So it is no surprise that in such a vortex of change, while some women spent their energies practicing the latest dance with their daughters, early feminists met in Washington, D.C., to discuss women’s rights. Their 1888 meeting was a sometimes exhausting rehash of what the Women’s Rights Convention had tried to accomplish back in the autumn of 1853. Then a still young and optimistic Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had led the national delegates, demanding not just voting rights but complete equality with men. Fifteen years later, in 1868, the women’s writers group Sorosis was allowed to meet at Delmonico’s, seeding the movement for women’s clubs.
Josephine and her friends talked about the shocking independence of some of the erstwhile socialites from their own circle, including J. Pierpont Morgan’s daughter Anne, whose radical tendencies already worried her more conservative father and irritated her older sister, Juliet. The brashness of Elsie de Wolfe and Cora Potter too, as they defiantly took to the New York stage, would track a seismic change in women’s opportunities. Increasingly, if slowly, Emily would come to understand the politics of women’s freedom. Certainly any courage she might have summoned to develop her talents would have been quashed by the monthly ridicule the press heaped on the Sorosis Club meetings, as columnists scoffed at the women’s quest for civic clout and cartoonists mocked their appearance.
For now, Emily agreed with Juliet Morgan: she didn’t support such bizarre behaviors on the part of their sex. She assumed that money and marriage—to someone, she hoped, like her father—would set her free. They would grant her independence, allowing her to become an adult at last. That was the reality she was focused on now, with no time to waste on silly fantasies of joining a man’s world. Emily and her friends, including Juliet Morgan, struggled at least twice a week to master the complete set of complicated dance steps of the German. She hardly had a chance to miss her father, who was spending much of 1888 in Montreal. In contrast to the routines of her past, she visited him only once or twice, too intent now on preparing at Miss Graham’s for her debut.
How to enter the young Emily Post’s mind, in the context of her culture and the expectations of her parents? It is hard not to expect more of her, given her opportunities, good mind, and evident curiosity about her father’s career. She could have pursued opportunities that her talents clearly suggested she could master. There were already singular women entering professions long assumed to be male: medicine, ministry, and the law. Colleges such as Vassar, founded in 1861, Wellesley (1870), and Smith (the following year, the year before Emily was born), had forced even rich socialites who spent their time directing their servants and plotting their social lives to confront, however privately, other options.
But though the leaders of the women’s movement throughout history often emerged from privileged families, most upper-class women saw no purpose in upending their comfortable lives. The majority regarded the nascent women’s movement with well-bred distaste. At this point in her life, Emily was ambivalent about women’s place in society. She would come to an awareness of their second-class status only as the twentieth century disentangled itself from the late Victorian age.
CHAPTER 12
You are a young girl on the evening of your coming-out ball. You are excited, of course you are! It is your evening, and you are a sort of little princess! There is music, and there are lights, and there are flowers everywhere—a great ballroom massed with them, tables heaped with bouquets—all for you! You have on an especially beautiful dress—one that was selected from among many others, just because it seemed to you the prettiest. Even your mother and married sister who, “en grande tenue,” have always seemed to you dazzling figures, have for the moment become, for all their brocades and jewels, merely background; and you alone are the center of the picture. Up the wide staircase come throngs of fashionables—who mean “the world.” They are coming on purpose to bow to you! You can’t help feeling that the glittering dresses, the tiaras, the ropes of pearls and chains of diamonds of the “dowagers,” the stiff white shirt-fronts and boutonnières and perfectly fitting coats of the older gentlemen, as well as the best clothes of all the younger people, were all put on for you.
—ETIQUETTE, page 276
SHE LIVED IN THE EMOTIONAL THICK OF FAMILY ADORATION: HER father approved and loved her, her mother assessed as first-rate her chances for a good marriage—even the Pierre Lorillards had anointed her their favorite. An only child with Tuxedo Park for her late-adolescence drawing room, Emily had used her father’s creation as the ultimate finishing school, surpassing anything Miss Graham’s could offer. The darling of the park’s residents, she spent her winters skating on the frozen lake, appearing, though less frequently, on the impressive amateur stage Bruce had built, attending the autumn ball and practicing her dance steps with affectionate family friends, older gentlemen rather than the young bucks with whom she shared hot chocolate at the clubhouse.
