Last week a story about a role-playing assignment in medieval history that forced women students into subservient roles to men appeared in the New York Times. (Be sure to read it.) Part of the study of Beowulf, this particular assignment at Shallowater High School in Texas is no longer on the curriculum after complaints. Rather than discuss the appropriateness of classroom role-playing, Etiquetteer wants to seize on a couple other aspects of the story: how expectations for women have changed, and the need to dress up.
“The rules were part of an assignment from an English teacher who for years had used it to show students in her class how women were treated as inferiors under the chivalric code of medieval times,” according to the Times. But we don’t have to go back in history nearly that far for evidence of female subservience. The grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s high school students grew up in just such a system. Anybody who went to high school or college before Woodstock* could tell stories about girls needing to diminish their achievements so the boys could shine.
And that sort of behavior was thrust on girls even in their etiquette manuals. Bernice Bryant’s Miss Behavior: Popularity, Poise and Personality for the Teen-Age Girl of 1948 provides only one role model. No matter how smart, strong, or capable a young woman is, Mrs. Bryant would squash her into the mold of the Sweetheart — because at this point in history, just as in medieval times, a woman’s only valid career was marriage in service to a man. “You never hear a golden-voiced tenor or a velvet-toned bass sing about the smartest girl or the strongest girl or the most sophisticated girl in the world. No, they tweet about the sweet. Thus it was, thus it is, and thus it always shall be. Why? Because that’s the plan of things.”
To which Etiquetteer can only respond with a phrase of the period: “Nuts to that!” While there is some good advice here and there in Miss Behavior, the oppressive need to conform to a feminine ideal swamps it.
One of the women students at Shallowater observed “I really don’t think it was the teacher’s intention to have it be such a sexist lesson. There were girls that were excited to get to do this finally and get to dress up.” Getting to dress up, once known as “getting dressed,” has become a casualty of the Casual. And you can’t know how to dress up if you never get the chance! How would it be, Etiquetteer wonders, if schools without a uniform dress code started a tradition of Formal Friday to make the practice of wearing one’s best clothes both fun and routine. In the last 50 years women have shown us that “frocks and heels” are not the only way to dress up; the pants suit ranks as one of the most revolutionary fashion changes of the last century . . . and Etiquetteer knows very well that women now will not be told what to wear by men anyway.
The suit and tie remains the dressed-up standard for men, though its absence from the workplace, even before the pandemic quarantine, was fading faster than the glaciers of Greenland. A young man’s first suit is still a rite of passage, and Etiquetteer just isn’t going to give up on it yet.
Role-playing may (or may not) have its place in classroom teaching, but learning how our behavior and expectations have evolved in recent history is just as important as that of long ago.
*Etiquetteer always uses Woodstock as the watershed moment that changed Perfect Propriety forever, but there were many Great Events in the late 1960s and early 1970s that could also be used.