Did the Rules of Etiquette Provide a Greater Sense of Safety For Women?

[Paisley]

From Etiquette by Emily Post, 1940 edition, page 210:

"Are Maids Allowed to Receive Men Friends? Certainly they are!....A pretty young woman whose men friends come in occasionally and play cards with the others, or dance to a not too loud phonograph or radio in the kitchen, is merely being treated humanly. The fact that she works and lives in a lady's house makes her no less a young girl, with a young girl's love of amusement, which if not properly provided for her 'at home', will be sought for in other, and quite possibly dangerous, places."

There's a whole chapter called "The Vanished Chaperon" detailing what was and wasn't proper for a young girl: going to a man's apartment for dinner (usually not), sitting with a young man after her parents have gone to bed, taking a journey longer than a day on her own or with a fiance (unless it was in a rail car full of people), giving the gossips anything to talk about, or (in society) living on her own before age 30. Nobody, man or woman, was supposed to get blotto drunk. Times being what they were, Post recommended that girls be trained to eventually deal with situations on their own and to have pride and dignity (she advised girls not to be like the offerings at a free lunch counter).

 

[sheeplady]

Yeah, my own mother taught me how to hold a friend's drink when I was in high school before going off to college. (With your hand entirely over the top of the cup, such that you can only hold your drink and one friend's.)

And my mother wasn't that "with it"... I assume this is something she learned in the very early 60s or late 50s.. with a note that the early 60s were more like the 50s than the late 60s.

 

[vitanola]

Don't you imagine the ones from the 1960s were better, although not as good as the ones from the '50s. You couldn't get washing machines in the 40s.

Well, not during the War, unless you had a Priority, but otherwise washing machines were easily available throughout the he decade.

 

[LizzieMaine]

...or (in society) living on her own before age 30.

Kids today! Sponging off their parents until 30! What's the world coming to!? I bet Mrs. Post just looked daggers at Marjorie "Live Alone And Like It" Hillis whenever they saw each other at Schrafft's.

You can tell, by the way, just how well Society lived up to what was expected up it by paging thru prewar issues of "Life," and observing the capers engaged in by such frisky celebutantes as Cobina Wright Jr. and Brenda Frazier.

 

[Paisley]

I'd have been improper--30 years with my parents would have driven me over the brink.

 

[Fading Fast]

I've been thinking about this thread recently as it is clear that the old rules of etiquette were only surface deep - heck, from my dad and grandmother, I learned that pre- and extra-maritial sex, drugs (and drug abuse), drinking (binge drinking and alcoholism) and worse were all going on in the Golden Era (they weren't into "protecting" me from reality at all) - and, today, society abhors hypocrisy and just puts it all out there with no real rules other than to "be real."

So what do people here think, is it better to have standards (rules of etiquette) that society puts out there that (on its best days) some strive to live up to or is it better to let it all hang out there and, basically, say "this is the human condition" acknowledge and accept it?

The reason I ask is I wonder if having some standards - I'm not talking about which fork to use (I couldn't care less - although, basic table manners are nice), but, say, the view that binge drinking or promiscuous sex is not something to laugh off or dressing nicely at a funeral, not to show off (that's too stupid for words), but to show respect and reflect the solemnity of the event - does improve human behavior and the state of our society?

In case you're wondering what I think, I used to think they do help - i.e., having a standard and striving for it even if you fall short is better than not trying at all - but now I don't know. Were all those rules just a stupid surface code that few followed, some used as a cudgel to hurt others and that forced almost all of us into being hypocrites? Is the crudeness / the crassness of our culture today just a reflection of who we are, so fighting it is ignorant and useless? I ever so slightly and with no confidence feel standards can help, maybe, (again, not persnickety "show-off" rules), but believe people should be free to make their own choices and that mass hypocrisy is ridiculous - so I simply don't have a strong opinion.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I don't think a "code of rules" is necessary so much as simple common sense: drinking until you puke in the gutter is idiotic. Why would you want to do that? What benefit is there in making yourself violently sick?

