Storm Clouds Over Party Shoes: Etiquette Problems for the Ill-bred Woman

Lori A. Dunn is a freelance writer in New Westminster, British Columbia.

“If young girls could hear men discuss women and their ways, they
would cling to convention like a limpet to its rock.” This piece of
advice to the young women of 1948 is a typical example of the quotes
that Sheila Norgate, artist and self-described ill-bred woman, has
chosen to present in this entertaining little book. She describes the
books and articles of the time as a “bald and brazen exhibitionism of
a choking doctrine so perfectly internalized as to be only dimly
recognized as foreign.”

The collected quotes, which appear in conjunction with Norgate’s art,
poke fun at the “silly strictures” that women had to live under
during the postwar period. At the same time, they haunt and disturb.
Interestingly, most of the rules of etiquette presented in the book give
a negative view of the expectations that were placed on women and men
alike. Women were told, for example, that “a clever woman will not
long let a man remain in the role of audience. No matter how perfect her
performance may be, it cannot possibly be fascinating enough to keep his
mind off himself.”

A book of this kind inevitably raises the question of how future
generations will look on the 1990s. Will we measure up, or will our
mores appear as disquieting as those exhibited here?