Latest news with #Dunton
India Today
27-06-2025
- General
- India Today
How the world's first women's magazine sparked a silent revolution in 1693
Imagine London in 1693. Tea in delicate china, horse-drawn carriages rattling down cobblestones -- and on a printer's press, the first-ever magazine created just for was called The Ladies' Mercury, and its debut issue hit the streets on February 27 -- marking the start of a new era in communication and ATHENIAN WHISPERS TO LADIES' PAGESIn the early 1690s, John Dunton and a small team -- known as the Athenian Society -- ran an advice column in The Athenian Mercury, answering questions from readers about all aspects of Woman readers showed particular interest. So Dunton, perhaps sensing a new market, decided to spin off a magazine aimed solely at thus, with no grand fanfare, The Ladies' Mercury quietly debuted in London on February 27, 1693 -- a brief, bright moment in print MAGAZINE THAT SPARKED A DIALOGUEJust four issues were ever printed. Yet in those single-sheet editions, women wrote in -- about courtship, marriage, manners, even personal love queried whether a bride could pretend virginity after premarital intimacy. Another asked if a husband wronged by his wife could ethically take a tone was gentle yet bold -- a mirror to a century of domestic expectations and quiet rebellion. First published copy of The Ladies Mercury advertisementWHY IT MATTED THEN, AND NOWBy speaking directly to women's concerns -- without condescension -- The Ladies' Mercury challenged the notion that women had no public showed publishers, writers, and society that women weren't mere ornament; they were engaged readers with curiosity, fears, and a desire for soared too close to its parent periodical and was retired after just four editions, but the idea had taken root. Soon, publications like The Female Tatler and Female Spectator followed in the 1700s.A SEED PLANTED FOR FEMINISMWhat seems like a little sheet of paper mattered. It represented a crack in the wall between private and public, tradition and women's magazines would dominate literary culture -- and offer platforms for suffrage, education, and later feminism. That spark began with The Ladies' Mercury in a tiny room off Fleet THIS DAY STILL SHINESOver 330 years ago, someone decided women deserved their own column. Not buried in gossip, but welcomed into the civic simple act echoes today -- in blogs, magazines, and conversations we continue to share. The voices of women didn't just whisper. They roared.- Ends
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
What Kind of Questions Did 17th-Century Daters Have?
Not long after my partner and I exchanged our first 'I love you's, I made an embarrassing confession. In the weeks leading up to the occasion, I had Googled how long one should wait before declaring their love, and combed through dozens of forums and articles in search of guidance. With relief, my partner blurted out: 'I did the same thing!' I imagined us both whispering our mutual question into the search bar, seeking a faceless chorus of counsel. We were far from the first to anonymously seek romantic prescriptions from strangers. In 1694, a lovelorn inquirer wrote to The Athenian Mercury, a periodical published by the English printer John Dunton, with a question not unlike mine: 'A lady who is in love desires to know how she may decently convince the other person of her passion?' The response she received from the paper's team of experts—that is, Dunton and his two brothers-in-law, under the guise of the 'Athenian Society'—was surprisingly sympathetic: 'Indeed, Madam, it's a ticklish point,' they replied, 'and you should know a man well before you try anything … To be plain with you, we find men to be an ungrateful sort of animal in such cases … But the best way will be to do it as decently as you can.' The Athenian Mercury, which consisted entirely of questions and answers, ran for six years starting in 1691 and received thousands of inquiries, many of them attempts at sussing out the tacit rules of dating and romance. As the historian Mary Beth Norton writes in the introduction to her delightful new book, 'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,' which collects and comments on a wide array of Q&As from the paper, many questioners invoked dilemmas that still vex people today: how to manage unrequited affections; how to extract oneself from a regrettable entanglement; how to recover from being 'slighted,' or ghosted, by your beloved. (Though not all are so relatable: One woman wrote in 1693 that she 'had the misfortune to have a young gentleman fall in love with me to such a degree that he became distracted and died.') Dispensing relationship advice was far from Dunton's mind when he launched the paper, which he referred to as 'the question project.' About half a century before Diderot's Encyclopédie, and three centuries before the invention of Google, Dunton intended to cater to the learned male patrons of London's new coffeehouses, who sought to educate themselves on subjects including science, medicine, and law. Readers sent in many such questions ('What is a star?' 