Apologies for the lag since my last post; I meant to get this out for the weekend. Here is another excerpt from my book, The Gentleman’s Guide to Manners, Sex, and Ruling the World (Sophia, 2021). This one addresses a gentleman’s public comportment, especially in the company of a lady.
You can buy the book on Amazon.com (paper or Kindle), but the publisher is currently offering a discount on the paperback: here. For a fuller description of the book, see my website, www.StephenBaskerville.com, and click on the book’s cover.
Going Out
In most circumstances, a gentleman allows a lady to go first, holds doors for her, helps her with her coat and with her chair, and walks on the curb side when accompanying her on the street. He allows a lady into the taxi first and then, barring heavy traffic, goes around to the other door, so that she does not have to slide across the taxi.
All these rules however have always been subject to qualification according to circumstances, and recent changes in the circumstances have qualified them even more severely. For example, a gentleman precedes the lady if there is likely to be any difficulty or danger. He precedes her going up the stairs, but follows her down the stairs. Technological and other changes have long made it easier for ladies to attend to matters like doors themselves, before the gentleman can, so oftentimes the offer or intention is enough.
More than that, however, is that changes in ideological fashion on the part of some ladies have rendered it positively hazardous for a gentleman to attend to these matters without risking a scolding. The fact that other ladies do not accept these changes in ideological fashion makes it equally hazardous for the gentlemen not to attend to these matters, at the risk of an unpleasant glare. Further, the prerogative of all ladies to accept or reject the changes in ideological fashion as they please and the fact that some please to do so inconsistently at different moments in the same afternoon places all men in a state of uncertainty and confusion. In these circumstances the gesture must suffice, and if the ladies who place themselves on the cutting edge of ideological fashion are offended then the best you can do is smile and tip your hat (an argument in favor of being one of the few remaining gentlemen that still wears one) in silence.1[1]
Further consequences of the ideological changes are that some ingrained and traditional habits of gentlemanly behavior nowadays can put you in a potentially troubling position. If you habitually allow women to enter first through doorways or on exiting elevators, you may inadvertently find yourself in a position of following a woman you do not know. You must not permit this to happen. (Some other marks of traditional gallantry may also have to be avoided nowadays, as we shall see.)2
In boxes at the opera, ballet, or theater (which of course a gentleman patronizes), which are typically allocated four seats to a box, the gentlemen take the two seats at the rear of the box and allow the ladies to occupy the two seats at the front, even when the couples are not acquainted with one another. This allows the ladies not only to see but also, and far more important, to be seen. The fact that some people (or computers) who sell tickets nowadays do not know this rule and will happily sell you the two seats in the front does not justify you in displacing another gentleman’s lady by occupying a front seat, displaying yourself and your black evening jacket to the audience while denying them the delightful sight of the lady and her beautiful dress.
[NB: The publishers made me remove the following paragraph, no doubt wisely. But I include it here to solicit readers’ suggestions for the next edition.]
(When the lady in question shows up to occupy the seat that you paid for attired in torn blue jeans and a T-shirt proclaiming, “I’M A B****. GET OVER IT,” you are not authorized to reclaim the seat but must content yourself with a momentary glare before settling yourself quietly alongside her companion of whatever “gender.” The lady accompanying you may be permitted a more extended glare, but we will leave that to the guidebooks for ladies.)
The most nuanced guide I have seen on the details of these matters is “The Anatomy of Etiquette” published some decades ago in Esquire Etiquette: A Guide to Business, Sports, and Social Conduct, especially the sections entitled “Your Hands” and “Your Feet,” parts of which I am summarizing. For example, he sensibly qualifies the rule about walking next to the curb by adding “when you can do it gracefully”:
It is better, however, to walk on the inside than to convert a simple stroll into a ballet: don’t cross back and forth behind her or be forever running around end just to get into position. The rule is supposed to be for her comfort and her safety; she finds nothing comfortable about talking to a whirling dervish, and nothing particularly safe about leading the way through traffic while you’re running around her heels.
Published in 1954 however, this guide hesitates to apply the rules to “modern women hipped on ‘independence,’” and already he is making the shift from ensuring that the woman benefits from the rules to allowing her to make and re-make them at whim: “Don’t expect her to be consistent,” he warns. “Just because she opened the last three doors, foiling all your efforts to play the gallant, don’t be surprised if she waits expectantly before yon magic-eye door. Your job is to be ready and willing at every door, and to let her specific conduct be your guide at each one.” The novel assumption is that the woman is, essentially by definition, always right, means that “the gesture is what counts with an independent dame.”
See below, “Sexual Harassment” [in the full book].