The Press: Dear Miss Dix

Of all the thousands of troubled women who have turned hopefully to Dorothy Dix, none ever found a happier solution than the first. She was Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, sheltered daughter of a genteel but impoverished Tennessee family, and her problem was how to make a living. At 25, with an ailing husband to support, tiny Mrs. Gilmer was a women's-page slavey on the New Orleans Picayune, where she had started at $5 a week.

Timidly, she went to her managing editor one day in 1896 with a bright idea: a column of advice for...