More on Manners and Women's Liberation

When I wrote the previous post my intent was to give a lighthearted account of my own obsolescence, which resulted mainly from the U.S. Deep South social milieu in which I was raised. Based, however, on some reactions I’ve received, I apparently came across to some readers as criticizing the women’s liberation movement.

It was myself that I was making fun of, and not women who were trying to improve their status in the culture. Pink Ginger’s comment gave me the key word for understanding the “women’s movement”: Independence. Women wanted a new level of independence, and so they went about achieving it in various ways. To me, there were important ways and unimportant ways, and the merely symbolic ways relating to male/female etiquette and manners seem to me relatively unimportant, even silly, and it was manners that I was smiling about.

I have no ambition to analyze the facets of the phenomenon here, and a woman could do a much better job than I could (and is invited to do so on my blog if she wishes), but the most important way to achieve independence, obviously, is to make your own money. Thus employment and entrepreneurship must have been the main goals of women’s liberation from the traditional need to turn to a male for money.

As I said, not entirely jokingly, many men would consider having a job to be more a form of bondage than of liberation, but women saw it from a different point of view, and apparently many of them felt that the work they did at home was more burdensome than the work that their husbands did at the office. I would not agree with that, based on watching my mother spend her days at home and with friends, compared with my spending often miserable or stressful or boring days in offices, but I’m not a woman. And when you add children to the mix, the traditional woman’s role of being at home raising offspring from infancy through the horrors of teenagery might indeed seem more akin to galley slavery than do the torments of the average office. And yet some women still say that they LIKE raising children.

Based on watching people I know, what I don’t see is that being a mother (especially a single mother) and raising children while earning an income at an office is any improvement, in terms of work pressure, over the mother’s role in the old-fashioned family, where she had to do the same work at home but didn't have to earn money outside the home.

Admittedly, if a woman doesn’t need a man to provide the money, there isn’t much else she needs a husband for! And if she doesn’t have children or a husband, she’s as free as any male ever was, and she has reached the Promised Land. No wonder society has changed fast.

As a result of something -- whether it's women's liberation or something else -- we see current statistics about families, and single parent homes, and marriage and divorce which would have seemed shocking, unimaginable, fifty years ago. Things have changed faster than I have, I must admit it, and not just in terms of manners. Emotionally, I am not happy with a number of things that have happened to society in that past half century.

I have always liked women better than men, and have enjoyed the company of women more than the company of men, and from the beginning I’ve wished women the best in their quest for improvement, in particular in their quest for equal employment opportunities. That doesn’t mean, however, that I feel that all the results of the quest for liberation have been desirable as far as effects on children, women, men, and society as a whole are concerned.

Yes, I’m getting older, but I don’t think it’s fair – and I never did – to say that older people always think things were better in the past, and so their evaluations of present vs. past can be ignored. Although the narcotic of nostalgia can indeed bathe the past in a pleasant glow, it is possible that sometimes the past actually WAS better than the present. One of the great fallacies of our time – fed by government and the popular media – is that our present day values and standards and politically correct beliefs are a great improvement over anything that has come before, and that most of the past belief-system and culture, even a generation ago, was comparatively benighted and shameful. Populations of nations tend to be taught that they are better off than any other people past or present, but that doesn't make it so.

I’m still wondering why, “Honey, I’m home!” is the subject of scornful jokes. Well, I can figure it out, but it still has a pleasant ring to me. Actually I don’t think it was ever said except on a TV show.

Changing Manners

Emily Post


On March 3, Pink Ginger wrote about an experience that made her happy. It triggered my idea for this post.

Pink Ginger was invited to lunch with a male friend, their first lunch together. His office was across the road, opposite her office building. He suggested a restaurant behind his office. Because Pink Ginger would be passing his office to get to the restaurant, she prepared to walk over to meet him in his building's lobby.

He called just as she was leaving her office to say that he was waiting for her in the lobby in her office building. She was impressed. She hadn’t expected him to come over. She was even more impressed when, after lunch, he insisted on walking her back to the lift in her building’s lobby. The distance between the buildings was so short that it usually would not have been considered necessary for the man to pick Pink Ginger up or drop her off.

Pink Ginger’s pleasant experience is easy to explain, of course: She is probably the prettiest woman in Singapore and should get over being surprised when men go out of their way to please her. But was her happy reaction to what she considered an unusual act of courtesy which reminded me of how “good manners” have changed during my lifetime in the United States.

I grew up a long way from Singapore and from Pink Ginger’s Chinese culture, and so I’m not able to compare her world with Florida, where I received my etiquette training as a boy in the mid-1940s and early 1950s.

My parents considered courtesy and politeness so important that my two younger brothers and I were given more than a casual introduction to good manners. It was part of my parents’ Deep South heritage (I hope “Deep South” means something to people from other parts of the world, who perhaps have at least seen “Gone With the Wind”), and it was shared by the families I grew up among.

