, and the gendered transformations in American culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Advice columns helped turn American newspapers into a media form that prioritized the reading habits of women. They gave rise to the newspaper advice columnist, a new type of female reporter who played a central role in defining the archetype of the celebrity journalist. Newspaper advice columns redefined the meaning and use of advice, as readers increasingly turned to public, anonymous, and interactive sites for help on their most intimate problems, rather than to their family members or friends.

After World War II, transformations in the newspaper industry, in mainstream gender values, and in the nature of popular discourse again reshaped Americans’ experience with advice. The rise in the 1950s of a new generation of advice columns, led by Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren, also marked the decline of local, participatory columns like the Detroit News’ “Experience” and the Chicago Defender’s “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise.” Yet early twentieth-century advice columns set key precedents of collective communication that continue to shape the digital communities that serve as our primary modes of personal interaction today.

This chapter focuses on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s little-known breast cancer advice column, “Off My Chest,” which she wrote from 1998 to 2003 for MAMM, a women’s cancer magazine, and A Dialogue on Love, a memoir of her therapy that records her struggle with her cancer diagnosis and metastasis. The chapter argues that Sedgwick’s journalistic and experimental writing circulates a public discourse of love that mediates her relationship to her own mortality. Sedgwick sets herself up as an object for collective identification. By disseminating pieces of herself in published works she strives to serve as an instrument for “good pedagogy” to counter the “bad pedagogy” of the cancer establishment. Influenced by Melanie Klein’s concept of reparation, which she regards as another word for love, she offers a Buddhist inflected teaching that recognizes life as an ongoing collaborative project sustained through the anonymous and impersonal love of readers she has never met, but who survive her death.

This chapter examines the evolution of newspaper women’s pages – spaces designed to entice female readers with features and advice columns on fashion, cookery and domestic life – in the national daily press after 1918. The first section examines how the market leaders, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, modernized and repackaged the traditional content of these pages for a new generation widely deemed to be more independent, demanding and discriminating. The second half explores how three left-of-centre newspapers–the trade-union supporting Daily Herald, the liberal Manchester Guardian, and the Communist Daily Worker–tried to reimagine the women’s pages and domestic life, moving beyond the usual feminine stereotypes. Although none of these titles was entirely successful, the Manchester Guardian set out a model that would provide a lasting and significant space for moderate feminist perspectives across the twentieth century.

In the 1960s the Daily Mirror ran a weekly feature offering financial and investment advice about stocks and shares and it dealt with thousands of letters a year about financial matters from readers who found its advice more accessible and less intimidating than speaking to financial professionals. The social optimism of the sixties dissipated in the 1970s, however, as the economic situation deteriorated and the Daily Mirror’s financial advice had to adapt to a climate in which its own circulation was declining and as its core readership started to age the column became more conservative, dealing with queries from older readers and worries about unemployment, and focusing more on ‘mitigating’ the effects of inflation and redundancy payments. Porter argues that the Daily Mirror had, in fact, misinterpreted its readers’ interest in ‘popular capitalism’ during full employment and rising living standards in the 1960s, when its advocacy of financial investment reflected contemporary beliefs that the values and aspirations of the working-class were changing, with greater opportunities to borrow, save and spend. As he points out, its financial journalists were forced over time to adapt to more pragmatic queries about family budgeting and personal savings rather than focusing on larger investments.

Mead reached her largest audience through her monthly column in Redbook magazine, which ran from 1962 to Mead’s death in 1978. Examining the Redbook columns gives a good sense of Mead’s spiritual life and social ethics in her prime years. Religion was not a major theme in the columns, but it cropped up in surprising ways. The Redbook pieces also shed light on Mead’s relationship with Rhoda Metraux, who co-authored them and edited the three book collections drawn from the columns. Additionally, looking at the letters Mead received during these years shows the impact she had on her audience. By 1970, she was getting fifteen pounds of mail every day. People believed that they knew her through her media presence, and they trusted her enough to ask her practically anything. In some ways, she came to function almost as a clergywoman, making prophetic pronouncements, receiving confessions, and dispensing pastoral advice. Ironically, she came only late and reluctantly to acceptance of the idea that women could be clergy, and the slow evolution of her thinking on this subject is most clearly seen in one of the Redbook columns.