I went o happy happy day on reading this
Today's ODNB Life of the Day: Marje Proops by Katharine Whitehorn.
I daresay that many of my dr rdrs were in the wrong country to know of or born just a bit too late to recall Dear Marje, so I will copy a few choice bits here, as those links do not last: [T]he editor of Good Taste magazine asked her to write an article on the problems of mothers coping on their own in wartime. A pamphlet on venereal disease for female servicewomen and other commissions followed.
My kinda gal! Sid sez HAI! [A]t the end of the war she joined the Daily Herald as fashion editor, later graduating to woman's editor. And when the existing advice columnist, writing as May Marshall, left, Proops, unable to find a replacement, started answering the letters herself.
So began her career as an ‘agony aunt’, which gave her ‘Dear Marje’ column iconic status in journalism and the country, a role she continued when she moved back to the Woman's Mirror under Hugh Cudlipp in 1954. He had been impressed by the witty, forthright replies of American columnists Abigail van Buren and Ann Landers, and reckoned Marje could emulate them, and more. At first she was alarmed by how little she knew, but her friend the psychiatrist Dr Eustace Chesser let her bring round the letters in his lunch hour and gradually schooled her in their interpretation. She built up over the years not only increasing experience but a vast knowledge of the organizations and agencies where her troubled readers could go for help. She answered, or caused to be answered by her team of trained helpers, every one of the 50,000 letters she received each year; other readers telephoned her, and occasionally she was compelled to take practical action, for example when one girl rang from a call box to say she had taken suicide pills; Marje kept her in conversation for long enough for her staff and the police to locate and rescue her.
Her columns were distinguished from the more conventional and moralistic work of previous advice columnists by their frankness about forbidden areas such as homosexuality, impotence, divorce, and incest; she claimed to be the first person to mention masturbation in a family newspaper. She was compassionate but could be tough with her correspondents: her journalist colleague Felicity Green described her answers as being ‘brutally frank, sexually aware, liberal to the point of illegality’ (private information). Her writing bridged in its fifty years a change in public attitudes from that in which wives wrote about ‘submitting’ to their husbands to one in which, in her own words, ‘questions about orgasms are as common as questions about mothers-in-law’. She and those who followed her were even reproached for having accelerated the process, though she saw herself as struggling against hypocrisy and repression and cruelty.
The influence of a woman working in one of those derided womanly spheres of activity, eh? not just women's magazines, but the advice column.
And thinking about the spreading and diffusive effect of that sphere - well beyond the individuals actually presenting their problems - I was reminded of this which I came across linked from somewhere or other: I Was A Hardcore Conservative: What Changed My Mind and that thing about having arguments not to convince the person you're arguing with but the bystanders. Even if the advisees themselves did not take the very excellent advice offered by Ms Proops, I am sure I am not the only person who has picked up valuable life-lessons from reading those responses.
And, with a bit of a sigh - one of the areas that Marje was very active in getting the word out was contraception, still a bit of a no-no in many women's mags in the 50s and 60s, partly because of not wishing to publish an entirely separate Irish editions - I noted this article, The Swedish physicist revolutionising birth control, which is something of a reprise of 'no duckie, I don't think anything that requires 'complex mathematics and data analysis' to create an algorithm counts as 'natural'.
I also boggle at someone who presents the data that 'I discovered that you can see when you're fertile by your temperature' as, 'for me that was really a revelation.'. Nearly 90 years since the findings of Ogino and Knaus and the development of the rhythm method sez, WOT.
[ETA] And just came across this about the agony column in Just 17: 'Where has this fantastic, empowering advice gone?'. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2642573.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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