Etiquette of a Lady

Be a lady... Not necessarily this one above. Television's Lady Mary is lovely and self-assured, but she can be truly thoughtless and self absorbed. Especially while playing cat and mouse games with men. Besides, she's wearing gloves while she's drinking champagne. Demonstrating poor etiquette and a true faux pas!

Be a Lady

Good breeding is good sense.

Bashfulness is constitutional.

Awkwardness maybe ineradicable.

No art can restore the grape its bloom.

Bad manners in a woman are immorality.

It is the first duty of a woman to be a lady.

Wildness is a thing which girls cannot afford.

Delicacy is a thing which cannot be lost or found.

Ignorance of etiquette is the result of circumstances.

Familiarity, without confidence, without regard, is destructive to all that makes woman exalting and ennobling.

Who was Gail Hamilton?

Gail Hamilton, 1833-1896, was an essayist, journalist, and fiction writer. She was born Mary Abby Dodge in Hamilton, Massachusetts, and lived as a school teacher and governess in New England and Washington, D.C. 

In the late 1850s, she began publishing for the anti-slavery paper, the National Era, under the pen name, Gail Hamilton. She went on publish books on women’s rights, politics, religion, and children’s subjects. 

In 1867, she sued her publisher, Ticknor and Fields, for deliberately underpaying her in relation to the industry norm. Although she was unsuccessful, she "made a significant contribution to the history of the professional (women) writers, and she exposed the Gentleman Publisher’s market for what it really was: a relationship based on power, even when conducted as a friendship" –(Coultrap-McQuin).

                                       

From The Los Angeles Herald, 1887

Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia