He had some pretty interesting advice for women.
[F]or a little over a year between 1957 and 1958, [Ebony magazine] published a [Martin Luther] King-penned series called “Advice for Living.” At the time, King was just starting to come to international prominence: In February 1957, he made his first appearance on the cover of Time, thanks to his leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott. He had already appeared in Ebony numerous times when the magazine’s editors, inspired — and overwhelmed — by the volume of mail addressed to King, asked him to pen an advice column. “Let the man that led the Montgomery boycott lead you into happier living,” read an advertisement in Ebony’s sister publication, Jet.
[...]
“Advice for Living” was ... remarkable in terms of its content. King did not purport to have all the answers, and, for the most part, avoided making blanket condemnations, perhaps because of the dualities and hypocrisies in his own life. In response to one reader, a preacher’s wife concerned by the amount of female attention bestowed upon her husband, King said, “Almost every minister has the problem of confronting women in his congregation whose interests are not entirely spiritual ... but if he carries himself in a manner representative of the highest mandates of Christian living, his very person will discourage their approaches.”
“Remember, this was an era when a common joke was that any upstanding preacher negotiated with the deacon board for a salary, parsonage and pick of the choir,” says Taylor Branch, author of the prize-winning trilogy “America in the King Years.” “But he couldn’t talk about that, because he was trying to make his name known and establish a record of wholesome conservative values for the civil rights movement.”
[...]
King’s response to a cheated-on wife was to suggest that she “study” her rival to learn what her husband wanted in a woman. (“Are you careful with your grooming? Do you nag?” he asked.) He informed an unmarried woman grappling with whether to have sex that “real men still respect purity and virginity” and instructed an abused wife to determine whether there was anything within her personality to justify such treatment. “Are you sure that you have a radiating personality, a pleasant disposition, and that feminine charm which every man admires?” he asked a Miss Lonelyhearts. To a newlywed having troubles with her mother-in-law, he remarked, “There is an expression that no home is big enough to have two women at its head.”
[Washington Post]
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