Now she was ready to conquer the field of female competition. She was going up against the best, vying to gain the most attention, the choicest gossip, the champion husband. Just when her excitement at being Tuxedo Park’s resident princess was wearing thin, Emily turned to a year of designing her own evening dresses, perfecting her dancing, experimenting with hairstyles, and exercising regularly to strengthen her stamina. Her days were suddenly busy with purpose.
EUROPEANS COULD BE excused for their confusion as they witnessed uppercrust Americans modeling their habits upon those of the defeated mother country. After the Revolutionary War, republican social leaders, most surprisingly among them Abigail Adams, had almost immediately replicated the same customs the new country supposedly disdained—habits that smacked of privilege and class. When presented at the court of St. James’s in 1785, Abigail had written home with disgust about the whole sorry spectacle her new country had, thankfully, transcended. Yet on New Year’s Day sixteen years later, she’d appeared at the first formal White House reception as an English clone, imitating the very stiffness she had earlier excoriated, even bowing instead of shaking hands the American way. Her husband had emitted equally confusing signals: for their magisterial party, John Adams wore velvet knee britches and powdered hair, fashions more redolent of London than Philadelphia or Washington.
The English court, the motherland, had unintentionally controlled the way the new country’s social set measured worth. Impoverished nobility seemed a fair exchange to a rich American girl: money for a title. The post–Civil War wealth of railroads and finance funded most of the debutantes in Emily’s day seeking to be presented at the court of St. James’s. Their oft-innocent eagerness inspired old-schoolers like Henry James to tsk-tsk at their sometimes embarrassing ignorance abroad. Old-line Knickerbocker Edith Wharton practically sneered at the daring parvenus, so gauche, so obvious in their quest for a title.
But the newly wealthy were getting as good as they gave. They were investing in Old World class, with continuity and the implied link to important histories. After all, the “venerable” British custom of a young woman’s debut even included that most American of icons, Pocahontas. In 1616, this daughter of an Indian chieftain “came out” at the court of James I. Within a few generations of such efforts, if all went as planned, even a Native American’s granddaughters could be promoted to Old World status, the color of their skin long merged with the fairness of the Old World Dutch.
In Emily’s day, coming out was the linchpin for an upper-class girl’s entire future. The debut as we know it dates from 1870, when Delmonico’s sponsored the first debutante ball held outside the home. By the time Emily was ready to take center stage at the end of 1889, young women took their coming out as seriously as today’s students take their admission to college. Very few refused the unveiling. (Though the young Edith Wharton balked at the idea, in the end she simply sulked her way through the evening.) Nor did many object to being put on the market: it was, after all, no small matter to run households for men with great fortunes in those days, before the invent
ion of conveniences our own age takes for granted.
Thanksgiving traditionally marked the advent of the New York dance season, which ran from late November through February or March. Most of the magisterial “Assembly balls” were subscription only, with groups of similar-minded people selling tickets that would in turn repay the costs they had underwritten. The fanciest dances required no subsidy, and they were inevitably overseen by Ward McAllister, who sought to import pre–Civil War correctness and southern class into the uncivilized North. Mistakes cost friendships: if demand for one’s Madeira exceeded the host’s supply, the household’s reputation was ruined over the next morning’s breakfast gossip. By the time that Emily debuted, during the holiday season of December 1889, McAllister controlled who was in and who was out, far more effectively than any high school clique has ever managed to do.
Partly because he himself enjoyed dancing—and, for an ungainly, pudgy short man, performed the routines fairly well—McAllister incorporated ever more elaborate steps into the choreography he usually supervised. After all, the mother of Caroline Astor had imported the complicated dance ritual called the cotillion to the States before the Civil War. The ever-changing taxonomies of the day thwart even experts on dance history. One could either “attend a cotillion” or “dance a cotillion,” depending upon the favored vocabulary of the season. Other times the same dance was termed simply a German or, sometimes, a quadrille.
