When Emily’s Etiquette Ditched Chaperones

“He says that Emily Post now writes that you can dine at his place as long as your self-respect and reputation remain intact. He asked can you be there at 6:00?”– Mrs. Post has not been content to chop away an outmoded custom here, and relax a hidebound convention there. She has almost thrown the old edition out the window and written a new one. Mrs. Post now accepts practices which would have created a national furore had she sponsored them two decades ago. For example: a young woman may dine alone with a young man in his bachelor flat (providing, of course, she is positive that neither her reputation nor her self-respect will be damaged thereby). 

Emily Post Yields to Modernity: Even Chaperone Is Now Ditched

NEW YORK. Sept. 9, (UPI) Emily Post, who put etiquette on a paying basis back in 1922, is bending a social knee to the behavior of our times. The famous authority on good manners has rewritten completely her earlier standards to comply with a changing world. For 16 years Mrs. Post’s blue-covered book has been the final appeal on what constitutes gentility and good taste. But a new generation has so kicked over the traces of horse and buggy days gentility that Mrs. Post has been forced to give ground. This she does, reluctantly but gracefully, in a new edition of “Etiquette, the Blue Book of Social Usage,” published today by Funk and Wagnalls. 

Mrs. Post has not been content to chop away an outmoded custom here, and relax a hidebound convention there. She has almost thrown the old edition out the window and written a new one. Mrs. Post now accepts practices which would have created a national furore had she sponsored them two decades ago. For example: a young woman may dine alone with a young man in his bachelor flat (providing, of course, she is positive that neither her reputation nor her self-respect will be damaged thereby). 

No Chaperones . . . The author flatly consigns chaperones to the ash heap, concluding that a girl’s best chaperone is the training she has received before she makes her debut. She even goes so far as to say that when a college boy hangs his fraternity pin on a co-ed, it may be accepted as a formal engagement of marriage. And that, as Mrs. Post almost allows herself to admit, is quite a social jump from 1920. Actually, the theme of Mrs. Post’s social dicta now is not rigid formality, but informal comfort. Just about anything that is sensible and practical and inoffensive, is (to use a word not in Mrs. Post’s vocabulary) okay. And a young modern who cannot afford either a maid or a banquet, can with decorum invite her friends to “supper” instead of dinner, and toss them up hash and scrambled eggs. It'd be “de rigeur,” so to speak. 

The Woman Can Pay . . . Here are a few other new standards of etiquette: It is permissible for a woman to pay the dinner check when she dines with a man, if he is indigent and she has money. It’s proper for a girl to attend, unchaperoned, a fraternity house party and stay overnight in the fraternity house if the occasion is a time-honored festival on the campus. (But she should take only one suitcase.) It is correct to leave a party early in order to go home and listen to a favorite radio program. 

Smoking Etiquette . . . Trends of the times can be seen in a chapter on smoking etiquette, on motoring manners, and even in a section on short ocean cruises. There's also a discussion of the young man’s problem when he’s invited to parties where he knows the bridge stakes will be high, or where he'll be roped in for theater tickets after dinner. Young man, the thing to do in that case, is to decline the invitation. 

Mrs. Post still clings to a few positive “dont’s.” Her formal dinner is as stiff-shirted as ever. Her big wedding, her coming out party, her little niceties about correspondence, are as pat as formerly. People still may not smoke at dinner, unless the hostess has signified her permission by placing cigarettes on the table. And no lady smokes on the street, even yet.– 1937

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