As the forerunner of today's popular advice columnists, Dix was America's highest paid and most widely read female journalist at the time of her death.

[5] Her journalism career began after her neighbor Eliza Nicholson, the owner of the New Orleans newspaper Daily Picayune,[6] saw her work and offered her a job as a reporter.

[7] As was customary for many female journalists at the time, who believed that their work had the potential to cause embarrassment or poor social standing, she chose to write under a pseudonym.

At its peak in 1940, Dix was receiving 100,000 letters a year and her estimated reading audience was about 60 million in countries including United States, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South America, China, and Canada.

She earned her national reputation under the term of sob sister during the 15 years she worked for William Randolph Hearst's New York Evening Journal as its leading crime reporter, concentrating mostly on murders and trials.

[13] In this case, a socially prominent clergyman, Edward Hall, was found deceased with the body of Eleanor Mills, a singer in the choir and wife of the church janitor.

"Women who are toiling over cooking-stoves, slaving at sewing-machines, pinching and economizing to educate and cultivate their children.... the Ordinary Woman is the real heroine of life," she wrote.

[17] Years later, Dix again spoke to attendees at the National American Suffrage Convention held April 14, 1910, in Washington, D.C. She delivered her address, "The Real Reason Why Women Cannot Vote," by imitating the dialect of the African-American character featured in her "Mirandy" novels.

She wrote a circular for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) outlining the social, political and economic reasons why women should be granted the right to vote.

[25] A Providence, Rhode Island, newspaper reporter said at a trial, "For years no great American murder-trial looked complete until Dorothy Dix took her place at the press table.