Etiquette Books and Emotion Management in The 20th Century: Part One--The Integration of Social Classes

Abstract

This is a first report on a larger comparative study of changes in twentieth-century American, Dutch, English and German etiquette books. A central hypothesis is that major directional trends in dominant codes and ideals of behaviour and feeling, as reflected by changes in etiquette books, are closely connected with trends in power relationships and emotion management. In this century, an important common trend in all four countries has been the diminishing of differences in power and behaviour among all social groups; workers and women came to be represented in the centres of power and further integrated into society as national states became welfare states. This expansion and further integration of interdependency networks implied a diminishing of institutionalized as well as internalized power differences-that is, in social stratification and ranking. Inequalities, together with more extreme forms of social and psychic distance between people, have diminished, without losing importance. In the course of the twentieth century, direct references to differences in class, status and gender have diminished or even vanished from the codes and ideals of behaviour and feeling. Extremes in these codes and ideals, expressing large differences in power and respect, came to provoke moral indignation and were eliminated; within the subsequent narrower limits the codes have become more lenient, more differentiated and varied for a wider and more differentiated public: a process of informalization.l To what extent can this overall twentieth-century trend be specified for the relationships among the classes and between the sexes in the four countries under consideration? This has been the leading question for this study of etiquette books, which focuses on connections between changes in ranking and formality, and changes in emotion management, particularly with regard to feelings of superiority and inferiority. My reading and collecting of Dutch etiquette books began in the late 1960s, but for this international study I have had to develop an overview of the literature with the help of existing bibliographies, bringing them up-to-date where necessary.2 I then selected my sample of etiquette books, the main criterion being whether a book had gained wider recognition, that is, whether it was reprinted. From these and other books,3 I compared what was written on relationships between people of different rank (or class) and sex. The first two parts of this study will focus mainly on similarities since their central hypothesis covers broad developments and common trends, leaving a fuller description of differences between countries and periods to a later date. Questions regarding national and temporal differences, for instance why the English are more formal in informal