Our 300-year love affair with advice columns

What is it about advice columns that are so appealing?

As an advice columnist myself, I wonder this a lot. I’ve spent the past decade running the Ask a Manager advice column, where I tackle workplace conundrums and questions. But what’s the history of the advice column as a format, and what makes the greats like Carolyn Hax and Miss Manners so good at what they do?

I stumbled into the advice columnist role. While working as the chief of staff at a nonprofit, I kept seeing people make mistakes that I thought were avoidable and that often stemmed from just not quite understanding how most managers think. I figured I’d start a blog, give some advice for a few months on things like bad bosses and office lunch etiquette, and then get it out of my system.

That was 10 years ago. Now Ask a Manager gets 2.4 million visits a month, and I receive more than 50 questions a day. I’ve tackled scenarios like vengeance for stolen lunch, a woman who cast curses on her co-workers, and the employee who made her co-workers call her boyfriend “master.” The more advice I’ve given, the deeper appreciation I have for what advice columns can do — there’s a real hunger out there for nuanced advice for all the weird situations life throws at us.

And I still love reading other advice columns, so I was excited when I stumbled across the work of Elyse Vigiletti, a print culture researcher with a side interest in advice columns. Elyse approached me as a regular reader of Ask a Manager, and when she’s not writing about America’s first lesbian publications or researching the history of bourgeois protest in popular mid-20th-century novels, she tracks patterns in the history of advice columns as a hobby.

I sat down for a chat with Elyse. Here’s our conversation:

So we’re both interested in the cultural role of advice columns, and advice columns in general. Where should we start? History?

To talk about the full history of advice columns themselves would take us back to the 17th century. In fact, here’s a really fun piece from the Atlantic a few years ago about the kinds of questions readers of the Athenian were sending in in 1690! Advice column format has been remarkably stable over the last 300 years — readers send in questions and columnists respond, with direct instructions, with straightforward answers to questions, or by using the question as launch point for a philosophical treatise.

I love that Atlantic article. Some of those questions remind me of some of the weirder, completely non-work-related ones I’ve received. One person emailed me with a question about keeping chickens. (I had no answer.) But go on.

Every database I’ve consulted so far shows a significant curve up in “advice columns” after 1900, particularly in the US. And I do think there’s something uniquely 20th-century about the 21st-century advice column renaissance’s blend of self-help, humor, and tastemaking.

The early-20th-century spike in literacy and the growing middle class created an opportunity for a wider print audience, but in order to be tapped, its tastes had to be cultivated. In other words, if editors and publishers wanted to maximize the potential of the growing market, they needed to train their new consumers to want what they were selling.

The notion of upward mobility became a driving force: Almost all magazines included regular book recommendation features that gave tips for choosing the “best” books; Emily Post’s etiquette columns and books blew up; people went nuts for self-improvement books, cookbooks, and parenting books (and puzzle books, interestingly). Academic fields like psychology and sociology started bleeding more into pop culture as people warmed to the idea that it was possible to be a learned expert in interpersonal relationships — and that this expertise was directly applicable to all of our daily lives.

I think we might be having a similar moment now. Mass culture’s internet literacy is at an all-time high, now that the internet has been around awhile. We as a mass audience are well-trained to crowdsource our problems among strangers, to strive to put our best selves out into the world. Dashing off a letter to an advice columnist is as easy as dashing off a tweet or email to our boss, and sharing their responses is as easy and cathartic as sharing an inspirational quote on a stock photo sunset background.

And because it’s less necessary for advice columns to respond to the more straightforward stuff that can be easily Googled (to the point where LMGTFY is an actual website), they skew more heavily toward the philosophical, developing their own subgenres and vocabularies — they’re not just for old people or housewives anymore. There’s an old joke that the first thing people did with the internet was try to find naked people on it. I think the advice column boom might suggest that was also the second thing people did, but more figuratively.

I agree that advice columns are having a moment right now. And I think a lot of the coverage of Heather Havrilesky’s new book — How to be a Person in the World, based on her advice column for New York magazine — earlier this year might have driven the point home. That coverage focused on how Ask Polly helped to transition advice columns away from prim and proper and toward searching essays about life and meaning.

Havrilesky is a great case study too, since she is regularly far more personal/autobiographical than most of you and takes the longer-form writing I mentioned before to the greatest extreme. I think you’re right that her book tour is partially responsible for the current trendiness of advice columns. What’s “having a moment” in print culture is rarely, maybe never, organic — in other words, part of the reason why they’re “having a moment” is because somebody started saying they were having one.

Didn’t even Molly Ringwald have an advice column for a little while?

Advice columns are, at their core, aspirational. People just implicitly trust Molly Ringwald’s judgment about their lives and life in general, because who wouldn’t want to be more like Molly Ringwald?

