ABSTRACT
‘Naomi’s Advice’, a column in a Norfolk, Virginia, African-American newspaper in the 1940s, shows the clash between two tendencies in the history of emotions – the promotion of emotional intimacy in love-based modern marriage, which strengthened women’s position, and the rise of the ‘cool’ emotional style as a feature of modern urban America, which privileged men. Women advice seekers protested men’s drinking and neglect and wanted more affection, but Naomi urged them to accommodate men’s needs. Significantly, African-American marital patterns of conflict, fragility and divorce anticipated those that characterized a wider population later in the century.
