The days are short and cold but sunny and bright with yellow leaves. Yesterday I very much enjoyed my walk to the post office. There I posted a thank you note (written on a postcard) and a long letter written on notepaper.
Mrs Humphry's Manners for Men (1897) thinks "over-ornament" in the "embossed or printed" address on personalized notepaper is "in the worst taste," and I have just had a nervous look at mine. I think Mrs Humphry might say it would do for a lady, but teal ink is pushing the boundaries.
Mrs Humphry doesn't have much to say about writing invitations, except that sending them out three weeks before the planned dinner party is "usual." Sarah Maclean (no relation) of The Pan Book of Etiquette and Good Manners (1962) says that it no longer a solecism to have them printed instead of engraved although the latter are still necessary for "very formal occasions such as coming-out dances and elaborate dinner parties."
Mrs Maclean spells out how to write invitations for weddings, cocktail parties, dinner parties,"bridge or bottle" parties and dances, but the advice for this last is confusing:
For an informal dance an ordinary 'At Home' card can be used, filled in in exactly the same way as for a cocktail party except that 'Dancing' and the time to start dancing is to start is put where the word cocktails usually goes. For a formal dance all the information is engraved and the card is longer.
I have lived in Britain for almost 15 years and although I have admired many an embossed or printed invitation propped up on many a chimneypiece, I have never seen an "ordinary 'At Home' card." In addition, almost nobody I know in Britain has a space large enough at home for informal dances. When I hold an informal dance, it is in a parish hall.
For reasons both legal and sociological (the latter explained in a previous post), these informal dances are private parties. To underscore the privacy and the total lack of legal responsibility of the archdiocese or any priestly fraternity for these parties, I used to write invitations--that is, I would put the details in the least embarrassing children's party invitations I could find and hand them out. I filled in the RSVP space with my email address.
To my very great surprise, very few obeyed the RSVP. I was thus also surprised to see who turned up. (I moreover suffered an early death in the church car park after I realized there were 11 young men to 5 young women and 3 chaperones.) And I am beginning to think that people born after 1990 do not actually know what an RSVP is, let alone that it is (or was) an iron-clad social rule that you do not simply ignore a personal invitation or turn up without telling the host or hostess that you mean to do so.
Therefore, youthful readers, RSVP is an anagram meaning répondez s'il vous plaît which is polite French for "Please reply." If you get an invitation to something, it means that the host or hostess is paying you the compliment of thinking you are, or might be, an ornament to society. Anyone who goes to the trouble of having a planned party or dance wants it to be a success, so being personally invited to it is a great compliment. The first way you say thank you for this compliment is to respond to the invitation as asked: Dear Mrs So-and-So, Thank you very much for the invitation to your dance party. I will certainly attend. Could I bring anything? Yours sincerely, Hope of the Future. (The second way is to post or email a note afterwards saying Thank you so much. I had a wonderful time. Elegant Baby Boomers still sometimes telephone [on a landline!] their thanks as a substitute for a note; I wouldn't expect that of Gens X, Y or Z.)
According to Mrs Humphry, the rule in 1897 was that "notes of invitation should be replied to within twenty-four hours." Mrs Humphry also says this to the young man, lest he think he is all that and a bag of chips: "To be invited is an honour to the young man who is just beginning his social life."
The other problem with my invitations, though, was that I couldn't always find the invited, as I don't know their addresses and they don't always come to the TLM on Sundays. Sometimes I would entrust invitations to other guests to hand out at the university, should they find the absent invitees there. They didn't always find them, which led to disappointments and many wasted envelopes.
Thus, I switched from store-bought invitations to the little white cardboard flashcards I have in profusion and just wrote 25+ invitations by hand. Sadly, our pastor found one of them scrunched and thrown under one of the tables in the parish hall, a response to the RSVP I wasn't expecting. And after the Michaelmas Dance, I moved the whole business of invitation to a super-private Facebook group, stopped expecting RSVPs, and now look on the bright side when men outnumber women 2:1.
In conclusion, restoring the social graces of the pre-conciliar era, let alone those of 1897, will take a group effort. Someone is going to have to write a book to assist in this. It will probably have to be me. But maybe I can interest the prolific Dr. Peter Kwasniewski in the task.
