Comments on: Proprieties and Usages of Good Society — Lesson II. Visitors in the Home

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:35:41 +0000

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

By: Moniker Challenged

Moniker Challenged — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 22:59:13 +0000

Timeless, but unfortunately not innate. If it were, we wouldn’t have to worry about an invitation for one turning into 12, or people randomly turning up on our doorsteps with train cases and rottweilers.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:34:07 +0000

One or two of the pieces in this set do talk about chaperones, ellen, but others concern women traveling alone — I think you’re right about this being the era for that change, with the expectation of chaperones being limited to activities like dancing and canyon outings where young people of both sexes were out and about together after dark. I haven’t identified any writer for these lessons (I actually think they were written by different women, due to some subject overlap and different writing styles), but the overall tone reminds me of Catherine Hurst of the Girl Query department, with the rules being generally common sense and hardly ever based on arbitrary, pro forma rules.

You’re right, Stephen, I’m a sucker for the subjunctive!

By: Stephen Taylor

Stephen Taylor — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:03:40 +0000

The writer uses the subjunctive and modes so well. How far down the ladder we (with the exception of Ardis) have descended.

By: ellen

ellen — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 02:58:17 +0000

these guidelines could have been spoken by my mother to me virtually unchanged. i don’t know that visits longer than overnight were particularly common for us growing up in the last half of the 1900′s, but for the most part this is the way it was for us.

i wonder when it was that young ladies no longer needed a chaperone to go out alone. it must have been right in this era somewhere.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:30:29 +0000

When I read a lesson, anywhere, that says “Don’t Do X,” I have to suppose that no matter how bizarre X is, the line was included because there were people who *did* do X. Typing this lesson reminded me of my mother once telling me about certain relatives who used to drop by her mother’s house (Grandma was almost the only sibling who lived in the city, which was a big draw to her country-dwelling siblings in the ’20s and ’30s) unannounced, and who would stay for indeterminate, usually lengthy, times, expecting to be waited on as if they were staying at a hotel and fed as if there were no Depression. I don’t know how Grandma finally cured her relatives of this bad habit — I suspect that Depression hunger probably forced her to be blunt — but this part of the YLMIA lessons rings true to me as something the girls were familiar with for which they needed a better, more courteous model.

By: Eric Boysen

Eric Boysen — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:33:55 +0000

Pretty good rules to follow even today, though no doubt not well followed. I have had a few house guests. . .