At supper, and weekend dinners, (“dinner” was the noon meal) we boys were taught to stand behind our chairs until all five of the family were at the table – and someone would always pull out my mother’s chair so that she would be the first seated. You might get the idea that there was some stiffness or formality involved in my family, but that wasn’t true at all. (I knew boys who had to address their fathers as “Sir”.) As my father was more fond of saying than I was of hearing, “We’re just plain folks.” I did not want to be just plain folks, but that's beside the point. The dining table routine was considered basic decency, like not talking with your mouth full, and regularly saying “please” and “thank you”. It included being excused from the table rather than just getting up and leaving.

Telephone lessons: Making a call: “Hello, this is Fleming. May I please speak to. . .” (Always identify yourself before asking for the other person.)
Answering the phone if the caller was too uncouth to identify himself: “Who’s calling, please?”

Many were the things I was taught by my mother that would help me please girls when I finally got the coveted driver’s license: Always stand up when a female enters or leaves the room. Always offer her your seat. Always help a lady put on or take off her coat. A lady always goes first. Open every door for a woman and stand back while she enters ahead of you.

When I finally did receive the driver’s license my mother walked out to the car and we went through a little drill of my opening the passenger door and helping her in and out of the Pontiac until I felt quite suave about my first evening out with Patsy Ray. Of course I was coached always to go up to my date’s front door and ring the bell, never to honk the horn.

I assumed when I moved to Washington State at the end of 1959 to begin my first teaching job, that I was now prepared to feel at home as a gentleman anywhere in the world. Boy, was I surprised! And I became more surprised during the following years in the north. I almost knocked a woman from New Jersey down when we both went for the car door at the same time, and it took awhile for her to understand what I was trying to do. If I pulled back a chair for a woman she’d look surprised and might say, “Well, thank you. How nice.” Or she’d be halfway to my car before I could make it from the curb to her front door. In those early years in Yankeeland my manners seem to be considered quaint but charming. A Japanese girl in Ohio complimented me, “You’re the only American I’ve met who behaves like a Japanese man.” A British woman said, “You seem more English than American.” I felt happy about those words. I preferred being thought oddly courtly to being coarse and unmannerly.

But things changed even more. I don’t know when American Feminism happened, but I missed it. Maybe I was too wrapped up in females to notice, or maybe it was because I lived overseas from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. Maybe it was partly because I don’t read newspapers or magazines, and watch as little television as possible. In any case, unbeknownst to me my world of social customs was spirited away and a new set was dropped onto the stage. When I returned to America a woman would not only be surprised when I started to open a car door for her, but would say firmly, “You don’t need to do that”. She might even add, “I’d rather you didn’t do that again.” When I opened the library door for a fellow law student and waited for her to enter ahead of me, she snapped rudely, “If you do that again, I won’t go out with you.” I was stunned. Another woman said, “Okay, I’ll go first this time, but we have to take turns,” and she insisted on opening every other door for me. I was routinely hearing “dirty words” from women’s mouths that I would have been sent home from school for. And for the first time I learned that “girl” was a dirty word when it came from my mouth if I could possibly have used “woman”.

What had happened? Had females gone insane? Why were they demanding to be treated more shabbily? It seemed that women were voluntarily giving up most of their advantages and asking nothing in return except what males see as the very dubious privilege of working in an office eight or more hours a day.

My virtues were now liabilities. I adapted as best I could, cheered by the rare woman who was charmed by my deeply engrained way of behaving. I found “Ms.” easy because in the South we’d used “Miz” for both “Mrs.” and “Miss” before the feminists thought of it. (Not so the awkwardness of writing “his or her” instead of “his” as the general pronoun.) And there were other compensations. For the first time, a woman asked me to go out with her alone on a date, and not in a group. I loved that. After I’d gone out with a woman she might call me up instead of waiting to be phoned. A definite improvement. Occasionally, even, a date would not assume that I was paying for dinner, and I learned the advantages of going Dutch. Best of all, since it seemed that a lot of women were trying to be like men, and men were notoriously lustful and promiscuous, my life became much more pleasant than before. Yes, feminists, hate me! I give loud thanks that I was alive in the era which saw the inception of the bikini, the miniskirt, and women’s sexual liberation.

Just as “Women’s Lib” and the Feminist Movement (are they different?) went right by me while I wasn’t looking, I think something changed as the United States moved through the 1980’s and 1990’s. I stopped encountering women who got angry if I opened a door for them, or who got tangled in their jackets because no man had ever held a coat for them before. One woman even walked up to my car and waited at the passenger door until I opened it. Excellent.

Since I began blogging I’ve noticed more than before how much faster things have changed in the last hundred years than in previous centuries. This is as true of customs and manners and language and social attitudes as of technology. When, as a college student, I began looking for old books at library sales and used book shops, I developed a hobby of collecting old etiquette books. They made me laugh. The rules of etiquette which ruled my grandparents at the beginning of the 20th century (and even the more “modern” rules my mother would have read about when she was married in 1927) were so different from the rules of the 1960s and 70s that they seemed to reflect an entirely different world . . . which they did. (Click on "Emily Post" to see a reprint of her famous 1922 etiquette book.)

So, it gave me special pleasure to read Pink Ginger’s appreciation of a man’s courteous attention, and to know that what I was taught as a boy has not entirely vanished.