Emily Post: Ettiquette Queen

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Josh Clark (0:11)

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.

Chuck Bryant (0:21)

I got to say, after this, researching this, I am a big fan of Emily Post.

Josh Clark (0:27)

Yeah, she's a surprisingly cool person. Especially for somebody who literally wrote a book on Etiquette.

Chuck Bryant (0:34)

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.

Josh Clark (0:42)

Sure. Maybe number two, we'll say. Three.

But yeah, still a big fan. Are you going to buy the book, the blue book?

Chuck Bryant (0:51)

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.

Josh Clark (0:59)

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, 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.

Chuck Bryant (1:39)

Yeah, some might say more so.

Josh Clark (1:42)

Yeah, more needed for sure.

Chuck Bryant (1:45)

Yeah. So, I mean, they had etiquette guides for sure. It's not like she, even though, 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 we're going 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, 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 not born into a great family or something, then that doesn't mean you can't be a part of what she called good society.

You have to be grounded in ethics and how to know how to keep a clean house and how to behave with manners.

Josh Clark (2:40)

Yeah, which is kind of ground breaking, 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 this, you're going to embarrass yourself. So memorize all of these. 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 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.

Chuck Bryant (3:09)

Yeah. Also, she wasn't so stodgy that she didn't embrace change when it was clearly happening. As we'll see, this book, she started to write and came out during the roaring 20s. So it was a lot of people, including her sons, thought like, this probably isn't the right time for this kind of thing. That kind of stuff is old-fashioned.

And she just said, just hold my tea and I'll take care of this.

Josh Clark (3:32)

Yeah. So the US 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 are like, here's what the wealthy tell you to do. The problem is, is there 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.