Profiles in Etiquette – Judith Martin

As the daughter of a United Nations diplomat, Martin early on acquired a working knowledge of proper social etiquette. “After you've entertained Mrs. So-and-so who doesn’t speak anything but Flemish, life holds no fear,” she says with a light. She also became fascinated by historical etiquette. “I quickly learned that if you wanted to learn what a given society was doing at a given time, you looked at their etiquette books, and what they were being told not to do, they were doing. That's how this little hobby got started.” 

Gentle Readers: meet Judith Martin, columnist Miss Manners

My. My. Miss Manners is prolific isn’t she? Barely has the dust settled from the rollicking entrant of 1st etiquette epistle, “Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.” then we are inundated by 389 paces of “Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children.” Oh, indeed. One can almost feel ones metaphorical knuckles being rapped. Not for falling to use ones fish fork correctly that was discussed previously but for violating the rules of the baby-sitting co-op. Or commiting faux pas at parent-teacher conferences. The list might be endless. Or at least worth 389 pages. 

Gentle Reader, as Miss Manners herself is wont to say, press on. For this tome on decorum that is receiving all sorts of highly favorable book reviews has as its core nothing less than the “passing on of civilization” as we know it. Or at least as we knew it prior to the 60s, a decade that, according to Miss Manners, was “without rules.” As a tonic to the aforementioned plight, Miss Manners, who in real life is the syndicated columnist and novelist Judith Martin, offers her “primer for everyone worried about the future of civilization.” What this heir apparent to the etiquette doyennes Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt proffers, is highly practical but spirited counsel, on modern-day manners and morals common to that process known as child-rearing. Wit is arguably one of Martin's strong suits, as is her no-nonsense advice.

“The baby doesn't think. ‘Well I'm hungry, but if I wait few hours they'll be less reluctant to get up’,” Martin says, looking very proper during a recent interview in her high-necked blouse and antique garnet earrings. “It's very hard to teach a child to let somebody play with his toys or to wait. But that's what civilization is all about, and you have to start very young.” Talking with Martin is no schmoot over the bark fence. Just as she crisply stated her intent in her book: “A good parent owes it to a child to teach manners as an interesting and useful skill, and not a a subject that is invoked to condemn whatever the child happens to be doing when the adult is feeling irritable.” So does she mince no words in person. “Things were in a rock-bottom state when I first went into the etiquette trade six years ago,” she says, sounding not unlike a modern Mary Poppins, “but now there is a realization that you don't have to live in a world where everyone is rude.” 

In waging her genteel war on rudeness which by the way, does not permit “being ruder back” Martin has modeled her second etiquette book on her column format: a brief commentary on a particular social breach followed by answers from “Miss Manners” to the “Gentle Reader,” one of 200 letters she receives weekly. Interspersed with her advice on the etiquette of braces, car pools, and the like, Martin tosses in counsel that will warm parents’ hearts everywhere: “The chief tools of childrearing are nagging and example.” “Lecturing, in Miss Manners’ opinion, is one of the rewards of child-rearing...” However, lest anyone think the author is one-sided, Martin throws out some for the children who may be listening: “Properly done, a sulk is wildly irritating to the parent ... the ideal revenge of a theoretically powerless person on a supposedly powerful one.” 

It hardly need be said that Martin, herself the mother of “two perfect children” well, that's how the book jacket reads, politely snorts at the “JeanJacques Rousseau school of etiquette,” the belief that natural behavior is beautiful and that civilization, including manners, spoils man's essential goodness. Unfortunately , those who pay the price for believing such nonsense, says Martin, are those children now in their late teens and early 20s who “were told that etiquette is outdated and you just do whatever you feel like. Well, these people have grown up and discover that it's not true, and they’re at a terrible handicap.” Job interviews, romances, all are in jeopardy, says Martin, when one is bereft of a general system of etiquette. 

As the daughter of a United Nations diplomat, Martin early on acquired a working knowledge of proper social etiquette. “After you've entertained Mrs. So-and-so who doesn't speak anything but Flemish, life holds no fear,” she says with a light. She also became fascinated by historical etiquette. “I quickly learned that if you wanted to learn what a given society was doing at a given time, you looked at their etiquette books, and what they were being told not to do, they were doing. That's how this little hobby got started.” 

But it wasn't until the end of her 25year career as a feature writer and sometime theater critic at the Washington Post, where she covered “everything it’s possible to write about in a newspaper except news.” that Martin broke into the etiquette business in earnest Her thrice-weekly column, “Miss Manners,” began in 1978 and is now syndicated across the country. With women’s growing presence in the workforce, Martin says, additional etiquette questions are being raised today. “In business, etiquette is based on rank not gender,” she says crisply. She also predicts that our social etiquette system based on gender will yield to one based on age. “What I would like to do is speed along the structure of American society and the working world so that people can have a decent life that is a mixture of the domestic and the career life.” Does Martin consider herself pivotal in promoting that change? “Well, I don't want to be immodest, but I'm trying my best.” – Hillary DeVries for Christian Science Monitor, 1984

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