Another point to consider -- there are a lot of people abroad in the world with a "Rules Are Made To Be Broken" mindset. Many will do stupid, provocative things just because they're not supposed to, because they think they're Sticking It To The Man when they fight for their right to party, etc. But who do they think is selling them the booze and the dope and the condoms? The Man is laughing all the way to the bank over people like this.

Frankly, the only "social rule" that I think we need is a simple one. Don't be an idiot. You're not some isolated individual specimen whose actions affect no one but yourself, you're a part of human society whether you like it or not. Somebody's got to clean up your puke. Every single thing you do every single day of your life directly affects someone else. So have some common sense and don't be an idiot.

 

[Fading Fast]

I don't think a "code of rules" is necessary so much as simple common sense: drinking until you puke in the gutter is idiotic. Why would you want to do that? What benefit is there in making yourself violently sick?

Another point to consider -- there are a lot of people abroad in the world with a "Rules Are Made To Be Broken" mindset. Many will do stupid, provocative things just because they're not supposed to, because they think they're Sticking It To The Man when they fight for their right to party, etc. But who do they think is selling them the booze and the dope and the condoms? The Man is laughing all the way to the bank over people like this.

Frankly, the only "social rule" that I think we need is a simple one. Don't be an idiot. You're not some isolated individual specimen whose actions affect no one but yourself, you're a part of human society whether you like it or not. Somebody's got to clean up your puke. Every single thing you do every single day of your life directly affects someone else. So have some common sense and don't be an idiot.

I agree in theory - in addition to "don't be an idiot" if everyone treated others as they'd like to be treated we'd have most of it covered - but wonder how that gets translated to those who don't naturally think that way? Did the rules evolve (and lose sight of their original purpose) in part, as a societal attempt to help steer those who would do idiotic things or treat others poorly to better behavior?

 

[LizzieMaine]

People come out of the womb with no moral compass whatsoever. An infant is a creature driven by three instincts: to eat, to sleep, and to void. Everything else is imposed on that being by society. So in that sense, in every society there have to be some sort of agreed-upon social standards. The question then becomes "who sets them, and for what purpose?"

I think in the days of simple hunter-gatherer societies rules and taboos evolved for the good of the whole tribe -- everyone knew what was expected of them and everyone was equally bound to do what was expected of them, because the survival of the tribe depended on it. But as soon as society began to evolve in a hierarchical direction, with rulers up top and subjects/slaves down bottom, the rules moved into a hierarchical direction as well -- they were less about ensuring the well-being of all than they were preserving the "order of things" and the privilege of those at the top of the hierarchy. Those at the bottom, naturally, could see the imbalance, and took steps to remedy it. Those at the top saw what those down below were up to, and took steps to keep them in their place -- leading to more "rules." And thus began the class struggle -- there are rules, but then there are "rules," and the question becomes who gets to define them: all of us acting together for the common good, or a few at the top looking to protect their own interests.

Some rules can evolve from one to the other. The "rules" about how to treat women evolved from the tribal need to ensure the ability of that tribe to reproduce. In violent times, it was necessary to ensure that fertile women were kept out of harm's way or the tribe would become extinct. But those rules, by Victorian times, had long since ossified into meaningless ritual -- women were to be cossetted and coddled simply because they were women, and this was one way of ensuring that said women were kept their place in the "order of things." That by the middle of the nineteenth century so many women were loudly critical of those "rules" demonstrates their obsolescence.

So "rules" change, as the need and the purpose for them changes. Some rules become obsolete with the evolution of society, and new rules take their place, and such has been the case since humanity first crawled out of the muck. When a rule no longer serves any practical or useful purpose to society, it should -- and inevitably will -- disappear.