Yes, men outnumbering women at parties is a good thing. So often it's the other way around.
ReplyDeleteSarah McLean's book was my parents' etiquette adviser of choice, when they first entered the Canadian foreign service. She was quietly funny and correct. When Evelyn Waugh reviewed her book, however, he defied current wisdom by saying that women were natural anarchists and thus not suited to being advisers on etiquette. Cranky middle-aged men, he insisted, were better at the task.
If I were 20 years younger and appeared at one of these gentlemanly Catholic waltzing parties (which would make an interesting short story), I would think I were in an earthly paradise. (Coming face-to-face with 20-years-older self would have been a trip. Conversely, coming face-to-face with my 20-years-younger self would be alarming: "You'd better not be here to cause trouble," I would say. "Go home and put on a longer skirt.") Thus, I am astonished girls are not actively trying to cadge invitations. Meanwhile, it is very interesting to read that Sarah Maclean was so influential! And thank you for the EW anecdote. It does sound like everything I've ever read about him.
DeleteThe fact that men outnumbered women at your dance fits in with all of my Catholic young adult experiences (from 2008 - 2016 primarily, but in different geographic locations), where all the groups I belonged to had significantly more men than women.
DeleteJessica! But why? Where are the women? Where did they go? (Mrs McL)
DeleteI have two theories!
Delete1) The university-educated Catholic women, hoping to eventually have babies, had more awareness that their days of relative freedom might be ending in a few years. So they were volunteering abroad, working in the city, getting that MA on the side, etc etc. The men seemed less inclined to pack things into their early/mid 20s, so they were around more.
2) It’s generally more counter-cultural for men to be devoutly religious than women. But that means, IMO, that Catholic young adult groups tend to attract men who are counter-cultural in many ways, not just religion. Or to put it in less delicate terms: there were always a few men in the group who were extremely socially awkward and probably had difficulty making friends elsewhere, but found welcome within the YA group.
Do either of those theories explain the imbalance at your dancing parties??
I think Theory 1 applies more than Theory 2, as I cannot think of any markedly socially awkward (as opposed to perhaps a little shy) types among the young men who accept my invitations. The benefits of living in Broken Britain is that truly sane men (including ones who imagined the UK was a lot different than it too often is) seek out (or are introduced to) the blessed normalcy of the TLM. Of course, I'm old enough to be their mother, so it is difficult for me to see them from a 20-something girl's point of view. That said, one otherwise very polite chap once told me that he thought women didn't like their parties because they talked about ["manly"] subjects like theology. Well, I (Mrs. McLean, M.A., M.Div./STB) could see two problems there. However, there is really no time for boring arguments about the metaphysics of Francisco Suarez, SJ (et alia), let alone shouty arguments about evolution, at my waltzing parties.
DeleteI'm more inclined to suspect that young women avoid parties given by groups with religious associations, or groups organised for women, because they are afraid there will be only women there. Unfair and of course not necessarily true, as you have both pointed out, but, well, there it is.
DeleteFrom my Catholic young adult experiences roughly 2016 to 2020 in the US, I would definitely agree with the preponderance of the excruciatingly socially awkward, but the women always outnumbered the men, and unfortunately the women were often catty and unwelcoming. There do seem to be more men in attendance these days, but that could be because I’m trying different areas or I wonder if the pandemic shook up people’s habits. If I didn’t live across the Atlantic, I would absolutely be trying to cadge an invitation to the waltz evenings, haha.
ReplyDeleteI saw this post in my Facebook feed (not a group I currently belong to) and was amused at the gender ratio, given this conversation:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.facebook.com/100064383831139/posts/pfbid0beqDcEQb5aQcuJxpqs2M3k6m7VU2hUBwhH8FKpuET5Q2Eqc3yFeVj7zcrUEvCMVGl/
PS When I said “socially awkward,” I meant it in all charity — not just “shy” but “unable to make eye contact” “doesn’t comply with/shows a lack of awareness of social norms” etc.
Charity assumed! And I had a chuckle at the lack of "gender parity" in the YCP group. Thanks for posting!
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