'What causes smallpox?' 'Dancing, is it lawful?'), but the format naturally appealed to the perennial, very human confusion about how to navigate sex, love, and marriage. Soon enough, Dunton and his co-editors were flooded with queries such as 'How shall a man know when a lady loves him?' and 'Who are wisest, those that marry for love or for convenience?' [Read: Love is magic—and also hormones] Although both men and women wrote to The Athenian Mercury for romantic advice, Norton notes, Dunton tended to group questions about personal relationships under 'ladies issues.' More than 300 years later, relationship-advice columns are still often dismissed as frothy features of women's magazines. But throughout their long history, they have evolved in complicated ways, reflecting the winding path of gender politics—even as they have remained true to a single constant: Love is confusing and hard. Two of the most popular advice columns of the 20th century—Elizabeth Gilmer's 'Dorothy Dix Talks,' which ran from 1896 to 1950, and Elsie Robinson's 'Cry on Geraldine's Shoulder,' which doled out answers from 1920 to 1961—were informed by their authors' own experiences in unhappy marriages, as well as their relatively progressive views of women's rights. Their widely syndicated columns had major influence. In Asking for a Friend, Jessica Weisberg argues that Dix wielded outsize power over romantic norms. Weisberg cites a 1929 study on cultural mores in Muncie, Indiana, which found that Dix's column helped dictate townspeople's ideas about marriage—among them the notion that a wife should be more than 'a domestic drudge.' Robinson, for her part, advocated explicitly for gender equality. 'I'm tired of hearing the differences of men and women emphasized and exploited,' she wrote in 1922. 'It has built a wicked wall between the sexes and it's time we knocked it down.' According to Listen, World!, Julie Scheeres and Allison Gilbert's book about the columnist, Robinson recognized that women were often made to feel frivolous and isolated; she offered them a much needed sense of affirmation. 'Is your husband or your complexion growing dull?' she wrote in her announcement for 'Cry on Geraldine's Shoulder.' 'Let us then discuss the value of soft soap on complexions—and husbands … We shall sit together on the edge of the world. You have wanted a friend. I'M IT.' But advice columns have not always been sources of validation and solidarity. Despite her relatively liberal leanings, Dix was also 'a stern foe of sexual irregularity among her readership,' per a 1936 profile in Time magazine. As for the advisers behind The Athenian Mercury, they shared what Norton calls 'a broadly based Protestant outlook' and often frowned on what they deemed sexual misbehavior, including homosexual relationships and premarital sex. Some of the more insidious romantic-advice columns in the U.S. flourished after World War II, with the aim of disciplining women dissatisfied by marriage, who were beginning to articulate 'the problem that has no name' years before The Feminine Mystique. In No Fault, her memoir about divorce, Haley Mlotek discusses the history of such columns, including 'Can This Marriage Be Saved?,' which ran in Ladies' Home Journal from 1953 to 2014. In the early decades of the column, the answer to the titular question was nearly always yes, no matter how severe the wife's grievance. (The first columnist behind it, Paul Popenoe, was a known eugenicist whose zeal for marriage stemmed from a desire to propagate the 'fit'—that is, middle-class, able-bodied white people.) When a feminist collective staged a sit-in at the magazine's offices in 1970 demanding to edit a 'liberated' issue of the Journal, it decided to rename 'Can This Marriage Be Saved?' to 'Should This Marriage Be Saved?' (One member reportedly suggested that they simply shorten it to the more declarative 'Can This Marriage.') [Read: A divorce memoir with no lessons] Indeed, over the past century, many romantic-advice columns have functioned as one tentacle of what the scholar Jane Ward calls the 'heterosexual-repair industry,' which peddles advice based on the irreconcilable differences between straight men and women. 