How To Behave

[cronus]

Found this book on late Victorian etiquette....hilarious the codified manners and rules they had to live by in those times.

Shall scan and post a few pages later. Notice where the light bulb is on this guys head? Going up the dancers... Subtle or what...? A warning for vigilant ladies.

[Jason]

Shulamith Firestone, in her book The Dialectic of Sex which is one of the seminal feminist texts, has it that such rules of social discourse evolved as part of a woman's defence against the predation of men and one of the only barriers they had at the time against complete subjugation to the male will. She argues that these rules set the board for a game which, in its course and through proper observation of the rules, redressed the cultural imbalance of power between male and female (in courtship only) and afforded women the opportunity to select their master for life, for that is what the male became for the female through marriage, at leisure and perhaps even with some pleasure in the undertaking. She argues further that the deconstruction of these social constructions of etiquette was a step backward in so far as women were stripped of one of their few social defenses against the purely sexual predation of men on women that occurs in modernity.

Interesting stuff.

[cronus]

This book is by the famous pre-feminist Flora Klickmann (1898)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Klickmann

Interesting stuff. Folks of a altogether different calibre in the old days. Country went to the dogs in the sixties and beyond. That 'counter-culture' generation has a lot to answer for, nothing except cultural vandals really.

[Hermit]

Sounds like a load of cobblers to me.

Etiquette, at least as decribed in the book Scumple found, is a classist thing. The pretentious courtesies are supposed to more clearly differentiate the emerging bourgeoisie from the unwashed masses and make it look more closely related to the ruling strata, the top of which of course was royalty living in courts. Hence the name 'courtesy'.

Etiquette itself is derived from France, where small cards written or printed with instructions for how to behave properly at court were distributed to occasional guests. They were known as tickets or étiquettes.

Progress os sorts, I suppose, compared to previous modes of 'courting'.

[Jason]

It's clearly a bourgeois cultural artifact; that isn't to say that Firestone isn't correct in her analysis of its role and effect on the power balance in courtship rituals of the upper class. I'm sure women of the proletariat were far too terrified of starving on the street and having to turn to prostitution to engage in such a leisurely ritual.