As far as crudeness and crassness goes, well, read any 18th Century "erotica" lately? Or any Macfadden publication of the 1920s? Or 1930s issues of "Ballyhoo" magazine? Or any Mickey Spillane novels of the 1940s? Or any copies of the tabloid "Midnight" from the 1950s? And that's to say nothing of the under-the-counter don't open-em-men-till-you-get-em-home stuff -- there are scenes in 1930s "eight pagers" that would disturb even the most hardened modern-day libertine. And don't think it was just Joe Punchclock looking at dirty pictures down at the gas station -- in the 1940s you could have a member of Congress on the floor of the House refer to a newspaperman as a "dirty little k*ke" and get away with it. Even today's crudest practitioners of the political arts couldn't do that and come away uncensured.

In short, crudeness and crassness were within arm's reach of anyone in the Era. It's just that the nostalgia merchants who framed latter-day awareness of the period couldn't put down their Norman Rockwell prints long enough to notice it.

It does seem more pervasive today, largely because it's had to ramp itself up over and over again to get noticed in the marketplace, and because now we have the internet pumping it directly into our brains at every turn, but in its very essence it's nothing that we haven't had all along, and the steady progression of it could have been predicted a hundred years ago. The vision of a future humanity numbed by drugs and cheap pornography was not uncommon in early science fiction predicting the end result of modern industrial society.

 

[GHT]

This is such a fascinating thread, some really interesting input. Growing up in the late forties and into the fifties, I too, don't recall any sort of rules. My mother taught me about respect, politeness and courtesy. It was always, ladies first, well not quite, elderly first. Mother also taught me patience, I can still hear her voice gently chiding me for not standing still as an elderly gent took his time alighting from the bus that we were waiting to board.

I also remember the young lady who lived next door, she was fifteen and I was eight so she was grown up in my eight-year-old thought. One evening, she had returned from her singing class, the walk from the bus stop to home was probably about four hundred yards. She heard someone behind her, afraid to look around she sped up, so too did the person following her. Glancing into the illuminated room of a neighbour, she saw a woman walk across the room, she immediately turned into the drive of that house as though she lived there. She rang the bell, the woman that she had seen answered the door. All that my young neighbour said was: "Someone's following me." The neighbour was quick on the uptake, smiled and invited her in. A short time later, my young neighbour was escorted to her home. All this was explained to me later by my mother, along with the warning of never going off with a stranger.

Years later, at that same bus stop, I was standing in an absolute deluge, a young motorist stopped, he was about early thirties, offered me a lift to get out of the rain. I refused, backing into the hedgerow, he persisted a little, but I was having non of it, getting ready to run if needs be. He drove off.

In later life I've been on the wrong end of a very sharp tongue. A woman, coming out of a shopping centre, laden with bags, was having a struggle to open the door. "Allow me," I said with a smile, pushing the door open for her. "I'm not helpless," she snapped. Ordinarily I would have been taken aback but I did understand that rebuttal. "My mother taught me that in my life I would meet many people, she also said that I had but a few seconds to make a good impression," I quickly explained to the lady. She locked eyes with me for a second or two, it felt like forever: "Wise woman, your mother mother," she remarked, without an expression on her face, turned on her heel and walked off. I smiled an inward smile, my mother died young but she has always been with me in my heart. "Thanks, Mum," I whispered as I went on my way.

 

[BlueTrain]

I agree generally but not entirely with most of what has been said, especially Miss Lizzie's comments about the rules.

Rules aren't meant to be broken, of course. The scofflaw ignores the rules at everyone's peril. Think about the rules of the road, for a minute. I'm sure that in some people's little minds, those who follow the law are fools and are in the way and perhaps even dangerous. It isn't difficult to see that attitude on the road.

In the larger world, it becomes a serious problem when some feel the laws don't apply to them, either the ones written down or the ones assumed by everyone (the ones your parents taught you). And again, you can probably think of some examples.

In the past, and by that I mean the distant past, those at the top had obligations to those on down the scale. There was no ladder, you understand. Class mobility basically didn't exist. You were born into a certain station in life and 99% of the time, that's where you stayed. That's basic feudalism. Everyone owes something to someone else. Some had more wealth and power than others but the obligations up and down were essentially the same, though with sometimes notable differences from place to place. It was ancient history by the time this country was being settled. But traces of the old system were present to a greater or lesser degree in the English Colonies, in New France and in New Spain.

