A few months ago, a friend told me that when she receives her print copy of the Washington Post every day, she turns first to Carolyn Hax’s column offering personal advice to anonymous correspondents. The Post also runs another regular advice column, Ask Sahaj, written by Sahaj Kaur Kohli, an American-born therapist, the daughter of immigrants, who caters to other children of similar parents caught between cultures. The questions both columns consider differ from queries about etiquette (sent to the syndicated Miss Manners), ethics (to the New York Times’s The Ethicist), or personal finance (to a variety of experts in different media).
Last year, Amy Dickinson, who had taken over the “Ann Landers” column in 2003, decided to retire from a field in which (as she put it in a recent book title), “people tend to tell me things.” The Chicago Tribune syndicate then replaced her rather than ending the column. The person they chose, R. Eric Thomas, seemingly broke with a longstanding tradition of female “agony aunts.” His column, Asking Eric, is written from the standpoint of a married Black man in his forties. Thomas has revealed that he tries to respond to questioners with empathy as he thinks about advising himself, especially his younger self.
In the twentieth and twenty-first century United States, advice columnists other than Eric Thomas have indeed customarily been female. In the 1950s and 1960s, “Ann Landers” (Eppie Lederer) had a famous, competitive, contentious relationship with the woman who wrote “Dear Abby” (Pauline Phillips), ironically her twin sister. The two women built on the tradition pioneered by “Beatrice Fairfax” (Marie Manning Gasch) in columns written for the New York Evening Journal between 1898 and 1945. Yet not all such authors have been women. For example, at intervals several men, including Eric Thomas himself, drafted the column “Dear Prudence,” begun in 1997 in the online magazine Slate and subsequently syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, although its writer is currently a woman and the collective pseudonym is of course female.
But as I learned from my research into the 1690s publication in London, The Athenian Mercury, Thomas and other male authors have followed rather than broken with tradition. Despite some sources claiming that “Dear Beatrice Fairfax” was the world’s first personal advice column, the Mercury, predating it by over two centuries, deserves that title. It was the brainchild of John Dunton, a thirty-something printer in London, who in early 1691 had the idea of producing a cheap broadsheet (a single, two-sided page) periodical that would respond to anonymous questions on any topics posed by readers to himself and his collaborators.
Dunton frequented London’s coffeehouses, where men engaged in reading, business, and conversation, famously discussing a wide variety of subjects. Inevitably, factual disputes arose and no one present knew how to resolve them. As an entrepreneur, Dunton hypothesized that an inexpensive publication which could respond rapidly to queries from coffeehouse patrons would find an avid audience. In effect, he invented a seventeenth-century version of an internet search engine.
Dunton was correct in his prediction. The Athenian Mercury’s first issue, calling for questions, appeared in mid-March 1691. Correspondents were to send inquiries to a coffeehouse, for Dunton initially concealed his involvement. That added to the mystery of a purported group of experts prepared to answer queries from all comers. Questions flooded in. The initial plan for one broadsheet a week immediately expanded to two. Men speculated about the identity of the Athenian Society’s members or volunteered to join the group. But Dunton and his two brothers-in-law, the other Athenians, never enlisted anyone else except for an occasional consultation.
Among the questions the Athenians were eventually asked included the following: what causes smallpox? If a man dies, will his apprentice have to serve the widow? Or, on the Bible: whom did Cain marry? Did Adam and Eve eat actual apples?
After about six weeks of successful publication, the Athenians confronted two correspondents with novel inquiries. First, a man submitted a series of questions that, although generally phrased, verged on the personal: who is worse off in marriage, men or women? Should people marry for love or money? Don’t couples today marry too young? Dunton chose to both print and answer the queries on topics he had not anticipated.
Second, a woman contacted the Mercury: could women as well as men ask questions? Women worked in coffeehouses, but they were not among the patrons. The Athenians had initially assumed their readership was wholly male. But faced with the reality that they had a potential female audience as well, they replied, yes, they could.
And thus the world’s first personal advice column was born. Dunton had not expected some of the types of questions the Athenians were asked over the next six years of the ˛Ń±đ°ůł¦łÜ°ů˛â’s existence. Even though the queries they had foreseen continued, about one-third of the contents of the broadsheets eventually consisted of inquiries about some aspect of personal behavior. Correspondents primarily focused on courtship, love, marriage, and sexual relationships. What should a woman do if her lover “slighted” (ghosted) her? How could a man disentangle himself from two lovers, neither of whom he wanted to marry? How could a husband or wife deal with a quarrelsome or abusive spouse in an era without accessible divorce? Should a woman trust a man she feared had designs on her chastity? Was sex outside of marriage ever permissible, and if so, under what circumstances?
The Athenians dealt with all these, and many more. They almost always adopted a tone of moral condemnation toward men or women who admitted misbehavior, sexual or otherwise. But they nevertheless often revealed compassion and understanding for human foibles and common mistakes. On more than one occasion, for instance, they told correspondents confessing serious sexual misconduct that they needed to seek forgiveness only from God.
Today’s advice columnists will undoubtedly not direct their correspondents to do penance or attend church more regularly, as the Athenians sometimes did. But neither too do questioners today frequently reveal secrets as shameful as those their predecessors described to the Athenian Mercury.
Mary Beth Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita of American History at Cornell University. Her books include the Pulitzer Prize–finalist Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power in the Forming of American Society; 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, winner of the George Washington Prize; In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692; and Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women.