Excerpt of THE SEASON: A History of the Debutante

The world of debutantes opens into a revealing story of women across six centuries, their limited options, and their desires in Kristen Richardson’s THE SEASON: A History of the Debutante [W. W. Norton & Company; November 2019; $26.95 Hardcover].

Digging into the roots of the debutante ritual, with its ballrooms and white dresses, Kristen Richardson – herself descended from a line of debutantes – was fascinated to discover that the debutante ritual places our contemporary ideas about women and marriage in a new light. In this brilliant history of the phenomenon, Richardson shares debutantes’ own words – from diaries, letters, and interviews – throughout her vivid telling, beginning in Henry VIII’s era, sweeping through Queen Elizabeth I’s court, crossing back and forth the Atlantic to colonial Philadelphia, African American communities, Jane Austen’s England, and Mrs. Astor’s parties, ultimately arriving at the contemporary New York Infirmary and International balls.

Whether maligned for its archaic attitude and objectification of women or praised for raising money for charities and providing a necessary coming-of-age ritual, the debutante tradition has more to tell us in this entertaining and illuminating book.

Kristen Richardson was born in London, grew up mostly in Connecticut, and now lives in Brooklyn.

Excerpt

Complex etiquette and rituals like debutante presentations functioned as codes—Were you in the right circle or were you not? Your movements, gracious or ungainly, would immediately communicate your place to a group of people who waited, watched, and judged. A new word entered the American vernacular—“genteel,” from the French word gentil, originally meaning “well-born.”

Used in Europe to describe received good behavior, but not plausibly applied in the colonies in their first century, the word’s widespread use in the eighteenth century conveyed that there was now an accepted standard of behavior to which colonists should aspire.

Gentility, with its basis in proper behavior, soon transformed all manner of people into critics, because it made every activity into a performance.4

In an atmosphere where a successful show of one’s gentility was the primary means of social advancement, knowing how to dance was the fastest way for a colonist to move upward socially. Early forms of country dancing, or contredanse, originated in fifteenth-century England, and accelerated in popularity at the court of Elizabeth I.

In the dance, two lines of people face each other (contre is French for “against” or “across”), women on one side, men on the other. These simple dances, and their later derivatives, the quadrille and the cotillion, were performed by groups of men and women and were first danced only in lines, but later in more complicated rounds and squares. These dances were deliberately and self-consciously social and evolved not only to allow men and women to interact within a safely contained space, but also to teach them how to do so elegantly.

John Playford’s The English Dancing Master, which explained a number of different dances using simple terms, was published in 1651, and made its way, with dancing masters, to the colonies. There were eighteen editions, as well as new volumes, by 1728.

Playford’s book was among the first in a new genre of etiquette literature that preached that one could actually improve oneself and one’s station through successful behaviors, like skill at dance.

By the eighteenth century, Europe had produced a large number of itinerant dancing masters who modeled themselves after Playford, some of whom emigrated to the colonies in the early part of the century and began to advise the merchant captains and landowners who made up the colonial elite. By the early eighteenth century, there were enough traveling dancing masters to worry religious figures, who saw them as sly frauds whose instruction would lead to the disruption of the social order.

Prominent church leaders inveighed against them and against dance itself, as did Cotton Mather when he wrote in 1700 “the case before us, is not, whether people of quality may not employ a dancing-master . . . but, whether the dancing humour, as it now prevails . . . be not a vanity forbidden by the values of Christianity.”

Mather’s speeches could not stop the craze for dancing. In ­Boston, dancing instruction was offered to young ladies and gentlemen by 1716. Its popularity created such controversy that a group of angry ­Puritans fell upon and destroyed Boston’s main dancing school in 1723. In Philadelphia and Charleston, there was a greater demand for dancing teachers—and in those non-Puritan cities the elite vied for the best dancing masters. In an ad posted in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1780, a dancing school advertised that it had opened “for the ensuing season, for the reception of Pupils to learn that polite and necessary art. And for the convenience of grown Gentlemen, an EVENING SCHOOL will be continued the whole season.” 5

In 1740s Charleston, the two major dancing masters copied each other’s advertisements and accused each other of being imposters. Both were eventually driven out of town by a third, Thomas Pike, who arrived from England in 1764, pronounced them both frauds, and rendered them obsolete with his skills that went beyond mere dancing—he also taught fencing, swordplay, and deportment. He was wise to offer private classes at his students’ houses after their work hours, sheltering the tradesmen from public humiliation.

Pike constructed long rooms that were specific to contredanse and held weekly dance nights and one large scholars’ ball each year. Pike remained the preeminent master in Charleston for years. Because of the timidity and conformism of his colonial clientele, he was forced to introduce all innovations on spec—people hesitated to pay for something new until they were sure it was the current fashion.

Once convinced, they needed to learn it immediately. Pike eventually went bankrupt after other dancing masters opened new venues there, diluting his clientele. He left Charleston and moved to Philadelphia, where he began again.6

Dancing masters traded in information and status. They were masters, too, of gossip and judges of minute mistakes. A dancing master could ruin a young woman’s marriage prospects by excluding her from the dance or raise them by naming a dance after her, letting her lead the dance, or choosing the best partner for her. The colonial dancing master was just one in a long line of intimidating experts a potential debutante would rely on as rules for the burgeoning upper classes developed and hardened.

Dancing masters were not the only people in colonial America who organized balls and assemblies. Much like the British gentry, colonial Americans found that their houses were not large enough to accommodate the kind of dancing they wanted to do. Groups first began to sponsor larger gatherings in taverns and, soon, in purpose-built spaces modeled on Almack’s and other assembly rooms in England. ­Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston all had dancing assemblies in place by the mid-1740s.

Smaller cities like Cambridge, Massachusetts, and ­Alexandria, Virginia, had theirs by the 1760s. Unlike in England, where assemblies were organized and administered by women, in colonial America, men ran these events and determined who was invited. While in ­London, merchants were barred from court presentation, in the colonies, they were the social leaders, setting trends and defining the parameters of fashionable society. And it was their daughters who were the most desirable brides.

Reprinted from THE SEASON: A Social History of the Debutante by Kristen Richardson. Text copyright (c) 2019 by Kristen Richardson. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

THE SEASON: A Social History Of The Debutante

In this enthralling history of the debutante ritual, Kristen Richardson sheds new light on contemporary ideas about women and marriage.

Kristen Richardson, from a family of debutantes, chose not to debut. But as her curiosity drove her to research this enduring custom, she learned that it, and debutantes, are not as simple as they seem.

The story begins in England six hundred years ago when wealthy fathers needed an efficient way to find appropriate husbands for their daughters. Elizabeth I’s exclusive presentations at her court expanded into London’s full season of dances, dinners, and courting, extending eventually to the many corners of the British empire and beyond.

Richardson traces the social seasons of young women on both sides of the Atlantic, from Georgian England to colonial Philadelphia, from the Antebellum South and Wharton’s New York back to England, where debutante daughters of Gilded Age millionaires sought to marry British aristocrats. She delves into Jazz Age debuts, carnival balls in the American South, and the reimagined ritual of elite African American communities, which offers both social polish and academic scholarships.

The Season shares the captivating stories of these young women, often through their words from diaries, letters, and interviews that Richardson conducted at contemporary balls. The debutantes give voice to an array of complex feelings about being put on display, about the young men they meet, and about what their future in society or as wives might be.

While exploring why the debutante tradition persists―and why it has spread to Russia, China, and other nations―Richardson has uncovered its extensive cultural influence on the lives of daughters in Britain and the US and how they have come to marry.

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