Gypsy Creams
Why Do People Hurt Each Other So?
Woman / 25 December 1965
Aha! A problem page! Although Evelyn Home was compassionate by the standards of the famous Mary Marryat, the advice here is both bad by its own standards, and, understandably, compromised by her inability to discuss homosexuality frankly, which wouldn’t be legalised between men for a further two years.
Although I can understand her urging to the writer of the featured letter to ‘forget’ her friend (a sexless affair, it seems), there was really nothing stopping him getting in touch to tell her what was happening, apart from, I suspect, a childish inability to deal with both his and her emotions. But of course, there wouldn’t have been the counselling services to help her deal with her understandable sadness, and so Evelyn could do nothing but urge her to push her feelings away, leading this poor woman to run the risk of becoming divorced from them entirely. What a sad situation.
Evelyn does redeem herself when advising a woman failing to cope with the idea of having a son-in-law with a different skin colour to her, and giving a woman who has developed a crush outside marriage permission to recognise her own sexuality. However, there’s an awful lot of avoidance here, and I recognise this attitude in older members of my family. I’m relieved that we can be franker about sex and more open to recommend talking about problems nowadays.
Tags: 1960s, dodgy advice, Evelyn Home, problem page
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