'Marriage experts recognized men's disinterest and violence toward women, and women's resentment and fear of men, as fundamental obstacles for straight relationships,' Ward writes in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. As a result, Ward argues, early advice givers were more interested in perpetuating heterosexual unions—that is, framing men and women's mutual illegibility as natural—than in trying to improve gender relations. Notably, centuries earlier, the Athenian Society had urged women to be more skeptical of men—'the inconstancy, levity, and prejudices of our own sex being so very notorious'—rather than simply accept their faults. Today, the lovelorn more frequently eschew the authority of columnists in favor of crowdsourced advice. (I, for one, consulted a Quora forum as well as a number of magazine articles to answer my question.) As a result, relationship guidance has become more democratic but also more diffuse. On the subreddit r/relationship_advice, which has 16 million members, single posts can draw hundreds of responses, many of them conflicting. The greater autonomy people have today to make their own romantic decisions can feel simultaneously empowering and confusing. What's more, many people are dogged by the suspicion that they're living through the nadir of heterosexual love, which appears to be buckling under various pressures: Many men are falling behind educationally and economically, and, for some people, the logic of optimization has made dating feel like a chore. Where, internet denizens wonder, have all the 'real lovers' gone? But reading 'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer' confirms that even when the norms of courtship and marriage were far more codified, and options in love and life were far more limited, dating was still an anxiety-riddled endeavor. 'There are indeed so many equivocations in love that it's much easier to be in the wrong than in the right,' the Athenian Society wrote to a reader who asked how a woman can tell whether a man is courting her 'for marriage or for diversion.' There was no code to crack, no hack to deploy. Romance is, after all, the ultimate test of one's judgment—which is why we so often outsource that deliberative labor and defer to the advice of others. But, as the Athenian Society told an inquirer in 1692, one thing remains as certain as ever: 'If you're a true lover, you can't despair at a little hardship.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
07-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
The Surprising History of Romantic Advice
Not long after my partner and I exchanged our first 'I love you's, I made an embarrassing confession. In the weeks leading up to the occasion, I had Googled how long one should wait before declaring their love, and combed through dozens of forums and articles in search of guidance. With relief, my partner blurted out: 'I did the same thing!' I imagined us both whispering our mutual question into the search bar, seeking a faceless chorus of counsel. We were far from the first to anonymously seek romantic prescriptions from strangers. In 1694, a lovelorn inquirer wrote to The Athenian Mercury, a periodical published by the English printer John Dunton, with a question not unlike mine: 'A lady who is in love desires to know how she may decently convince the other person of her passion?' The response she received from the paper's team of experts—that is, Dunton and his two brothers-in-law, under the guise of the 'Athenian Society'—was surprisingly sympathetic: 'Indeed, Madam, it's a ticklish point,' they replied, 'and you should know a man well before you try anything … To be plain with you, we find men to be an ungrateful sort of animal in such cases … But the best way will be to do it as decently as you can.' The Athenian Mercury, which consisted entirely of questions and answers, ran for six years starting in 1691 and received thousands of inquiries, many of them attempts at sussing out the tacit rules of dating and romance. As the historian Mary Beth Norton writes in the introduction to her delightful new book, 'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,' which collects and comments on a wide array of Q&As from the paper, many questioners invoked dilemmas that still vex people today: how to manage unrequited affections; how to extract oneself from a regrettable entanglement; how to recover from being 'slighted,' or ghosted, by your beloved. (Though not all are so relatable: One woman wrote in 1693 that she 'had the misfortune to have a young gentleman fall in love with me to such a degree that he became distracted and died.') Dispensing relationship advice was far from Dunton's mind when he launched the paper, which he referred to as 'the question project.' About half a century before Diderot's Encyclopédie, and three centuries before the invention of Google, Dunton intended to cater to the learned male patrons of London's new coffeehouses, who sought to educate themselves on subjects including science, medicine, and law. Readers sent in many such questions ('What is a star?' 