I have been reading etiquette books from the 1950s and 1960s. (Some aimed at children, some at teens.) A few are clearly school textbooks from health or home ec classes. I did not expect there to be so many etiquette books for children, and I sure didn’t expect so many to have been published in 1955. I was six, just beginning elementary school, and apparently the publishing world was already tapping into my parents’ anxieties about my future. I should say “my mother’s anxieties”, because it was Esther Barraclough who bought Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt’s books and consulted them before every unfamiliar social occasion. But before Emily and Amy, there were books just for me.

The books written for children emphasize manners (ways of behaving), with less detail about the rules of etiquette. They also address both boys and girls, usually equally. The desired behaviors - kindness, empathy, respect for elders - are illustrated regardless of gender. The one exception I have found so far is Being Nice is Lots of Fun (1955), which has twice as many male characters as female ones. The boys are also depicted negatively twice as often as the girls, exhibiting such behaviors as dawdling, crankiness, roughhousing, selfishness, stubbornness, and poor hygiene. The girls’ sins are fewer: grabbing things without asking, talking too much, and messiness, which is apparently so terrible that “Messie Bessie” appears in three of the book’s story poems.

More gendered advice kicks in with works for preteens and teens, along with more attention to the rules of etiquette. Most of the books for this age group either emphasize advice for girls or are specifically directed at them. In fact, only one of the nearly thirty books I consulted was primarily aimed at teenaged boys. I will discuss advice for this age group in a separate column.

In the meantime, enjoy this slide show of images from the children’s etiquette books.

My mother, bless her heart, tried hard to make me into a lady. Raised "genteel poor" (a preacher's kid in a family of ten), she relied on both Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt for insights into middle-class norms. My brother and I also read The Goops, though more for fun than guidance. The Goops ​offered this to little tangle-prone moppets like myself:

My mother didn't recite Burgess as she yanked the comb through my disobedient curls or poked my scalp with bobby pins during the Saturday night hair-setting ritual. She said, "You must suffer to be beautiful". That lesson would eventually apply to pointy-toed shoes, high heels, girdles and bras. And that was just for starters.

But at some point, I stopped believing that. There's grooming, and there's pain, and I am old enough to know the difference!

Like puberty, menopause has its highs and lows. And both have their promises for life-altering transformations. There are subtractions and additions, narrowings and deepenings. ​All in all, I'd say it's an interesting journey. In fact, more interesting than puberty. "Weird and uncomfortable"? Yes, but also amazingly fascinating. 

Most of us have heard Shakespeare's "seven ages of man" monologue from As You Like It.

**The beginning of my chapter reviewing the literature on aging, women, and fashion. Comments and suggestions are encouraged.
*I am actually 69 and 3 months, but will be 70 by the time this gets published.

I am working on Que Sera, Sera (aka Book 3, aka Age Appropriate), which should please all my patient readers out there. The first draft of the proposal is done, as is a very rough draft of the introduction. The glaring holes in my research are now clearly and uncomfortably visible, so I am renewing my effort to connect with American women who graduated from high school in 1967. If you want to participate in what I hope will be interesting discussions about your experiences from little girl to today, you can do the following:

Join my Facebook group, The Class of 1967.

Follow my Class on 1967 profile on Instagram.

​Please also share this with your high school classmates! I really want to cast a wide net!

I know, I know. I have complained about repetitive interview questions, but the truth is that is order for people to open their minds and let go of gender stereotypes, those of us who do this work must answer those questions over and over. Besides, every once in a while, we get one of those really fun interviews with someone we can share a laugh with, along with the information.


Last May, I had one of those interviews, with Shankar Vedantam of NPR’s Hidden Brain. We met at my local mall and strolled around the kids department in Macy’s, chatting about pink and blue, pockets/no pockets, and the missing character on the boys’ Star Wars T-shirts. (Can you guess who it was?) It was a double blast because inside I was fangirling like a twelve-year old. Hidden Brain is one of my favorite podcasts: smart, well-paced, and slickly produced like an audio documentary. And Shankar Vedantam is a great interviewer and host; being on his Rolodex was a dream come true.


So enjoy the podcast episode. Bonus: now I know how Lise Eliot (Pink Brain, Blue Brain) pronounces her name.

Thanks to UK retailer John Lewis, I was bombarded with media requests for interviews last week. That's generally a good thing, except it would be incredibly helpful if they didn't ask the same damn questions all the time. (Especially "Why is pink a girl color?" and "What's the problem with stereotypes?")

So this time I thought a few pictures might calm people down.

As recently as thirty years ago, parents had LOTS of choices for their children's clothing and toys. Strongly gendered clothes and toys are not "traditional". Nor are they necessary, until the objective is to multiply your profits by forcing people to buy boy and girl versions of things that could otherwise be handed down or shared. 

So chill. And don't even start with the "slippery slope" arguments. The world isn't about to end if girls wear camouflage or boys wear skirts. If it were, it would have already happened.