Etiquette Make’s One a Finer Person

Marjabelle Young Stewart’s photo from the back of her 1969 book, ‘Stand Up, Shake Hands, Say “How Do You Do”’

Good etiquette is just a sense, in a matter of speaking

She was the “Empress of Etiquette,” the “Queen of Courtesy” to her legions of readers. She was a protegee of Mrs. Meriwether Post and Mamie Eisenhower, and frequent guest at the White House. She moved from the nation’s capital to the “hog capital of the world” 37 years ago. Marjabelle Young Stewart reigned over her etiquette empire with books, videos, lectures and interviews with no hint of slowing down. With 21 books to her credit, in 2005 she was promoting “The Complete Wedding Planner.” 

According to Stewart at that time, etiquette books were outselling cookbooks. Her message was simple and consistent: Etiquette is a key to clear communication, a protocol for professional success, a tool for a happy and productive life. “Etiquette can take you where you want to go faster than a speeding BMW,” she said. “Good manners take you places money can't.” Etiquette is also the common-sense nuts and bolts of life. “Don't end up at the wedding with a wad of soggy, wet Kleenex. Be sure to take a lace-edged hankie,” she admonished. Stewart said her knowledge of etiquette started with on-the-job training. “I went from a 17-year-old girl in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the wife of an international scientist in Washington, D.C.,” she said. “I became a ‘sipper.’ I'd sip my drink and look over and see what fork or spoon others at the table were using. It was on-the-job training at the highest level.” 

Mellowed by decades of weddings, state dinners and formal entertaining, Stewart said the ultimate goal of etiquette is to make others feel comfortable. She recalled a White House dinner with then-President George H.W. Bush, father of the current president, and his guests from Asia, where the custom is to serve a clear broth at the end of the meal. When White House staff served finger bowls at the end of the meal, guests were startled to see the Asian diplomats pick up the finger bowls and drink the contents. Without hesitation, Bush picked up his finger bowl and toasted his American guests, indicating they should follow suit. Everyone at the table drank the contents of their finger bowls. “That is etiquette,” said Stewart. 

“Etiquette is knowledge, not to criticize others with or to put on airs, but to make you a finer person. Use etiquette to make your family and friends, acquaintances and colleagues feel like royalty.” — From an article by Clare Howard, for the Copley News Service, 2005

Marjabelle Young Stewart died in 2007

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

Profiles in Etiquette ~ Marjabelle Young Stewart

From the back of the 1969 book, ‘Stand Up, Shake Hands, Say “How Do You Do”’

Marjabelle Young Stewart; taught and wrote about etiquette

Marjabelle Young Stewart, an authority on proper manners who wrote more than 20 books and ruled the White Gloves and Blue Blazers children’s etiquette empires, died in 2007. She was 82.

Stewart, also famous for the annual list of best-mannered cities she began issuing in 1977, died March 3, 2007, of pneumonia at a nursing home in Kewanee, Ill., according to her daughter, Jacqueline Ramont.

Stewart’s career took her to the White House to teach manners to the daughters of Presidents Johnson and Nixon and later made her a fixture on the talk-show circuit. But her early years were anything but aristocratic.

“She was a self-made woman,” Ramont said. “She always said a good handshake and good table manners would get you anywhere.

Stewart was the second of four daughters born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Marie and Clarence Cullen Bryant. Her father was a great-grandson of poet William Cullen Bryant. The couple divorced while the girls were young and turned them over to a local orphanage called Children’s Square, where one of them died.

“I’ve just recently come to grips with all this,” Stewart told a Times interviewer in 1987 while recalling her childhood. “It was an old tin can I had to get rid of.”

But although she often spoke of the rigors of her orphanage upbringing, Stewart also credited the training she received there for her knowledge of etiquette, her granddaughter Erin Marjabelle Albert said.

After being reunited with her mother, Stewart lived on an Iowa farm and graduated from high school in Council Bluffs. In 1941, at the age of 17, she married scientist Jack Davison Young and moved with him to Washington, D.C., where she worked in a naval yard before being recruited for a modeling assignment. She soon became one of Washington’s top models and founded a modeling agency with two other women.

Her modeling work brought Stewart into contact with Washington society. She met the late humor columnist Art Buchwald, who persuaded her to collaborate with his wife, Ann, on a light-toned etiquette book. The result, “White Gloves and Party Manners,” became an unexpected bestseller. Stewart collaborated on two other books with Ann Buchwald before going on to write more books by herself.

Stewart and Young divorced, and in 1962 she married attorney William E. Stewart and moved with him to Kewanee.

Impressed with the success of his wife’s books, he and several of his friends founded a business based on the etiquette training technique she had been offering in classes for professionals and college students.

The results were trademarked etiquette classes for children, White Gloves for girls and Blue Blazers for boys.

The classes were eventually offered in conjunction with department store chains in 800 cities nationwide, including Bullock’s in Southern California.

Stewart is survived by her husband, two children, three grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

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