Mind the Chaperone: Women, Independence, and Etiquette in 1913

Join Libricola in going back in time and exploring the topic of women's etiquette in the early 1900s!

Somewhere, my New York grandparents acquired Putnam’s Handbook of Etiquette from 1913. They certainly weren’t part of high society, but I love having this doorway into the past. A quick internet search provided no information about author Helen Lefferts Roberts or the name Putnam, but that’s another rabbit hole. Available on Google Books and in print, it’s described as a helpful manual of manners and hospitality. That’s hilarious. It’s helpful if you’re a character in an Edith Wharton novel or in the series The Gilded Age.

The book was published in the last decade of the suffragist movement, whose Boston and New York leaders my colleague Anticus compared in the blog this month. Suffragists came from many backgrounds, particularly the upper-class world tightly bound by tradition that Roberts describes. Whole chapters cover the intricacies of paying afternoon calls. Know when to serve the eel dish in a 14-course formal dinner? Or how to introduce your great-uncle to the Bishop on the sidewalk? Or what to tip your host’s valet when staying at his summer house? Chapters cover behavior for travel, courtship, christenings, RSVPing to luncheon parties, and more. What a vivid, detailed primary source for this particular slice of America. 

Roberts demands conformity to society’s rules with the cheerfulness of a fairy godmother presenting the pumpkin coach to a longed-for ball. Of course, falling short could mean ostracism and disaster: this is a survival manual, too.

Then the reader arrives at the chapter “Etiquette for Spinsters,” and the mind is a bit blown. It lays out rules for unmarried women who don't have “natural chaperonage,” including motherless society girls but also professional women with their own households. It mixes rigid tradition with the acknowledgment that some elite women live independently as teachers, artists, or writers. 

Roberts “insists, and very rightly, upon the presence of the chaperone as a means by which great dignity and security are lent a…lady’s position.” A girl may not attend “a concert, theatre, opera, a reading in hotel rooms, a charity fair, horse show, or races” alone or with a young man, unless chaperoned. No unmarried woman may eat in a restaurant alone with a man, unless he is an elderly longstanding friend of her family.

Yet Roberts does excuse the professional woman from some rules. She is “naturally not required to follow all the laws laid down for chaperonage,” but neither “does the self-supporting woman claim a man’s freedom.” She may host mixed-gender gatherings at home, but she should have a married or much older female friend there. Male guests may smoke, but she may not, nor may she supply tobacco. She may only serve non-alcoholic beverages. “To go beyond this point,” Roberts declares, “is confessedly to overstep…and pass into bohemia…”  Throughout this chapter, Roberts holds up the warning finger about tipping over that edge.

Starting in the 19th century, Greenwich Village was a center of the counterculture bohemian movement: non-traditional, artistic, politically progressive. New, even radical, ideas about women’s lives and rights grew there. Roberts fully accepts women who live in the boundary space between tradition and change. She implies she knows that any professional writer or artist who reads her book will have acquaintances and friends in artistic bohemia. Yet she still instructs these women on participating in traditional elite society. It’s easy, and fascinating, to imagine ideas crossing the border with these women, who lived their lives in both worlds.