It was a perfect autumn day in Manhattan when we stumbled across this piece of history. We were walking through the East Village neighborhood and came across a storefront plainly labeled “Cookbooks.”
A cozy, underground shop with soft orange lighting, books were spilling out of every shelf and crevice and composed tiny piles throughout its interior. I was immediately drawn to the cookbooks of the mid-century, including several original editions of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child and contributors.
However, upon asking the shop owner what her oldest book was, volumes from eras even further back emerged from behind her cash register. Yellowed pages on the brink of slipping out of their worn leather shells. Of all the century-old books the shop carried, we decided to take one home: The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility by Emily Thornwell, originally published in 1857 in New York.
In one of my gender studies classes in college, we talked a great deal about archives and how to read between the lines of them. Hundreds of years ago, when scholars, historians, and other “important” people were transcribing history, they didn’t always take care to document the lives of marginalized groups of people with as much care, detail, and neutrality as they did groups in power. And documents marginalized groups made about their own communities or in favor of counter-cultural movements didn’t often survive as wholly as those made by privileged groups who had more resources at their disposal.
Thus, researchers must read between the lines of documents some might consider more peripheral to gain a greater understanding of population sects of a certain time. For example, it’s not uncommon for researchers to analyze advertisements geared toward 1950s housewives to gain a better understanding of the challenges they faced during that era based on the gadgets and appliances being peddled their way.
In any case, primary documents that fit the status quo seem to survive. And, particularly in the case of this etiquette book, there are many ways to read a text. Many different identities, time periods, and values can be put into conversation with a piece of writing.
Scholar Melissa Barrow shares that American etiquette manuals of the nineteenth century reflect powerful ideologies of that time, specifically a desire to act like the upper class, who were seen as the “ultimate symbol of refinement and ‘good breeding.’” These manuals covered all aspects of social life including cards of invitation, politeness, promenading, and more. Barrow shares that disregarding the rules laid out in these books had tangible, political changes. Etiquette manual writers had the power to create or destroy social norms.
The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility contains seven chapters: one on “agreeableness and beauty of person,” one on “manners in all the relations of home and society,” one on “female dress,” one on “the art of conversing with fluency and propriety,” another on “letter-writing,” another on knitting and needlework, and finally one on dress-making. Each chapter is further broken down into sub-sections, detailing rules for how elegant women must behave or perform in each of these domains.
Of note is the sheer amount of detail the book goes into regarding presentational and behavioral rules for women. You would think the target audience is an alien from another planet trying to acquaint itself with the culture of American women from scratch. Some of the sub-sections within the chapter on “agreeableness and beauty” include “Beauty must be natural,” “Requisites to female beauty,” “Pimples and wrinkles,” “Choice hair oils, washes, etc.,” and “Means of securing a beautiful tint to the lips.” Other sub-sections include “Low and vulgar associations,” “Suitable colors for white and blonde complexions,” “A lady’s influence in conversation,” and “How a lady should speak of her husband.”
Many in modern-day American culture would likely dismiss the contents of this book as overly fussy, unnecessary, and even backward or offensive. Many liberal folks are quick to look back on the suffocating corsets, impractical petticoats, and lack of women’s suffrage in the United States of the nineteenth century and think “Look at how far we’ve come! Women can vote and wear pants now!” And to an extent, they would be right. Many inhabitants of the United States are better off today than they would have been in the nineteenth century thanks to social, cultural, and even technological progress.
At the same time, I’m a firm believer that within a patriarchal society - or a country whose systems and institutions were embedded with prejudice at its conception - patriarchy doesn’t necessarily disappear, but rather reinvent itself. Many of the backward values simply find new forms of camouflage, like a predator adapting to its environment to better hunt its prey.
The beauty and behavioral culture laid out in The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility is not so different from the beauty and behavioral culture of the twenty-first century Internet. It’s just that instead of looking to etiquette books to learn how to dress, apply makeup, take care of their skin and hair, and talk to potential romantic partners, women are turning to social media.
Makeup tutorials, skincare routines, shopping hauls, and product reviews on YouTube. Get Ready With Me and Outfit of the Day videos on TikTok. A multi-billion dollar global cosmetic industry. All prescribing women with the right tools and behaviors to be seen as the most beautiful and well-behaved versions of themselves. Just like etiquette books.
On the first page of The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility, Thornwell writes about women and natural beauty:
“A fair skin and rosy cheek are calculated to excite admiration; but if it be discovered that they are entirely produced by paint, that admiration becomes disgust; or if owing to disease, it is changed to pity.”
I mean, is she not talking about the Glossier Cloud Paint?
The values have simply adapted to fit a new, digital mold.
From 1857 to 2022, women have been told that their “Beauty must be natural” or at least look natural if it contains artificial pigments and fillers. We’ve been taught to fret about “Pimples and wrinkles,” entirely natural human phenomena. Learning to police our speech, worry about men’s opinions, and, of course, be concerned with the “requisites” for our beauty have been ingrained into us and generations of women that came before us.
As with the etiquette manuals of the nineteenth century, the beauty culture we consume today is a means to maintain social norms. Norms that keep women clawing towards a completely optimized and intentionally non-existent version of themselves that encourages them to spend thousands of dollars a year on cosmetic products. Norms that convince women that their beauty and youth are so valuable that they should go to extreme lengths to protect it, including exuberantly throwing money to unethical corporations, shifting focus from more long-term forms of gratification, and in the case of Kim Kardashian, even considering eating poop. Norms that exact control.
Most parts of American women’s lives are better off today than they were in the nineteenth century. Can economic and political freedom help liberate women? Of course. But we have by no means “completed feminism.” “Completing feminism” is not as simple as handing a woman a ballot, a briefcase, and a pair of pants. We somehow think making women more like stereotypical men will free them and grant them more respect. But that is simply putting a Band-Aid on a larger, systemic issue that promotes “femininity” as deficiency.
At the same time, we also set up increasingly complicated beauty obstacle courses for women to jump through. Each year, as soon as women get closer to the “finish line,” the ultimately optimized womanly form, the beauty benchmark jumps to another place. One that requires more financial and technical intervention to reach.
But hey, women can now earn the money to pay for their cosmetic products and treatments and have the ability to drive themselves to drugstores, Sephora, and plastic surgery consultations all on their own.
That’s freedom, right?
The root causes of issues women of the nineteenth century faced - gender-based violence, disproportionate unpaid labor in the home, workplace discrimination, and impossible appearance requisites to name a few - are the same as the issues modern women are facing.
We’ve come far. But just how far?
If etiquette manuals of the nineteenth century speak to the dominant, patriarchal ideologies of that era, what will future historians say of the digital beauty archives we’ve created today? If we keep feeding, poking, and consuming the Internet beauty beast as we have been, chances are the conversations won’t look too different.
Best article yet !!!! So much to think about ?