“Advice to Little Girls” is a humorous short story written by Mark Twain in 1865 and published in 1867. The story is written in a tongue-in-cheek tone, and the title is meant to be ironic, as its content is not good advice for little girls to take. The piece references fantasies of resolving sibling tensions, such as scalding a younger brother with hot water. Twain’s mock seriousness and absurdities meant that what often starts out as a reasonable suggestion for mutually compatible co-existence ends up as being ludicrous.