The industrial age apparently allowed those at the top to ignore their ancient obligations to the rest of the world. That's when people started to be thrown off the land where they had lived for a thousand years (closer to 800, actually). And that's where class struggle began.

 

[Paisley]

People were, and to a lesser extent are, kept as pets as a status symbol. Think foot binding, trophy wives, grandchildren of the wealthy not trained in any practical endeavor, even slaves. (For all the slavery in the antebellum South, the South was much poorer than the North.)

I do think certain virtues are innate--if only as ideals to live up to. Those virtues are common across religions and cultures and time. Hunter-gatherers who break too many taboos too often (failing to live up to virtues of kindness, honesty and industry, for instance) meet with "accidents." To my mind, striving to live up to those virtues is better than wallowing in frailties.

Did people in more conservative times behave better? I'm not sure, but as the two biggest porn-using states (currently) are Utah and Mississippi (two states with a high proportion of very religious people), it suggests private behavior isn't necessarily ruled by social norms. However, Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, whose religions forbid smoking and drinking (things typically done publicly, or are detectable by others because of the scent of alcohol and tobacco, or neighbors who could see them buying it), enjoy better health than Americans in general. You can't draw a firm conclusion from these things, but you could form a hypothesis that people's public behavior was better in the Golden Era, and that their private behavior was worse. Domestic violence laws and child support orders were not (I think) vigorously enforced until the 1980s, as an example.

Fading Fast, you might like a book called The Evolution of God. According to the book, gods started out in hunter-gatherer societies as explanations for natural phenomena like storms and the sun. There was no need for a policeman god, since everyone knew everyone else's business. If a tribe member stole your tool, you'd see them using it. But as people formed larger societies (over 150 people), you couldn't know everyone's actions. In some growing societies, god or the supernatural became a policeman.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's a lot to be said for that idea. The more developed ancient religions got, the more profuse and more specific their codes of laws became. If you want to think about it from a Judeo-Christian perspective, you can argue that God gave the Israelites such a meticulous and specific code in the Mosaic Law, not because he expected them to keep it -- but because he knew that they *wouldn't,* because they *couldn't.* It was intended to prove their own fallibility and imperfection to them every single day of their lives, and by doing to so to keep them humble.

It's when people become Pharasaic about making and keeping laws, whether they're religious laws, secular laws, or "social codes," that the utter imperfection of humanity is made most manifest. But unfortunately, that's rarely the lesson learned. When The Rev. Dr. Billy Bob Biblethump D. D. goes on the radio and condemns you to hellfire because "God sees what you did and knows what you did" he's completely missing the point of what he claims to believe.

 

[Samuel]

I believe there's a bit of nostalgia whenever we reminisce about the—good ol' days. Any "golden age" is held as a pinnacle for greatness. Pick a subject; poetry, cycling, movies, each golden age subject is held on a pedestal. IMHO we see greatness and strides forward throughout; though there are for better or for worse, end of epochs. For example, during JFK's time men's hats became culturally passé; though you still see them sprinkled here-and-there on certain die-hards. I believe there will always be die-hards. There will always be people who value typewriters, fedoras, and 1950's Chevy Impalas; not necessarily in that order.

Poetry hit its second stride during the Umayyad period, in al-Andalus. During that epoch, there was a cultural love for all things poetic. If you were adept at words, you could move up the proverbial ladder. This happened to Samuel ibn Naghrillah who became a vizir of Granada, mainly because he could write sublime lines; but afterwards was found to have a keen mind for politics and war. Interestingly, this era was a theocracy in which wine and homosexuality were forbidden. Yet we see poems rife with the subject matter. Consider:

​

REFLECTION OF WINE
By Abu'l Hasan 'AII ibn Hisn
Seville, 11th century

Light will pass


Through wine
A red
Shine
On fingers
Forked at the stem.
Of the glass they bring

To antelope horns
A juniper pins down
I liken them.