The advice columnist–reader relationship is strange. I can’t think of any other longform medium that centers reader engagement in the same way, but that aspect doesn’t seem to break down the reader-writer barrier or make it more democratic so much as add more layers to it: You have the columnist on one side and this Venn diagram of readers and letter writers on the other. It’s an intimate, personal conversation for a large, remarkably loyal, yet invisible audience in which one party is simultaneously a participant, moderator, and expert consultant in the discussion.

Yes! The advice columnist–reader relationship confers a strange authority on the columnist, and in most cases, from what I can tell, the columnists just sort of claimed that authority for themselves and readers accepted it. None of the advice columnists I can think of have what we traditionally would think of as advice-giving credentials. Carolyn Hax’s bio even makes a point of describing her credentials as “five years as a copy editor and news editor in Style and none as a therapist” — it’s more about building a track record of common sense with readers.

You’ve mentioned before that you just sorta started your advice blog one day, and people just sorta started writing in to it, without you having to do much to solicit letters. This is actually a pretty common narrative — there’s no advice columnist certification, and few spend any time trying to convince anybody of their qualifications to give out advice, but readers don’t seem to need it. What do you think made people trust you?

Oof, it’s a good question. I actually really struggled with wondering that for a lot of years, and sometimes still do. I mean, I am far from a perfect manager or a perfect colleague. But I think people respond to straightforward talk and the fact that I hopefully sound like a real person, and that I explain my reasoning.

I’ve noticed that a lot of career advice doesn’t explain the logic behind the advice being offered, and I think doing that probably builds some credibility. I also like to acknowledge when I don’t know something or when I get something wrong, and I’m sure that helps.

Can we talk more about Carolyn Hax, my religious leader?

Hax lines right up with Ann Landers and Dear Abby. Americans like their advice columnists to be no-nonsense white ladies who champion personal responsibility and tolerance of others’ differences. But she was one of the first to be marketed specifically to a younger audience and to embrace the longer-form philosophical style that I mentioned above.

She answered fewer letters per column and treats questions like “how do I get my husband to do chores?” as questions about the meaning of life and the point of relationships — which, in a way, they are. She’s developed a glossary of terms and themes — boundaries like “wow,” “you can’t other change people,” “don’t negotiate with abusers,” “be honest with yourself and others” — that crop up in y’all’s columns.

I would need to do a lot more research about these subjects, but these are the theories I’ve developed based on my preliminary reading.

Yeah, when Carolyn Hax started out, it was marketed as an advice column for younger people. In fact, her tagline used to be “advice for the under-30 crowd.” That was dropped at some point, when they started pitching her as more all-purpose.

One other fascinating Carolyn Hax thing — years and years ago, there was a mini scandal when the Washington Post gossip column reported that she was divorcing her husband and was pregnant with twins with someone else. It was a weird position for an advice columnist to be in — suddenly people were scrutinizing her personal life, and I think she felt like she had to do something in response.

She did something that in retrospect I think was really smart — she devoted an entire one of her online chats to tell people what was up and answer their questions about it. It wasn’t really anyone’s business, but I think she must have felt like in order to credibly advise people on their own love lives, she needed some degree of transparency about her own situation. It’s always stuck with me, both as an example of a well-handled situation and as an illustration of just how weird advice-columning can be when it intersects with your own life.

Do you interact with other internet advice columnists at all? Do you guys have, like, a secret support group in the dark web?

Not that I know of. It’s possible others are meeting without me? I actually would really love this — there are a bunch of weird things about writing an advice column that I would love to be able to talk with others about.

I want to find out how everyone else manages their mail, and if they have those people who send their phone number and ask for a call instead of a written response “because that will be easier,” and whether they too now struggle with giving unsolicited advice in their personal lives, and oh, so much more. I have traded some emails from time to time with Mallory Ortberg (Dear Prudence), which is always a thrill, but I want an old-timey listserv set up.

Do you deal with much harassment or trolling?

No! This is weird, and I’m always afraid to talk about it in case I jinx it, but no. I can’t figure out why, since I know that so often women writing online deal with tons of crap. It might be that would-be trolls assume workplace advice will be boring and so pass me by.

Correction: An earlier version of this interview incorrectly stated the average number of visits per month to Ask a Manager. It is 2.4 million visits a month.

This interview originally appeared on the Ask a Manager blog.

Alison Green is the author of the popular Ask a Manager blog, which functions as the Dear Abby of the workplace, answering readers’ questions about work issues ranging from how to ask for a raise to what to say when you’re allergic to your co-worker’s perfume. She writes weekly columns for New York magazine and US News & World Report and is the co-author of Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Leader’s Guide to Getting Results.

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