Manners Nudging a 1980’s Comeback

The 1980’s was a decade of contradictions in etiquette and manners... Most saw etiquette and manners in the United Staes to still in be in a free fall of decline, following the pattens set in the 1960s and 1970s. That did not stop people, however, from writing and buying books in large numbers on etiquette and manners. This phenomenon became a lead up to “the 1990’s Etiquette Era.”

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“Although Clare Boothe Luce has no plans to write an etiquette book, she has observed social mores from the time when, she says, life was ‘much more ceremonial.’ Manners today except for official life in Washington have, she believes, ‘virtually disappeared,’ and she sees ‘no signs of a renaissance.’ For Luce, ‘good manners is treating others with a certain distance and formality until a friendship is formed.’ As for the current American interest in manners and etiquette, ‘I do hope,’ Luce says, ‘they buy all the books they can.’ – Helping a young lady into her chair at the table, from Marjabelle Stewart’s book, “Stand Up, Shake Hands, Say ‘How Do You Do’”

NEW YORK - America, if the social soothsayers are accurate in their predictions, is about to become a land of kindness and courtesy. This is not merely because “Tiffany's Table Manners for Teen-Agers,” the paperback by Walter Hoving first published 21 years ago, is, according to Tiffany, “suddenly selling like croissants.” Rather, it is largely because of the burst of books on manners and etiquette – subjects that in the past inspired works from such concerned citizens as George Washington and Eleanor Roosevelt – which have recently been, or are about to be published. There are courses and lectures on the same subject for which people are lining up as if they were waiting to see “Conan the Barbarian.” Americans, these authors and teachers are saying, are currently craving tradition and hungering for the rules of proper behavior in social situations. 

Mary Susan Miller, who is working with Elizabeth L. Post, the granddaughter of Emily Post, on updating “The New Emily Post’s Etiquette,” said, “People have become so horrified, hurt and disgusted by rudeness” that a resurgence of manners was inevitable. Manners, says Miller, “are not a set of rules that someone out there arbitrarily says follow. Manners are to make other people, as well as yourself, comfortable.” She is currently teaching corporate executives, among others, to be comfortable. 

When Marjabelle Stewart was at the Waldorf Astoria recently to conduct a class on dining for children from the United Nations International School, it was yet one more stop in her constant etiquette campaign. Stewart, who has made manners her cottage industry, has written several books on the subject (“Marjabelle Stewart's, Book of Modern Table Manners,” the most recent, was published last year). Her children's etiquette classes (seven weeks, $65, graduation ceremony and tea party included) are franchised in 476 cities throughout the country. “Everyone wants to be upper crust today,” says Stewart, who also conducts courses (“Eating Your Way to the Top”) for both executives and college students. 

Ann Buchwald, a Washingtonian who is married to Art Buchwald and was Stewart’s co-author on such books as “White Gloves and Party Manners” and “Stand Up, Shake Hands, Say ‘How Do You Do,’” finds further evidence that manners are staging a comeback. “Women are wearing gloves for the first time in years, and there's a return to dresses,” she said. “How people look has a lot to do with the way they behave.” It was President and Mrs. Reagan, Buchwald adds, who “put the cap on the bottle.” Many of the parents who are most concerned about teaching their children good manners, Buchwald has found, were students who demonstrated in the 60's and 70's. “When they locked up the dean, they didn't much care about where glasses go on the dinner table,” she said, “but they now want their children to care.” 

For those who, like him, grew up in the 60s and 70s, P. J. O'Rourke is writing “Modern Manners: Etiquette for Extremely Rude People.” “We never learned how to dress properly or give cocktail parties,” O'Rourke says. “It was an era, when people erased the tapes on how to behave.” It is the family that is or should be the unit that teaches manners to youngsters, according to Letitia Baldrige, who revised and expanded the most recent edition of “The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette.” “The many young people who grew up having dinner in front of the television set instead of the dining, table never did learn table manners,” Baldrige says. “Besides that, their parents were divorced and were never home to advise them.”

Another title, scheduled for publication later this year, is George Mazzei's “The New Office Etiquette,” which he says he wrote because “there's been a breakdown in business manners, and people are realizing they can no longer deal with the constant rudeness which became a part of the business world when crude young people became superstars.” Mazzei's book deals with “the new etiquette toward women in business" and sets guidelines for such business behavior as who should go through a revolving door first (the woman still does) and the correct way to deal with your boss's in-office lover (smile, nod, and don't talk about the affair). The book is scheduled for publication later this year. 

One can learn “How to Eat an Artichoke and Other Trying, Troublesome, Hard-to-Get-At Foods” in Rochelle Udell's just-published book. Udell wrote it, she says, “because food is so often a barrier to socializing across the dinner table.” She got the idea for her book, she says, while observing “someone's cherry tomato squirt across a dining room.” Although Clare Boothe Luce has no plans to write an etiquette book, she has observed social mores from the time when, she says, life was “much more ceremonial.” Manners today except for official life in Washington have, she believes, “virtually disappeared,” and she sees “no signs of a renaissance.” For Luce, “good manners is treating others with a certain distance and formality until a friendship is formed.” As for the current American interest in manners and etiquette, “I do hope,” Luce says, “they buy all the books they can.” – NYT News Service, 1982

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