Emily Post: Ettiquette Queen

Stuff You Should Know

This episode explores the life and enduring legacy of Emily Post, the woman who redefined etiquette for the modern era. The hosts detail her

Key takeaways

• Emily Post's philosophy focused on 'good society' through ethics rather than wealth or lineage.
• Her seminal work, 'Etiquette', was a massive bestseller that underwent numerous updates to stay relevant.

Main topics

• Emily Post's biography
• Evolution of social etiquette

Notable quotes

Just because you have money doesn't mean that you are respectable. You have to have a grounding in ethics no matter who you are.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how Emily Post's focus on fundamental courtes

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Iwano. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa DiGiulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of New Shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get Speaker 3 (0:32) your podcasts. Speaker 3 (0:35) Self-care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone and maybe ask, why am I like this? I'm Gemma Speck, host of the Psychology of Your 20s podcast. And this month, we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety. Confidence, relationships, and attachment. Sometimes our biggest decisions, without us even realizing it, aren't driven by what we truly want, but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (1:17) So like by age 11 or so, at least 70 % have a phone. Speaker 7 (1:21) I'm Dr. Joy, and this is Therapy for Black Girls. We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kid's brain, their group chats, and their friendships, and what you can do about it. Speaker 1 (1:32) Your child is not doing this on purpose. Speaker 7 (1:35) That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for a living. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 8 (1:47) Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 4 (1:57) Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, keeping us proper. And this is Stuff You Should Know, the Sit Up Straight edition. Speaker 5 (2:08) I got to say, after this, researching this, I am a big fan of Emily Post. Speaker 4 (2:13) Yeah, she's a surprisingly cool person, especially for somebody who literally wrote a book on etiquette. Speaker 5 (2:21) Yeah, I didn't know much about any of this. And now I'm like, I want to know about her number one fan. I'm sure there's one person on planet Earth that likes her more than me. Sure. Speaker 4 (2:30) Maybe number two, we'll say. Three. All right. But yeah, still a big fan. Are you going to buy the book, the blue book? Speaker 5 (2:37) I mean, I probably should. I'm sure it goes to something like her foundation or I want to support her financially still years after her passing. Speaker 4 (2:46) That'll do it. I know that I read some think pieces on people who went and read that book and were like lessons I learned from reading this book. And it's pretty much roundly described as lovely, charming. Yeah. And also useful still, because one of the things that set her apart is. Because of the way she approached etiquette and rules of etiquette and how to learn social graces, it was like a progressive way of doing it. So she was able to basically say, this is what's really important. So a lot of the stuff that she talks about is completely applicable today. Speaker 4 (3:26) Some Speaker 5 (3:27) might say more Speaker 2 (3:28) so. Speaker 4 (3:28) Yeah, Speaker 2 (3:28) more needed Speaker 4 (3:30) for sure. Speaker 5 (3:31) Yeah. So, I mean, they had etiquette guides for sure. It's not like she, even though, you know, you might commonly hear people say she literally wrote the book on etiquette. She did, but she wrote one of the many books on etiquette. Hers was a little bit different than the others in a lot of ways that, you know, that we're Speaker 1 (3:49) going Speaker 5 (3:49) to talk about kind of here and there. But one of the big ways is she was all about ethics. And as we'll see, you know, we're going to detail her life. She was born into money, but she was basically like, hey, listen, just because you have money doesn't mean that you are respectable. You have to have a grounding in ethics no matter who you are. And if you don't have money and if you're, you know, not born into like a great family or something, then that doesn't mean you can't be a part of what she called good society. You just have to know like. You have to be grounded in ethics and how to know, like, how to keep a clean house and how to behave with manners. Speaker 4 (4:27) Yeah, which is kind of groundbreaking because up to that point, most etiquette books were basically like, this is what the ultra rich expect of you if you're in their presence. And if you don't do that, you're going to embarrass yourself. So memorize all of these. And she definitely turned it on its head, which, as you said, her being a society or socialite, I guess, herself was really something. She had like the. the background to basically say, no, there's a better way to do this. Not coming from the outside, she was on the inside and that helped. Speaker 5 (4:55) Yeah. And also like she wasn't so stodgy that she didn't embrace change when it was like kind of clearly happening. And as we'll see, you know, this book she started to write and came out during the Roaring Twenties. So it was a lot of people, including her sons, thought like. This probably isn't the right time for this kind of thing. Like that kind of stuff is old fashioned. And she just said, just hold my tea and I'll take care of this. Speaker 4 (5:18) Yeah. So the U.S. in particular has long had a preoccupation with etiquette for a big reason. One is we established our country as a society of equals. There's not an aristocracy, which is where. people received their etiquette from, say, in like England or the UK. You just did what the aristocrats did or, you know, that was your etiquette. We don't have an aristocracy here. So it was like the wealthy. And like I said, up to that point, up to the point of Emily Post, the wealthy were just like, or etiquette books were like, here's what the wealthy tell you to do. The problem is, is there are a lot of people in the middle class who were kind of working their way up because in the United States, wealth equals aristocracy, not being born with a title. And those people resented the heck out of the upper classes who were just ready and waiting to embarrass them when they slipped up. And so Emily Post came and was like, hey, like you said, you