Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860.

Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860. By C. Dallett Hemphill (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. x plus 3l0pp.).

Recently on a crowded commuter bus from downtown Seattle to an outlying town, a professional, middle-aged man offered me, a professional, middle-aged woman, his seat. I immediately declined, saying that I had been sitting all day. Although my comment implied that I was quite happy standing, in reality I would have loved to sit down. Why then did I turn down such a generous proposal? Why did the man offer his seat in the first place? The cultural implications of such daily social exchanges are the central substance of C. Dallett Hemphill's important book on the history of manners in America. According to Hemphill, "manners serve three social functions." One purpose is to "constitute a subtle but pervasive system of social regulation or control." Another, more creative function, is to "generate the feelings that help people assume their social roles," while a third is to clue us in "about our place in the social order" (3--4). She argues further that studying the history of manners provides scholars a "new pers pective on society," one that can reveal "how larger changes in cosmology, polity, or economy were being worked out in everyday life" (4). Consequently, "these meaning-laden acts and gestures are the signal flags of an encounter, by which we communicate, often nonverbally, who we are and what we expect of each other" (4). As I stood on tiring commuter legs thinking of Hemphill's insightful book, I readily recognized that the man's offer of a seat was a remnant of the antebellum social ritual known as "ladies first," and that my response was intended to indicate to my bus companion that I was a "modern" woman who needed no special treatment because of my gender. It was just one enduring instance of the "little rules" of manners, the analysis of which, as Hemphill successfully demonstrates, provides an illuminating route to a better understanding of the tensions, ambiguities, and changes within the larger social order.

Hemphill has accomplished several major feats. Her book covers almost three hundred years of the history of American manners, from the early settlement of New England to the Civil War. She has divided the work into three parts-- "Hierarchy: Manners in a Vertical Social Order, 1620-1740"; "Revolution: An Opening of Possibilities, 1740-1820"; and "Resolution: Manners for Democrats, 1820-1860"--to indicate the dominant approach to manners during each time period. In addition, Hemphill's work confronts a wide diversity of historiographical debates, especially those dealing with pre-Civil War cultural and social shifts and developments. The debates include, just to mention a few, the question of whether Puritan society was a gerontocracy, the timing of the rise of an American middle class, the extent and meaning of the Anglicization of America, the transforming effects of the American Revolution, the historical value of the concept of separate spheres, and the class dimension of the culture of gentility. Again, I want to reiterate that these are only a few of the scholarly conversations that Hemphill joins, making this book a must read for everyone who teaches pre-Civil War American history.

Hemphill is able to cover so much within only 223 pages of text by focusing her study in two ways. First, Hemphill's book is geographically limited to those regions--New England before 1750 and the broader urban Northeast afterwards--where bookprinting and bookselling were centered before the Civil War. Second, in terms of source material, Hemphill's emphasis is on the perspective of the prevailing cultural elites. For evidence she relies primarily on published "conduct advice literature," which she defines as "everything printed or imported in America that gave direct instruction on how to behave in the presence of others" (4). Although most of Hemphill's evidence is drawn from this body of prescriptive literature (the book includes a nine page bibliography of these sources), she makes a very convincing case for taking this approach.

Hemphill's rationale is based, in part, on the fact that the historical profession's emphasis on social history over the past thirty years has bred a great deal of fragmentation, particularly, in the author's view, according to the categories of class, gender, and age. Hemphill's research strategy allows her to examine American society in a more holistic fashion. For instance, by comparing the expectations regarding women's behavior to those of other groups--children, youth, servants, and men of their own class--Hemphill is able to argue that before 1740 the New England "population in general was divided by age, adults were divided by sex, and men were divided by rank" with inequality as the perceived cultural norm (61). By the antebellum period, Hemphill argues, the social order was transformed, particularly with regard to women. Recognizing the continuing economic and political disempowerment of women, Hemphill nevertheless sees some gains for white, middle-class women in the fact that by the time of the Ci vil War "society existed only where men and women came together, signaling that the commitment to gender integration of the revolutionary era was fulfilled." Youths also rose in status, while children, the aged, and servants remained on the margins of social power (220). Of course these points are part of a much more surefooted and complex thesis in Hemphill's book, but even here they illustrate the significance of her comparative approach.

Hemphill's text demonstrates that she is clearly ready for those critics who are dismissive of scholarship that relies on prescriptive sources. Through the use of a select group of private documents, including the diaries and letters of Samuel Sewell, John Adams, Benjamin Rush, and a nineteenth-century Philadelphia youth Isaac Mickle, who appears to be Hemphill's great-great-grandfather, she has skillfully woven personal stories into her analysis to augment many of her arguments. I think some readers will appreciate even more emphasis on the role of manners in the daily life of actual people, particularly in the third part of the book, where Hemphill relies heavily on the diary of Isaac Mickle. Also, one could quibble and ask for more help in understanding the history of manners in regions beyond the Northeast, and among groups other than the dominant purveyors of culture. Given the coverage and depth of analysis that Hemphill has achieved in this work, however, future historians of manners should be quite sa tisfied that she provides such a strong framework from which they can develop their own studies.