| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

C. Dallett Hemphill. Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620–1860. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 310. $35.00.

In her study of conduct works and etiquette books, C. Dallett Hemphill interprets the changing codes of behavior that served to regulate and represent social relations in America from the colonial era to the Civil War. Her analysis focuses on how the code varied with class, age, and gender and changed over the course of three distinctive periods. Until about 1740, she argues, the primary function of manners was to enforce hierarchical social relations. For middle-aged men of the social elite, the Chesterfieldian code of conduct set forth an aristocratic ideal of strict control of the body. For their inferiors—less prominent men, young men, and women—conduct books prescribed rituals of deference—literally the bowing and scraping of colonial life. In reality, colonial elites never received the degree of deference prescribed. New World "aristocrats" simply lacked the Old World credentials; the material conditions of American life exerted a leveling influence; and because they insisted on maintaining a monopoly over the code of self-control, colonial elites could not count on their inferiors to internalize the behaviors associated with deference. . . .

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