According to Maria Rosa Menoçal, Sterling professor of humanities at Yale, this era was tolerant of vices we now (in certain contemporary societies) find to be intolerant. I teach my students, (this is fresh in my mind because school just started) how important respect and kindness are. For two days, we've been going over scenarios, videos, writing paragraphs on Respect and Kindness. Simple things like common curtesy, salutations, holding doors open, picking up trash are being revisited—because kids these days aren't being taught at home.

While I'm teaching about respect, I have a student mumbling under his breath loud enough for all of us to hear. Ironically being disrespectful while learning about respect—perhaps this is ongoing. Perhaps we had disrespect in the 50's towards teachers who grew up in the 30's? Maybe it's just the big wheel turning and somehow our reality only sees what that limited reality is. Perhaps it's just the bid wheel turning, feeling nostalgia when "the past was better." Perhaps it's just a figment of our imagination. That in reality, we romanticize things as a result of the current chaos, unknown factors that are evident in our lives—a way of coping with our current ideals.

​

 

[BlueTrain]

I don't know that we, individually, change our behavior according to the way the wind blows, be it liberal, conservative or somewhere in between and, anyway, those are relative labels. Labels are usually to limited in meaning to be accurately apply, too.

I have lived in a very small community way out in the country. It was small enough for everyone to know one another, though hardly to the same degree of familiarity. I not so sure that level of familiarity was enough to control errant or deviant behavior, although it resulted in a fairly good knowledge of how good other people were. However, I think that's also true in large communities, too, more or less, because in most ways, your contact with other people is limited to your neighborhood and your working environment. Fortunately, though, most people are fairly good anyway but a little meanness goes a long ways.

I've often wondered if "Judeo-Christian" was an accurate term to apply to anything. But if it is, then it really ought to be "Judeo-Christian-Islamic."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Or "Abrahamic," since all three faiths trace back to that particular patriarch.

As far as nostalgia goes, there's really two kinds -- the marketing driven kind, like the Gay 90s fad of the 1930s, the 1930s fad of the early 1970s, and the "Fonzie Fifties" fad that just won't go away no matter how much I wish it dead. And then there's the kind of nostalgia you get from people gazing back wistfully on the "simpler times" of their youth.

Of the two, the latter is the more pernicious. The times of your childhood weren't in any way simpler. *You* were simpler. A child or even an adolescent lacks the level of cognitive development to fully understand the complexities of the times in which they are growing up. So it really isn't a matter of those "times" being "simpler" at all, no matter what "times" they were. For every Facebook "wasn't it great growing up in the simpler times of the fifties" post from someone pushing 70, there's a 50 year old posting about how great it was to grow up in the simpler times of the Seventies. And there's a thirty year old getting misty over the simpler times of the Nineties. You remember those simple times, right? Gulf War I, OJ, Rodney King, the Branch Davidians, Tim McVeigh, Heaven's Gate, Monica and the blue dress, the Y2K panic? And in just a few more years, you'll have a generation reminiscing about the "simpler times" of the early 2000s.

What's especially interesting to me is how many of these "simpler times"essays about riding bikes, playing in the woods, going to the shore, roaming free as kids, etc. are exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the decade about which the nostalgic feelings are being expressed.

 

[Paisley]

I don't know that we, individually, change our behavior according to the way the wind blows, be it liberal, conservative or somewhere in between and, anyway, those are relative labels. Labels are usually to limited in meaning to be accurately apply, too.

I have lived in a very small community way out in the country. It was small enough for everyone to know one another, though hardly to the same degree of familiarity. I not so sure that level of familiarity was enough to control errant or deviant behavior, although it resulted in a fairly good knowledge of how good other people were. However, I think that's also true in large communities, too, more or less, because in most ways, your contact with other people is limited to your neighborhood and your working environment. Fortunately, though, most people are fairly good anyway but a little meanness goes a long ways.

I don't think it's just familiarity that enforces behaviors, but some kind of a stick. The stick can be shunning, banishment, threat of hellfire, loss of job or status, or even death.

