DIX, DOROTHY 1861-1951

Advice columnist

"Mother Confessor to Millions."

Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer started her column "Dorothy Dix Talks" in New Orleans in 1896. It lasted until her death in 1951, making her probably the best-known woman writer of her era. William Randolph Hearst lured her from New Orleans to his New York Journal at the turn of the century, and with his syndication operations, her readership eventually reached some sixty million throughout the world.

Poor in the New South

Elizabeth Meriwether grew up in a poor but cultivated Tennessee family after the Civil War. When she was twenty-one, she married her stepmother's brother, a charming but emotionally unstable man who could not hold a job. The marriage was unhappy, but they never divorced. Faced with the need to support her family, she began to work as a freelance writer. Eliza Nicholson, publisher of the New Orleans Picayune, recognized the thirty-three-year-old's abilities and hired her as a "Gal Friday" to the paper's sharp editor, Maj. Nathaniel Burbank. She graduated from the obituaries and drudge stories of the cub reporter to her own straightforward column of advice to women, called "Sunday Salad." Her down-to-earth style brought a barrage of letters.

Sob Sister Extraordinaire

Her first story for Hearst was to cover the saloon-busting tour through Kansas of temperance leader Carry Nation in 1901. "What a waste of good liquor," Dix wrote, in the voice of an inveterate southern belle. She became a favorite with Hearst's brilliant editor Arthur Brisbane, who helped sharpen her prose. He asked in 1902, "Did any man ever make a quicker success in the newspaper business than Dorothy Dix?" She covered titillating murder trials, including the Harry K. Thaw trial, and became the most dogged of the "Sob Sisters," wrangling interviews from victims, perpetrators, and their families. By 1917, at age fifty-five, she ceased work as a reporter to concentrate on her column and sermonettes.

The Hall-Mills Case

In 1926 Dix was persuaded to cover one last trial, that of a New Jersey minister's wife accused of killing her husband and his church-choir lover. The jury shared Dix's sympathies, and the woman was acquitted.

Everyone's Problems

People wrote to Dorothy Dix about universal difficulties: interfering parents, unfaithful spouses, recalcitrant children, romance, religion, etiquette, and recipes. She urged spouses to work out their disagreements, children to listen to their parents, and young men and women to hold to their ideals. She was an early advocate of the Nineteenth Amendment. If possible, she thought, women should stay home with young children, but as she herself had learned, having a vocation is crucial in case of need. She continued to dictate her column until she died in 1951 at the age of ninety. She allowed no one to carry on under the name Dorothy Dix.

Sources:

Harriett T. Kane and Ella Bentley Arthur, Dear Dorothy Dix: The Story of a Compassionate Woman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952);

Madelon Golden Schlipp and Sharon M. Murphy, Great Women of the Press (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983).

Dix, Dorothy, pseudonym of Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer (1861–1951), author of a column of advice to the lovelorn, begun (1896) in the New Orleans Picayune and later syndicated and distilled in such books as How To Win and Hold a Husband (1939).