'What causes smallpox?' 'Dancing, is it lawful?'), but the format naturally appealed to the perennial, very human confusion about how to navigate sex, love, and marriage. Soon enough, Dunton and his co-editors were flooded with queries such as 'How shall a man know when a lady loves him?' and 'Who are wisest, those that marry for love or for convenience?' Although both men and women wrote to The Athenian Mercury for romantic advice, Norton notes, Dunton tended to group questions about personal relationships under 'ladies issues.' More than 300 years later, relationship-advice columns are still often dismissed as frothy features of women's magazines. But throughout their long history, they have evolved in complicated ways, reflecting the winding path of gender politics—even as they have remained true to a single constant: Love is confusing and hard. Two of the most popular advice columns of the 20th century—Elizabeth Gilmer's 'Dorothy Dix Talks,' which ran from 1896 to 1950, and Elsie Robinson's 'Cry on Geraldine's Shoulder,' which doled out answers from 1920 to 1961—were informed by their authors' own experiences in unhappy marriages, as well as their relatively progressive views of women's rights. Their widely syndicated columns had major influence. In Asking for a Friend, Jessica Weisberg argues that Dix wielded outsize power over romantic norms. Weisberg cites a 1929 study on cultural mores in Muncie, Indiana, which found that Dix's column helped dictate townspeople's ideas about marriage—among them the notion that a wife should be more than 'a domestic drudge.' Robinson, for her part, advocated explicitly for gender equality. 'I'm tired of hearing the differences of men and women emphasized and exploited,' she wrote in 1922. 'It has built a wicked wall between the sexes and it's time we knocked it down.' According to Listen, World!, Julie Scheeres and Allison Gilbert's book about the columnist, Robinson recognized that women were often made to feel frivolous and isolated; she offered them a much needed sense of affirmation. 'Is your husband or your complexion growing dull?' she wrote in her announcement for 'Cry on Geraldine's Shoulder.' 'Let us then discuss the value of soft soap on complexions—and husbands … We shall sit together on the edge of the world. You have wanted a friend. I'M IT.' But advice columns have not always been sources of validation and solidarity. Despite her relatively liberal leanings, Dix was also 'a stern foe of sexual irregularity among her readership,' per a 1936 profile in Time magazine. As for the advisers behind The Athenian Mercury, they shared what Norton calls 'a broadly based Protestant outlook' and often frowned on what they deemed sexual misbehavior, including homosexual relationships and premarital sex. Some of the more insidious romantic-advice columns in the U.S. flourished after World War II, with the aim of disciplining women dissatisfied by marriage, who were beginning to articulate 'the problem that has no name' years before The Feminine Mystique. In No Fault, her memoir about divorce, Haley Mlotek discusses the history of such columns, including 'Can This Marriage Be Saved?,' which ran in Ladies' Home Journal from 1953 to 2014. In the early decades of the column, the answer to the titular question was nearly always yes, no matter how severe the wife's grievance. (The first columnist behind it, Paul Popenoe, was a known eugenicist whose zeal for marriage stemmed from a desire to propagate the 'fit'—that is, middle-class, able-bodied white people.) When a feminist collective staged a sit-in at the magazine's offices in 1970 demanding to edit a 'liberated' issue of the Journal, it decided to rename 'Can This Marriage Be Saved?' to 'Should This Marriage Be Saved?' (One member reportedly suggested that they simply shorten it to the more declarative 'Can This Marriage.') Indeed, over the past century, many romantic-advice columns have functioned as one tentacle of what the scholar Jane Ward calls the 'heterosexual-repair industry,' which peddles advice based on the irreconcilable differences between straight men and women. 