Whatever the nomenclature, the result was a four-to six-hour-long, heavily plotted production wherein only dancers who had seriously practiced the steps could hope to take part. The successful execution of the dances themselves, let alone the exhibition of any real skill, was impossible without long lessons. Dances at the society balls were no small matter, the stakes for the participants high. The ability to dance well was such a serious concern that almost three decades later, Emily Post would kindly but firmly advise any young woman with two left feet to stay at home and limit her socializing to afternoon teas. That way, she would avoid being the rejected wallflower at the dance. In Emily’s youth, the cotillions were always led by an important male society figure, recycled throughout the season.
The format for the intricate evening dances was boringly consistent, at ball after ball. Several of the events called for special costumes, which needed to be meticulously planned in advance. After the guests arrived, a grand march officially opened the ball, with couples circling the ballroom in a slow procession. The guests then danced for a few hours, all ages joining in the day’s popular steps: the quadrille, the lancers, the waltz, and the schottische. The gentleman held the lady at a respectable distance, and older guests and the official chaperones spent the evening talking and waiting for dinner to be served.
The dancing paused while guests sat down to the evening repast. They expected to encounter an appropriately light meal, if they were lucky, or, if they were not, a menu of terrapin (hard-shelled freshwater turtles) and canvasback duck, in danger of being overhunted. In his earlier days of planning society’s galas, Ward McAllister had included a boiled sheep’s head with hollandaise sauce, but it failed to elicit the response he desired and so the menu reverted to type.
Debutantes were taught to eat lightly on dance days, if they planned to show off their trim waistlines. After everyone finished dining, the men downed their cordials and smoked their cigars while the ladies attended to their toilette. Then the heat cranked up. The cotillion began in earnest, several hours of choreographed dances cantilevering seamlessly one upon the other.
The German, at least in one of its many semantic variations, was really four or five separate dances consisting of highly regulated formal steps, closer to what we today call a square dance than anything else. The figures of the German could include any number of combinations, depending upon the calls: the Fan, the Ladies Mocked, Blindman’s Buff, the Cards, the Ropes, the popular Mother Goose (where a prominent society matron would usually appear dressed as the Mother, with a live goose under her arm), the Dresden (with the dancers acting out pieces of china place settings), the Mirror (which the men hated because they were presented, one by one, to a prospective partner until she chose her favorite), and the Hobbyhorse, which one cynic has wryly called the most suggestive, with “whips and all.” At Alva Vanderbilt’s famous party in 1883, two of the ladies, wearing gold-spurred, shiny black boots, had even fallen off the overly rambunctious men they were riding.
To New York’s unmarried girl in white, trying not to fidget with her abnormally long gloves as she waited her turn for a spotlighted waltz on the floor, there was one aim of this whole encounter, which everyone understood. Tonight these girls were going on the market. They needed to be among the ones chosen for marriage, usually quickly arranged within a year or so of their debut. Otherwise, they risked being passed over, left behind as part of the also-ran group. The pressure was intense, the occasion fraught. Unless you knew that you’d be the star.
BY THE BEGINNING of 1889, the year that would end with her debut, Emily had already spent several winter seasons in New York society. She felt constrained by her repetitive city routine, for the most part just more of the same classes at Miss Graham’s—plus the inevitable practice in deportment.
In January, the endless sessions of dance lessons had turned serious. Emily’s nervous friends filled up their weeks with different classes or actual dances nightly: Ward McAllister’s Family Circle Dancing Class, the Assemblies, the Patriarchs, the Tuesday Night Dancing Class, the Wednesday Class, the Thursday, and so on. Although one could not predict the steps a dance master would call for his German, there were certain expected standards. Those routines currently in favor clearly deserved extra practice. All in all, a limited number of “sets” existed, though at times it seemed a terrifyingly large list of choices. Practicing her steps between lessons was the most important homework assignment a young woman of the Gilded Age would ever complete.
