Emily Post and Social Umpires

One of the better known writers on manners, with her first book of etiquette published in 1922, is Emily Post. Though she died in 1960, her extended family (most notably her late-granddaughter in-law, Elizabeth Post) has successfully continued on with her legacy of  nearly a century of etiquette books, news columns and social media contributions. – Above, “Emily Post” by Miguel Covarrubias for Vanity Fair, December 1933 
– Image source, Pinterest 

Chaperon Snubbed by Emily Post, Social ‘Umpire’ 

Emily Post did a bit of snubbing in Santa Ana today. She turned up her nose at chaperons for girls. In her newest book on etiquette, the ultra-ultra authority on polite behavior not only woke up to the fact that the chaperon has long been in moth balls, but also became aware that girls sometimes do a little stalking of men.

Miss Post gave grudging approval to this technique of pursuit, but warned that girls must never, never run.

With the fall social season opening, with high school and junior college festivities about to begin, girls and their mothers today were busy getting “posted” on the revised rules for the game.

VIEWS APPLAUDED

Local vendors have just received their first stacks of Mrs. Post’s modernized edition, and Santa Ana matrons have begun flocking in to get their copies.

Most social leaders here were heartily in sympathy with the liberalized trend in etiquette. A few thought Emily Post should be the last outpost of conservatism, but most of the new departments in the 700-page volume were well received.

Here are some of the newer Emilypostisms:

• “The young girl who is ‘the success of today’ depends far more upon her actual talents and disposition than in the day when sex-appeal was an ever menacing fact instead of a commonplace phrase...”

HOLDING HANDS?

• “It is the present fashion for the younger generation to walk side by side, never arm in arm...
• “In no detail of etiquette has the modern generation effected so marked a change as in its increasing freedom from the perpetual presence of a chaperon. The chaperon is gone. Protection has disappeared, much as have the veils which covered the faces of the women in the East...
• “When champagne is served at a mixed party, men always should be offered the alternative of a choice of whiskies.. ‘Highball’ is a social tabu. One says Scotch and soda or whisky and soda ...

SPEED LIMIT

• “A girl who goes into an office because she thinks herself pretty and hopes to rise quickly because of her physical charm has clerkship and chorus-work mixed. Sex is one thing that has no place in business…
• “The ideal business woman is accurate, orderly, quick and impersonal…
• “How far may a girl run after a man? Catlike, she may do a little stalking! But ‘run’? Not a step. The freedom of today allows her to meet him half way, but the girl who runs, runs after a man who runs faster!...

DUNKING?

• “Ethically the only chaperon is the young girl’s own sense of dignity and pride... 
• “In going to tea in a college man's room, it would not be out of the way for two or three properly behaved young girls to go together, with no older chaperon…
• “Elbows on the table are all right in a restaurant. because of the necessity for leaning forward when talking with a companion across the table…
• “A baked potato may be eaten by breaking it in half, scooping the inside onto the the plate with a fork and mixing butter, salt and pepper in it with a fork, but never with a knife...
• “All juicy or 'gooey' fruits or cakes are best eaten with a fork, but in most cases it is a matter of dexterity..."

Miss Post did not discuss the subject of drinking. – Santa Ana Journal, 1937

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

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