don't have to be born wealthy. You don't have to. Your ancestors didn't have to come on the Mayflower. Anybody. can learn etiquette and everybody should practice good etiquette. And that was, again, revolutionary. Speaker 5 (6:26) Yeah, for sure. So she was born into a rich family, like I said, her dad, Bruce Price, she was born Emily Price in October of 1872. But her dad was a pretty prominent architect in Baltimore. Her mom, Josephine Lee Price, was an heiress to a coal fortune. And she was basically an only child. She very sadly had a brother who died in infancy. So she was raised an only child. And at five, they moved to New York City. And they were a part of the good society there because they had money. They were not part of that of what was called the 400, which was the super elite upper crust that, you know, a lot of them had aristocratic lineage. But she was in New York and like going to finishing school, that kind of thing. Speaker 4 (7:12) Yeah. And you mentioned the 400. I read that that was a way for this elite upper class of old money and old lineage to differentiate themselves from the newly minted wealthy people who were starting to rub elbows with them. That list was one way to do it. Another way to do it was to found a little village called Tuxedo Park. a little north of New York City. And it was created as like an enclave, an escape for the incredibly wealthy old money to get away from new money. And I want to preface this, Chuck, by telling everybody I'm not making this up, but Tuxedo Park in New York is where the tuxedo came from, a.k.a. the dinner jacket. Speaker 5 (7:57) That's right. And her dad in 1885 built four cottages there. And, you know. Cottage is a loose description. These are very lovely, very large homes that he built. I looked him up and I was expecting, you know, what I think of as a cottage. Right. Same. Which is something like 1,200 square feet. These are big, beautiful houses. Tuxedo Park looks amazing. I would love to visit there one day, in fact. But he built four of these, rented out three of them, used one for the family. And, you know. Speaker 5 (8:32) Everyone started like going there in the summers and some people started living there year round and the Prices were one of those families. Speaker 4 (8:40) Yeah. And Emily was just doing basically everything that was expected of her. Like you said, she went to finishing school and at age 17, she premiered at a debutante ball. I think this is 1889. Following the script perfectly, she met her future husband at that debutante ball. His name was Edwin Post, and he didn't come from a ton of money, but he could trace his lineage back pretty far to old New Amsterdam. So he had that going for him. And Emily brought the money to the marriage. This is apparently not unusual at the time. And they just went ahead and had two sons, Ned and Bruce. I guess Bruce the Two, the Deuce. Speaker 2 (9:20) Bruce the Deuce. It got there eventually. Would they call him? How do you handle that if you're just named after a grandparent? I Speaker 4 (9:27) think they differentiated him by calling him Bruce Lee Post. Oh, is that it? I don't know. Speaker 2 (9:35) Different last name. Little Bruce, Old Bruce, Wrinkly Bruce, Chubby Bruce. Who knows? I didn't Speaker 5 (9:41) know if there was an official way Speaker 2 (9:42) you honor someone besides just the name. I think it's the second. Is it really? I thought that was just if you're named after your parent. That's Junior. Oh, okay. So it's the second, huh? I believe so. I'm making Speaker 4 (9:55) this up as I go along, but it's based on 50 years of paying attention on Earth. Speaker 2 (10:00) I got you. So that's my problem. What? Don't pay attention. That is not true. I probably would have picked this up. You just pay attention to stuff that's important to you. Speaker 5 (10:10) So, yeah, Ned was born in 1893 and Bruce II, Deuce Bruce, Bruce the Deuce, was born in 1895. Very... I guess she didn't have a very good marriage. Edwin doesn't seem like a very good dude. He was into sailing. She was prone to seasickness. So they didn't spend a lot of time together, like with shared passions. Yeah. At one point he said that he had committed matrimony and was sentenced to life for it. So not cool to say something like that. And when her dad died, she was, she was a daddy's girl for sure. Very close to her father. When he died in 1903 on his deathbed, Apparently she had, you know, a flair for writing and he said, you should go write like do that. That's what you're passionate about. And over the next year after he passed away, she wrote and published her first novel, The Flight of the Moth. Speaker 4 (11:04) Yes. It's like a society novel about a woman who falls in love with a man who's already engaged. And this is actually one of six novels that she wrote, some of which were really popular. I only saw that one was. poorly reviewed. One was mixed reviewed and the other four were pretty well received. So she was a good writer, a fiction writer. And that's what she wanted to be. Unfortunately, as her career's taking off, her marriage is deteriorating. Edwin's love of his ship or boating and her seasickness is not their only incompatibility. One of the big ones I think you could probably point to was him cheating on her all the time. Yeah. And He was the kind who I think didn't make too much of a secret of it. I don't think he talked about it openly because it's not clear whether she had full knowledge of it before he finally told her. But the reason he finally told her is because he was being blackmailed. And rather than submit to this blackmailing scheme that had been going on for a while, he decided he was going to be the hero of their circle of friends. I guess most of whom had been blackmailed as well and exposed the blackmailers. The problem is, is like this brought tremendous amounts of shame onto their marriage and onto Emily in particular. Speaker 5 (12:24) Yeah. I mean, I guess hell hath no fury like a man being blackmailed because he was willing to throw it all away. Yeah. And, you know, embarrass. I guess he didn't feel too much embarrassment, but definitely embarrass Emily. with all this stuff. Later on, she would basically say that they agreed that they would, you know, expose the blackmailers as a sort of a team. But according to her biographer, Laura Claridge, that was just something she said to sort of make it look better, like she had some agency, because apparently. He just said, hey, I'm doing this and that's going to happen. Speaker 4 (13:03) Yeah, he was basically like, heads up,