THE REFLECTIONS by reader and pizza deliveryman Ben Jolly on how he learned manners as a child during rare meals out in elegant restaurants reminded me of the 1911 essay “The Decay of Manners” by the Southern-born writer and lawyer Thomas Nelson Page. The essay appeared in The Century Illustrated magazine. Page’s complaints about boorish behavior seem positively quaint today. Some of his wisest observations concern the role of women in defending civility. He wrote:

This is the crux of the whole question. Among all civilized peoples woman is the custodian of good manners. She places the stamp on the currency which gives it value in the public mind, and if she will not assert her royal prerogative it will soon become debased. If the women of a community abdicate their throne and surrender their high privilege of being accorded courtesy not because of their strength, but because of its honor; if they boast their power; if they rival men in violence; if they flaunt their wealth in public with shameless ostentation; if they display arrogance before the eyes of their hapless sisters of toil; if they accept with complacency the insolent indifference of the male sex, and with gratitude the scattered and scornful crumbs of attention that they deign to let fall before their eager eyes, the result will be the natural consequence—a society hopelessly vulgarized from its former distinction of chivalrous courtesy, and with no end but to sink in an ever deeper abyss of vulgarity.

It being, then, the province of women to set the standard of manners, we may have license to wonder that they should be so indifferent to their high privilege, and should not only surrender their prerogative, which implies something of compulsion, but should voluntarily cast it away, accepting with alacrity a change of manners which one might think they would resist with resentment

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