The Head-Turning Questions People Sent Advice Columns Four Decades Ago—and 400 Years Ago

It’s Advice Week! In On Second Thought, we’ll revisit questions from the archives and dig into how much has changed since Slate began giving advice in 1997—and how much hasn’t. Read all stories here.

In December 1997, Slate published its first-ever edition of Dear Prudence, beginning what would be a long tradition of advice columns in the magazine. The column initially advertised itself to readers as a place to “get answers to your questions on morals, manners, and macroeconomic policy.” (That last bit was a nod to Slate’s inaugural Prudence, Herbert Stein, a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.) At the tail end of the ’90s, Slate was carving out its own brand of advice in a world long accustomed to writing to columnists for help with the minutiae of day-to-day struggles and the bigger questions in life.

That history winds back centuries. Scholarship on advice columns tends to point to the 17^th-century London newspaper the Athenian Mercury as one of the first attempts at an advice column that set out to answer a mix of questions, considering everything from current events and weather (“What is the cause of the winds, and whence do they come, and whither do they go?”) to whether a couple could cohabitate before marriage. In the years that followed, this approach proved to have lasting power. An endless font of people were writing to newspapers and magazines with questions about how to fit in, how to navigate love affairs, and how to process the political moments of their time. (Stein, early in Prudence’s days, responded to a reader who sought out his thoughts on President John F. Kennedy’s legacy.)

Each era of advice arrived with its own unique set of quandaries for the columnist, answered in many forms, including iconic, author-driven iterations that come to mind today, like Dear Abby and Savage Love. Slate’s Dear Prudence became a standard-bearer at the magazine in the years after its launch, followed more recently by columns targeted toward specific subjects like parenting (Care and Feeding), sex (How to Do It), and money trouble (Pay Dirt). As we looked back into our own archives and further back still in some revealing pieces we have in store this week, it became clear just how much advice columns serve as time capsules of how people figured out how to live through tumultuous times. That felt particularly useful as we head into 2024.

This week, we’ll be publishing an advice “time capsule” each day, taking a look at what sorts of questions people were sending in to Slate in the ’90s through today. We’ll take a look at U.S. history through the lens of our columns. You’ll learn more about how sex advice has evolved since its initial boom (short answer: quite a lot!). And we’ll host a special event with Slate’s current Dear Prudence, Jenée Desmond-Harris, and other architects of the modern advice column, like Cheryl Strayed, of the once-anonymous Dear Sugar, and Heather Havrilesky, of Ask Polly. Please join us—even I wasn’t quite ready for all the places this exercise took me.

—Paola de Varona, Slate’s advice editor