Ask Whatever You Wish?

In some of the world's magazines there is a section in which the magazine answers questions addressed to it by its readers.
Here is a sample of a question addressed to Mrs. Roosevelt.

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"I have read about you, how shy you were in your youth; and I know that your figure tends toward tallness, which is a thing that sometimes makes its owner shy. How did you conquer your bashfulness? How can I help my tall daughter to live a happy life and not be ashamed of her size?"

And the answer came on the magazine's pages:

"I think the most effective way for your daughter to overcome her constant feeling of being tall is to practice lessons in dancing and physical exercise, until she can manage the movements of her body with ease and grace. But if her shyness has some other source, I can only advise you to cultivate in her the pleasure of mixing with others; in that way she will forget herself and her bashfulness."

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It is essential to strengthen the relation between the magazine "The Woman's Voice" and its women readers in this simple, frank fashion—not only so that the asker of the question may benefit, but so that others may profit from her experiences and trials. This exchange of thought, by which the magazine would like woman to be a stimulating force in her home, her society, her school, or her club, unifies our habits and manners as a community of advanced ladies, and not as a faction or as individuals.

Woman in the East arrives, sooner or later, at a day when she calls herself "complete," lacking nothing in the way of advice or the lessons of others that come to her directly or indirectly. Is it not so? It is impossible for the modern lady among us to rest easy until she has seen, say, a dress her neighbor has sewn; but it never crosses her mind to ask for the scientific answer to a question with which her little daughter, not yet three years old, surprises her—a daughter who had been watching her mother change her brother's "diaper":

"Why is my brother different from me, Mama?"
The likeliest thing is for the mother to burst out laughing at the big question from the little mouth; or to take refuge behind the screen of a false modesty and scold her because it is "shameful"; or to persist in silence every time the little one presses for an answer—and this is the worst course of all. Here is what her mother answered her, and the judgment of whether it was right or not is yours.

– "Because your brother is a boy and you are a girl."
– After a moment the little one asked her again:
"And you are a girl like me?"
– "Yes."
– "And Papa is a boy like my brother?"
– "Yes."

And in fact the daughter found this a reasonable solution and never came back to that kind of question.

"The Woman's Voice" pledges itself to answer social, moral, health, and scientific questions through specialists in these subjects; and so long as the magazine is confident of the activity of its women readers, it has the hope that they will meet it confidence for confidence.