The Press: So You Want an Answer?

“You are a horridly ill-mannered, thoroughly selfish, slothfully inclined person . . . smugly superior and insufferably condescending. . . . By your own account you come near . . . being a rotter.”

A woman had rashly written a letter to the Washington Post’s corrosive “Mary Haworth” (real name: Elizabeth Young), complaining about having to wash her baby’s diapers. That was how Columnist Haworth let her have it. Post readers ate it up.

Disillusioned, Eh? When a woman wrote a letter telling how she had roped a husband by cajolery and bold pursuit, and now found herself “disillusioned” and “unhappy,” Mary Haworth sizzled: “All things considered, it is quite amazing that your husband has stayed with you this long.”

A wife who asked how to get her husband “more interested in other women, so I will feel free to have men friends” was told: “Get yourself a psychiatrist right away.”

To a “Worried Father” who wrote that his daughter was dating and embracing other men while her husband was over seas, Mary Haworth said: “Your daughter’s performance, I’m sorry to say, is that of a girl who is going to the dogs—at high speed.”

A Navy wife wrote: “My husband . . . wants a child. I do not. … I don’t want to drag around alone during those miserable nine months. . . . Am I just a selfish female?” Mary called the writer “harebrained,” said: “My immediate reaction . . . is a blend of nausea and dismay.”

Last week a woman asked Columnist Haworth for advice on how to keep her errant husband home. Among other things, she was told: “Your husband’s encroaching predilection for ganging up with a stag party to loaf his nights away in cocktail lounges, buying drinks for bevies of uniformed women … is spendthrift carousing.”

Stinkers Are Stinkers. Slender, well-tailored, attractive Mary Haworth (pronounced Hay’worth) has been doling out reprimands, advice and praise to the Post’s sentimental readers for more than nine years. Mostly because she is not averse to calling a stinker a stinker, her “Mary Haworth’s Mail” is one of the most widely read columns in the Washington area. Lord Lothian, late British ambassador to the U.S., once told Post Publisher Eugene Meyer that after the front-page news and the editorials he always turned to Mary Haworth.

Mary Haworth has savvy, writes wrathfully and well; her column answers serious questions (not all about sex problems) painstakingly, often falling back on dictionary definitions of misused words: “love” — “tender and passionate affection.”

Screens for Secrecy. Columnist Haworth, now in her 30s, reported for the Wilmington News-Journal in her native Ohio, then solicited ads for the Ohio State-Journal at Columbus. In 1930 she quit, married, went to Washington to live. She joined the Post in 1933, when her second child was still a baby, and after her marriage had gone on the rocks. She later got a divorce (in her column she calls divorce “social surgery” and “a desperate remedy for . . . sick relationship”).

In the Post’s dingy third-floor offices, she works in a nook fenced off by burlap screens. At first mail was skimpy and other Post employes wrote letters on order, for her to answer. Now she gets anywhere from ten to 100-odd letters a day, from readers willing to risk a furious answer to get their problems (anonymously) into print.