Unraveling the Social Code?

C. Dallett Hemphill. Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. x + 310 pp. Appendix, notes, works cited, and index. $35.00.

In Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620-1860, C. Dallett Hemphill proposes that a study of manners, defined as "the rule-bound and symbolic behaviors that we perform in the presence of others," offers "a new perspective on society--a street-level panorama" (pp. 3, 4). Indeed, manners functioned as a social code, which was spelled out in contemporary conduct literature. This influential genre of literature therefore formed a unified "script of rituals" that reveals "how contemporaries thought society was organized, how power was actually distributed, and how larger changes in cosmology, polity, or economy were being worked out in everyday life" (p. 4). Read the script to learn the social roles Americans played, Hemphill argues, as well as how those roles were rewritten over time.

The author's aim is ambitious and her analytical and writing talents are considerable. Hemphill has read extensively in the conduct literature and finds in it insight into many scholarly debates. But this ambition is also characteristic of the book's central weakness: it stakes too many large claims upon rather limited data. Fundamentally, Bowing to Necessities reveals a great deal about the history of conduct literature but much less about the history of American society.

Hemphill argues that the conduct literature in America fell into three distinct eras: the early colonial (1620-1740), in which manners functioned as social control; the revolutionary (1740-1820), in which manners served to "guide the behavior" of "newly rising groups"; and the antebellum (1820-1860), in which manners allowed Americans "to deal with the contradiction" of economic inequality in a political democracy (p. 9). The book is divided into three parts corresponding to these eras; in each, the author analyzes contemporary conduct literature to understand the social effect of age, class, and gender (race is not part of the analysis, although ethnicity is touched on briefly).

Part I, "Hierarchy: Manners in a Vertical Social Order, 1620-1740," analyzes Renaissance courtesy books imported into the American colonies, as well as Puritan sermons, with an eye toward unraveling the embedded social code. The study opens with an appealing story detailing the inability of Massachusetts Governor Joseph Dudley to command the kind of deference he thought he deserved from his social inferiors (pp. 13-14). The author argues that this incident reveals that although "deference from inferiors was vitally important to the early Massachusetts elite," the conditions of life in the colonies rendered this deference difficult to command (p. 14). Furthermore, analysis of the courtesy books and Puritan sermons reveals that the primary category of social deference was not class but age, and that "weak in body . . . weak in society" was the era's operative principle (p. 32). Age played such a powerful role that it subsumed class inequalities and "in their minority even elite youth were considered inferior" (p. 41).

When gender is "tossed into the mix," it yields a gender gap of a very different kind than historians have acknowledged (p. 46). Although women were "definitely" considered inferior to men, Hemphill finds, they were "not as inferior" as "the lower sort were to the elite or as young people were to adults" (p. 47). Far from being "the most fundamental form of inequality," as some have argued, gender was "the mildest form" as a result of the sexual intimacy in female and male relationships (p. 47). Still, regardless of their rank, colonial women "did not get much respect" from anybody (p. 54). In any event, contemporary advice to women was limited since "Puritan ministers and Renaissance courtiers shared the same vision. Society was a male world, divided by rank" (p. 54). In sum, Hemphill's analysis of the conduct literature argues that in colonial America "the population in general was divided by age, adults were divided by...