'Marriage experts recognized men's disinterest and violence toward women, and women's resentment and fear of men, as fundamental obstacles for straight relationships,' Ward writes in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality. As a result, Ward argues, early advice givers were more interested in perpetuating heterosexual unions—that is, framing men and women's mutual illegibility as natural—than in trying to improve gender relations. Notably, centuries earlier, the Athenian Society had urged women to be more skeptical of men—'the inconstancy, levity, and prejudices of our own sex being so very notorious'—rather than simply accept their faults. Today, the lovelorn more frequently eschew the authority of columnists in favor of crowdsourced advice. (I, for one, consulted a Quora forum as well as a number of magazine articles to answer my question.) As a result, relationship guidance has become more democratic but also more diffuse. On the subreddit r/relationship_advice, which has 16 million members, single posts can draw hundreds of responses, many of them conflicting. The greater autonomy people have today to make their own romantic decisions can feel simultaneously empowering and confusing. What's more, many people are dogged by the suspicion that they're living through the nadir of heterosexual love, which appears to be buckling under various pressures: Many men are falling behind educationally and economically, and, for some people, the logic of optimization has made dating feel like a chore. Where, internet denizens wonder, have all the 'real lovers' gone? But reading ' I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer' confirms that even when the norms of courtship and marriage were far more codified, and options in love and life were far more limited, dating was still an anxiety-riddled endeavor. 'There are indeed so many equivocations in love that it's much easier to be in the wrong than in the right,' the Athenian Society wrote to a reader who asked how a woman can tell whether a man is courting her 'for marriage or for diversion.' There was no code to crack, no hack to deploy. Romance is, after all, the ultimate test of one's judgment—which is why we so often outsource that deliberative labor and defer to the advice of others. But, as the Athenian Society told an inquirer in 1692, one thing remains as certain as ever: 'If you're a true lover, you can't despair at a little hardship.'
Wall Street Journal
01-05-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘'I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer'' Review: Instruction Fit to Print
One of the lessons of ''I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,'' Mary Beth Norton's delightful compendium of 17th-century advice to the lovelorn, is a sobering one to us today: Things that we think are binary and absolute have, historically, often been neither. Take marriage. Today you are either married or you are not. Those are the only possibilities. Yet for much of European history, until well into the 18th century in many places, being a little-bit married was routine. Marriage, under this conception, wasn't a one-time event. It was a process. There were usually four stages, all of them irreversible. First, a couple made a formal vow or commitment to each other to marry. Then came a public agreement and exchanging of tokens—typically a ring or a split coin. Then there was the ceremony and, finally, the consummation, or sexual congress. Because of this staggered process, it was possible to be in a marriage but not fully married. A 17th-century couple could, for instance, have made vows but skipped the religious ceremony, in which case their marriage would be legally considered 'valid but not legitimate.' If vows had been exchanged but parental consent withheld, the couple was in the awkward position of being neither married nor permitted to marry anyone else. Ever. Into this odd (to us) situation entered the genre now called advice-writing, the earliest example of which was found in the Athenian Gazette, or Casuistical Mercury, more commonly known as the Athenian Mercury. In ''I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer,'' Ms. Norton, a professor emerita of American history at Cornell University, brilliantly selects the most compelling—or bizarre—examples from this broadsheet, which John Dunton, a London printer, started in 1691. Dunton designed the paper to appeal to the customers of coffee shops, novel establishments where men met to sip that 'newfangled drink,' smoke and gossip. With two friends—including Samuel Wesley, the father of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism—Dunton dreamed up 'the question project': Readers could anonymously write in with questions on any topic, and answers would be provided in subsequent editions. The first call for questions evoked such a huge mailbag that the weekly broadsheet quickly began to appear twice a week.