Whether attending parties for her own crowd or for the older girls in the classes ahead of her, Emily would be accused by jealous young women of deliberately making a spectacle of herself. It was true that her imposing height of five feet nine, the gift of her tall father, gave her the edge in terms of immediate attention. She usually arrived late in the evening, around eleven o’clock, for a dinner served at midnight. But Emily really did tire easily. In the pictures of her from that time, doctors note her protruding eyes, possible evidence of a thyroid problem; the condition would affect her energy and her weight, another problem she began having within a few years of her debut. She found the social schedule she was required to keep burdensome, and she felt forced to attend only the most important dances. Even so, her days now passed in a flurry of activity.
Elsie de Wolfe remembered vividly, even after all the histrionics her life had undergone, her own debut almost ten years earlier than Emily’s: “My days were a whirl from shop to shop as I said good-by forever to plaids . . . and gathered brogans. There were silk stockings for eveningwear, and fine lisle for everyday. There was handkerchief-linen underwear and a real corset of white brocade, and Swiss embroidery corset-covers and voluminous petticoats starched until they could stand alone, and dresses of silk and satin and mouselline de soie and soft cashmere, tucked and ruffled and shirred in the elegant confusion of the styles of that day. There were hats, too, for every hour, and high-heeled shoes of kid and satin, and boxes of kid gloves of different lengths.”
Emily and her friends, finally graduated from the years of monotonous dance lessons, now faced months of tedious dress fittings, the seriousness of the couturiers reinforcing the purposefulness of their mothers. When their season arrived, the girls needed to have everything in order. Josephine, always frugal, discovered the best immigrant seamstresses available in New York to sew her daughter’s wardrobe; let the Astors order from Monsieur Worth if that’s how they wanted to spend their money. And money was at the heart of the fanciest balls: the favors at the grandest cotillions came from Tiffany’s or shops on the rue de la
Paix, grandly delivered to the twelve hundred guests gathered at Delmonico’s lavishly catered dinners.
On a clear December night in 1889, seventeen-year-old Emily Price was indisputably the belle of the ball, or at least one of the brightest blooms in a garden of rarefied flowers. As the Times noted, this dance brought together an unusually large number of distinguished society people in order to introduce several “fair” debutantes to their own. Tonight was the first exhibit of the season’s cotillion, the novelty of a new group always exciting. If she couldn’t be on a stage, this was an ideal venue for Emily Price.
At the beginning, Emily was put off her game by the late hour. Months earlier in Baltimore, she had been presented at a correct afternoon tea, where she wore a gown of white silk mull and lace and carried—with help—almost fifty bouquets sent to her by admiring friends. Up North, however, they did things differently. The opera had kept most of the socialites otherwise engaged until eleven-thirty, a late starting time even for the notorious New York dances, and an hour when Emily preferred to be in bed. But the very point of Gilded Age revelry, after all, was to dispel the notion that people worked for a living, meaning that the hours had gotten longer, not shorter, over the past few years.
Immediately acclaimed as one of the most beautiful debutantes ever, Emily was one of only two (or ten, depending upon whose account we believe) debutantes that season and the next who knew how to cross a ballroom. She had enjoyed participating in the design of her gowns, and now her stark white mousseline de soie with off-white embossed embroidery looked angelic and glamorous at the same time. Emily’s bodice was pulled even tighter than usual, her skirt a bit fuller, even diaphanous. Her delicate pale skin was heightened in color by the pink wax crayon she had used on her cheeks and mouth. Her dark hair was curled softly—not unnaturally, and not tortured into bangs and a tight chignon like the style chosen by some other debutantes that season. In the code for flowers that the late nineteenth century still used, the red roses twined through trellises throughout the ballroom symbolized a girl’s coming adult sexuality, and Emily Price certainly looked ripe to be plucked.
Emily Post Page 9