Hunter-gatherer tribes were tiny, even compared to small towns--no more than around 150 members. Most of their time was spent outdoors among the other members, who all depended on each other. Even so, the occasional narcissist grew out of that environment. Tribal healers considered them incurable; as there was no police force or jail, those members met with fatal "accidents." In more recent times, certain misdeeds could get you shunned from your community or fired from your job, with difficulty in getting another one. Look at the guy from Google (a small, insular community), who was fired over a memo questioning some of the company's assumptions on gender. What societies or groups have had (or needed) is a stick to enforce behaviors.

 

[BlueTrain]

Fair enough but today and for a long time since, there are those who aren't part of the local community. It's the "race of man that don't fit in." That's tolerated more in some places than in others, of course, possibly due to a lack of any real social control that enforces group solidarity or homogeneity. I'm not saying this very well, I realize, but basically we don't force people to be a part of the community, however you define community. I don't define those who post on this forum a community, by the way. It's "virtual," meaning it isn't a real community.

Maybe it's an American thing. We value independence and self-reliance, at least in theory. And circumstances permitting, we simply don't rely on our neighbors the way we think we did once. Maybe we never did. The colonial militia that some people like to talk about was not voluntary; it was an obligation. And it didn't work as well as some hoped it would. And in any event, it was the local gentry that ran the thing, which comes back to the social hierarchy we brought with us from the old country.

Otherwise, however, all those things you mention as enforcers of the rules are certainly there and mostly work. And how pleased we are when we see the police stop someone when they ran a red light.

Concerning nostalgia, I think there are two kinds, too, though not necessarily the same as Miss Lizzie mentions. There is the sort of longing for something we never experienced, real or fantastic. We may have a romantic notion of the high Middle Ages and living in a castle. Few lived in castles and castles were nowhere as nice a place to live as a little suburban house made of ticky-tack. Most people lived at the foot of the hill in a rough house with their animals.

The other kind of nostalgia is a real longing for a past that you really lived in or through. Not necessarily because it was simpler, though there is still that aspect, but because it was different and probably because you had fewer obligations that weighed down, like a family, a good job and a house. All of the crises of the past, just like the ones now, had little impact on your life. So, I suppose it was a case of your own life being simpler (not because you were simple!). Then one thing led to another and before you knew it, you had a wife and a kid and another one on the way, a so-so house with a mortgage, the company you work for just got bought and Baywatch and Wonder Woman aren't on TV anymore. Life couldn't be worse. So you remember your college days with some fondness, forgetting the real problems you used to face, like chemistry exams, eight o'clock classes, no money, and the thought of actually graduating and finding a job hanging over your head.

 

[sheeplady]

I have zero sense of personal nostalgia. The past, and particularly my past, is better left there.

I nearly have no idea why anyone would want to go backwards in their lives. I understand people had fewer obligations... but didn't you have less power and freedom?

Perhaps people had much easier and relaxing childhoods than mine, but I'm quite comfortable in my warm and dry house, my job that gives me money, eating the food i want to eat, and doing with my free time what i wish. Compared to my childhood, it's paradise. Yes, I have bills to pay, but that's a small price to pay for the happy and self-purposeful life I feel I lead. And to be honest, (with a few exceptions) I feel I've gotten happier every year of my life.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I didn't enjoy being a child at all. I enjoyed being an adolescent even less. And my twenties and thirties weren't exactly a barrel of laughs either. In fact, if I had to define a time when I was genuinely happy, it would probably be December 31st 2013 to August 3, 2015. Those days I wouldn't mind living over again in an endless loop.

As for childhood nostalgia, there are things I remember fondly -- listening to the ballgame on the radio with my grandparents, the wide availabilty of taco-flavored corn chips, digging thru the abandoned neighborhood store while it was being torn down and coming up with all sorts of interesting stuff, a few things like that. But I wouldn't be a kid again for anything. And if, god forbid, I was cursed to return to my teenage years I'd cut my own throat first. Those were a long way from being "simpler times."