Etiquette and Girls Gone Wild

It is the first duty of a woman to be a lady. Good breeding is good sense. Bad manners in a woman is immorality. Awkwardness may be ineradicable.

Wild Girls

by Gail Hamilton 

Wildness is a thing which girls cannot afford. Delicacy is a thing which cannot be lost or found, No art can restore to the grape its bloom. 

Familiarity without confidence, without regard, is destructive to all that makes woman exalting and ennobling. It is the first duty of a woman to be a lady. Good breeding is good sense. Bad manners in a woman is immorality. Awkwardness may be ineradicable. 

Bashfulness is constitutional. Ignorance of etiquette is the result of circumstances. All can be condoned and not banish men or women from the amenities of their kind.

But self-possessed, unshrinking and aggressive coarseness of demeanor may be reckoned as a state's prison offense, and certainly merits that mild form of restraint called imprisonment for life. 

It is a shame for women to be lectured on their manners. It is a bitter shame that they need it. Do not be restrained. Do not have impulses that need restraint. Do not wish to dance with the Prince unsought; feel differently, be sure you confer honor. 

Carry yourself so loftily that men will look up to you for reward, not at you in rebuke. The natural sentiment of man toward woman is reverence. He loses a large means of grace when he is obliged to account her as a being to be trained in propriety. 

A man's ideal is not wounded when a woman fails in worldly wisdom; but if in grace, in tact, in sentiment, in delicacy, in kindness, she would be found wanting, he receives an inward hurt. –Los Angeles Herald, 1882

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