America's First Advice Columnist
Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer was born in Montgomery County, Tennessee, in 1861, but she became Dorothy Dix in New Orleans — and as Dorothy Dix, she became the most widely read woman in the world. Her advice column, which ran for over forty years, was syndicated in newspapers across the globe and read by an estimated sixty million people at its peak. She was Dear Abby and Ann Landers before either of them existed, and she invented the template they followed.
The Picayune
Gilmer arrived in New Orleans in the 1880s, unhappily married and struggling with what we would now call depression. She found salvation in journalism, joining the staff of the Daily Picayune — one of the few newspapers in America that employed women reporters — in 1896. Her editor, Elizabeth Nicholson, recognized Gilmer's talent and gave her a column called "Dorothy Dix Talks" that would run, in various forms, for the next forty-five years.
The column started as general-interest commentary but quickly evolved into an advice column focused on women's issues — marriage, divorce, financial independence, workplace discrimination, and the daily indignities that women in turn-of-the-century America faced. Dix's advice was practical, unsentimental, and decades ahead of its time. She told women to get educations, to earn their own money, to leave bad marriages, and to stop sacrificing their own happiness for men who didn't deserve it.
The Crime Reporter
Before she became famous for advice, Dix was one of the most accomplished crime reporters in America. She covered sensational murder trials for the New York Journal, including the trial of a woman accused of poisoning her husband — coverage that combined meticulous reporting with the psychological insight that would define her advice column. She understood human nature at its worst and its best, and she wrote about both with equal clarity.
The Feminist Before Feminism
Dorothy Dix was a feminist before the word was in common use. She advocated for women's suffrage, for women's property rights, for divorce reform, and for economic independence — positions that were radical in the early 1900s. But she delivered these positions in the accessible, conversational tone of an advice column, which meant they reached millions of women who would never have read a feminist tract or attended a suffrage rally.
Her most famous advice — "dry your eyes, roll up your sleeves, and get to work" — captured her philosophy perfectly. She was not interested in sympathy. She was interested in solutions. She told women the truth about their situations, offered practical steps to improve them, and refused to sugarcoat the difficulty of what she was asking.
The New Orleans Woman
Dix lived in New Orleans for most of her life, in a house on Gen. Taylor Street in Uptown. She was a fixture of the city's literary and social scene, and she wrote about New Orleans with deep affection. She died in 1951 at the age of 89, having spent half a century telling the women of the world to stand up for themselves. The New Orleans woman who became the most read woman on Earth did it by telling the truth, one column at a time, to sixty million people who needed to hear it.
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