Bad Manners Made Her Murder

We at Etiquipedia are confused by this Dorothy Dix article, as she normally wrote serious, well thought out columns. This had to have been a one-off attempt at humorous sarcasm. Otherwise, why would she condone murder over a husband’s poor table manners.
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Downton Abbey’s, “Vera Bates”,  who famously poisoned her own food with the deadly powder, and ate her food, in order to frame her husband for murder. Vera Bates might have find this logic of Dix to be sound. Etiquipedia certainly wouldn’t recommend Dix as a lawyer for you in the event that you too understood her rationale and acted on the notion that it just may make your life happier! 
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Is a Woman Justified in Murdering a Husband Who Criticizes Her Cooking?

THE other day a woman gave as her excuse for murdering her husband that he always criticised her cooking. She stood it for years and years, and when she could endure it no longer having him ask, "Did she call that slop coffee?" and "What was the matter with the biscuit, and if she thought she "had a Government contract to make cannon balls instead of something to go in the human stomach," she reached down her little automatic and for ever silenced his carping tongue.

All that woman will need in order to get free when she is tried is to demand her constitutional rights to be tried by a jury of her peers. No twelve married women will ever send to the electric chair a sister who has done the thing that they have been tempted to do a thousand times, and that only the grace of God kept them from doing.

If the men who grumble about their food and knock their wives’ handiwork as they partake of it, were only mind readers enough to know that the ladies across the table from them are wishing that they had the nerve to flavor up the abused dishes with a little Rough on Rats, it would spoil many a husband's appetite. Likewise, there would be a great improvement in domestic table manners, and husbands would follow the old nursery admonition, to eat what is set before them and ask no questions, and make no comments.

Why women should be more sensitive to criticism of their cooking than they are to criticism of anything else they do they could not tell themselves. They simply are, and nothing gets on their nerves like having strictures passed upon their gravies, and invidious comparisons instituted between their pies and another woman's ples. Nor is there any woman who would not rather have her character aspersed than her baking. – Dorothy Dix, 1923

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

Bad Table Etiquette Cuts Off Friendships

  

Firmly, Nancy places a large piece of bread on the table cloth, plasters it thick with butter.

They wont dine out again! 

Bob stares at Nancy’s hands in fascinated horror. Firmly she places a large piece of bread on the table cloth, plasters it thick with butter. Then she lifts the whole piece to her mouth, leaves teeth marks in its buttery surface whenever she takes a bite. Surely Nancy knows that the only correct way to eat bread is to break off and butter a small piece at a time, just enough for a mouthful. 

Careless table manners —so easy to avoid —offend others most. Are YOU ever guilty of: 

• Pouring salt for celery or radishes on table cloth instead of plate?

• Dropping olive pits into ash trays? 

• Hanging knife and fork off edge of dinner plate so they tumble onto table when plate is removed?

            –The Santa Ana Journal, Home Service, 1937

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

19th C. Thoughts on Etiquette, Society and Civilization

Where the meaning of its rules may be somewhat obscure at first sight, there is an underlying reason for the regulation laid down.

"Etiquette is, in point of fact, nothing more nor less than the law, written and unwritten, which regulates the society of civilized people, distinguishing them from the communities of barbarous tribes, whose lives are hard and their manners still harder.

It is to a well disciplined and refined mind the fundamental principle of action in all intercourse with society, and they are interested in maintaining it in its integrity, and bound to heed and obey its simplest as well as more formal precepts.

The real law-giver is the general convenience, speaking with authority and the experience of many years; and it will be found that even in those cases, where the meaning of its rules may be somewhat obscure at first sight, there is an underlying reason for the regulation laid down." –by Sarah Annie Frost, 1869

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