USA Today
26-04-2025
- General
- USA Today
Ranch dog named 'Buford' honored for 'vital role' in saving missing toddler in Arizona
Ranch dog named 'Buford' honored for 'vital role' in saving missing toddler in Arizona The 2-year-old was missing for about 16 hours before appearing with Buford in his owner's driveway. Show Caption Hide Caption Ranch dog rescues missing child in dangerous terrain of Arizona A missing 2-year-old child is miraculously found after spending the night in the rough terrain of Seligman, Arizona all thanks to a courageous ranch dog. Buford, a rancher's dog in Arizona credited with helping protect and rescue a toddler who went missing in Arizona last week, is basking in glory as a hero. The 6-year-old Great Pyrenees/Anatolian mix received an "Honorary Search and Rescue Certificate" and a vest by the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office on April 22 for being a "source of comfort to the family and community," and playing "a vital role in representing the spirit of keeping our community safe," the law enforcement agency said in a post on Facebook. "Buford's vigilance and protective instincts, combined with Scottie Dunton's swift response, ensured Bodin's safe return to his family," Buford's certificate reads, according to the Arizona Republic, part of the USA TODAY Network. "Your actions exemplify the highest standards of community service and canine heroism." Not only that, but Buford is also being showered with gifts from strangers for protecting the 2-year-old boy and leading him to safety, his owner, Scotty Dunton, told KPNX. "Toys, chew toys, snacks, you name it, just a little bit of everything," Dunton said, adding he has also been receiving messages for Buford from across the world. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. Buford the dog meets 2-year-old Bodin Allen, lost boy he led to safety Buford the dog is credited with guiding 2-year-old Bodin Allen to safety after the boy wandered from home on April 14, 2025. Yavapai County Sheriff's Office 'I can't believe that kid made it that far' The 2-year-old, identified as Bodin Allen by the Arizona Republic, was reported missing on April 14. The toddler had wandered away from his home in Seligman, Arizona, about 180 miles southeast of Las Vegas, and into rough terrain, according to the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office. A search and rescue party consisting of 40 members was put together to look for the toddler, and he was found after approximately 16 hours with Buford in the rancher's driveway, about seven miles away from his home. Dunton, at the time, had said he spotted the toddler just as he was headed to town. "When I was driving out the driveway, I noticed my dog was sitting down by the entrance," Dunton, who owns Dunton Ranch in Kingman, had said. "I look up and the little kid's standing there with my dog." "I can't believe that kid made it that far," he added. Dunton's wife, Dawn, told USA TODAY over email that she wasn't home at the time of the rescue, but the "child was in fairly good condition all things considered." "He was crying but Scotty was able to comfort him. His little face was all dirty and of course he was hungry and thirsty," Dawn said. "He is doing well now after some much needed rest in the safety of his home." How did the toddler go missing? Bodin's mother, Sarah Allen, told the Arizona Republic, she was tending to their 1-year-old child when the toddler wandered off in the afternoon of April 14, adding it was not unusual for Bodin to go outdoors and play in the dirt. A few minutes later when she went outside to look for her child, she couldn't find him anywhere. "My instinct was maybe he got trafficked or something," Bodin's father, Corey Allen, told the Arizona Republic. "And he could be states away. Who knows what's going on? And that feeling just kept intensifying by the minute." Over the next few hours, which Corey described as "the weakest moment of our lives," search and rescue officials looked for the toddler far and wide. "I feel like I'm about to be ended as a person," Corey told the Arizona Republic. "I'm trying to hold my son in my arms, and he's not there." Arizona Republic reporter speaks with rescued boy, parents Arizona Republic reporter Caitlin McGlade speaks with rescued boy Bodin Allen and his parents, Sarah and Corey Allen. Bodin, meanwhile, dressed only in pajama bottoms, a tank top, and sneakers, was wandering under the full moon, somewhere in the seven miles between the Allen property and a ranch guarded by the 150-pound dog Buford. Around 8 a.m. the next morning, as Scotty was getting ready to go into town, he saw Buford coming down the fence line with a little blond boy and alerted the family. "I've just had the most emotional meltdown. I've never cried that hard," Corey said, describing the moment before he found out his son was found. Sarah said their son was completely unfazed by the incident and "acted like nothing even happened." The Yavapai County Sheriff's Office also celebrated Bodin by giving him "a challenge coin" to acknowledge "their courageous spirit and commitment to helping others." Buford loves kids Dunton said he believes the toddler reached the ranch by following a road right next to a power line before Buford found the boy. Buford "loves kids, so I can imagine he wouldn't leave him when he found him," Dunton said. "We chose him from the litter because of his chill demeanor," Dawn said, adding that Buford is a livestock guardian breed, and it is their nature to roam and protect. "Buford has always been a natural babysitter, whether it be with baby animals or with children," Dawn added. Contributing: Julia Gomez, USA TODAY / Caitlin McGlade, Arizona Republic Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at sshafiq@ and follow her on X and Instagram @saman_shafiq7.
