Manners around the Thanksgiving table aren't quite what they used to be some 160 years ago.
"An etiquette book I have from 1853 says, for instance, don't be noisy when you eat and don't eat with your knife except when visiting a home where the only forks they have are two-pronged, big carving forks," said Emily Troxell Jaycox, who has worked for 24 years as librarian at the Missouri History Museum Library and Research Center.
"It seems that forks had not come into universal use back then and some houses only had big carving forks, so you'd need to eat with your knife because that's all there was."
Another tidbit from the book advises never to load your plate with food.
"In passing gravy, it says, do not cover the meat or vegetables but put it on one side of the plate," Jaycox said. "Another part says to 'take care that the bread be cut in a cube form not in slices but in pieces of about 1.5 inches thick.' It sounds like they may have been dipping cubes in gravy like fondue.
"Sometimes with these old books, etiquette was obvious to the people of the time but may not be to us now," Jaycox said.
On Nov. 20, Jaycox gave a talk to the Sappington-Concord Historical Society at the Tesson Ferry Branch of the St. Louis County Library in South County entitled, "How Rude! The changing forms of polite behavior."
She's been giving the talk for a few years, after it originally started out as a show and tell for museum members.
"There seemed to be enough interest so I thought I would develop it into a power point talk to take to groups," Jaycox said. "The museum has a wonderful collection of old etiquette books and various kinds of ephemera, like old dance cards, historic photos, promotions by groups offering lessons in deportment, and etiquette books, and I use those things to illustrate my talk."
Her message shows a sort of contradiction in American society.
"Our history is built on ideals of democracy and equality, but, whenever groups of people get together, some people want to find ways to distinguish themselves as different and somewhat separate and possibly find a way to be recognized as elite," she said.
For instance, she'll show two photos, one of a man standing in the doorway of a log cabin with his wife sitting outside, "very rustic, with nothing fancy, showing self-reliant frontier people who should be the social equals of all others because that's the premise of this country.
"The other photo, from a little etiquette book called 'Etiquette for Gentlemen,' shows two gentlemen shaking hands, with top hats and fancy waist coats," Jaycox said.
"It talks about the proper greetings to use, how to use calling cards, when to take off a hat, and introductions. For example, one part says 'it is the correct thing to raise his hat when a gentleman bows to a lady or an elderly gentleman.' The gist of that seems to be what the rules are for who you will recognize socially and how you'll recognize them, who gets to be the first one to acknowledge the other. It gives me a headache to think about it all."
She also talks about how, until recently, wearing hats was more common regardless of class and social status.
"I have a photo I use of a group of women from the early part of the 20th century, waiting at a train station, suffragettes and radical for their time, who were going to Jefferson City to petition for the right to vote," Jaycox said. "But all of them were wearing hats. These women were going to send a strong message to their government, but they'd never dream of leaving the house without a hat on.
"Another photo from downtown St. Louis in the early- to mid-20th century shows a street scene where everybody has got a hat on," Jaycox continued. "Some are well dressed, some are working people, but all are wearing hats. Today, we see a lot of men wearing ball caps in public but it's unusual to see any other kind of hat on a man's head unless it's a formal occasion like a funeral."
Jaycox also shows off a scanned 1880s-vintage dance card, something many young people can't fathom.
"Back then in the era of ballroom dancing, dances would be in a certain order during the event - you'd start with a waltz, then a quadrille, and they'd be numbered on a pre-printed card with blank spaces next to them," she explained.
"A man would find a woman, ask if she'd have a specific dance with him and then he'd fill in her name on the card. Ladies also kept track on cards but only men did the asking. In some cases, the man would ask a woman whose name he knew. In other cases, he might not know her name so he'd use a memory trick. This card has the man putting down 'Miss Bouquet' for one dance and 'Miss Robe Rouge' for another, so I guess one lady had flowers and one was wearing a red dress."
Jaycox will show a cartoon drawing from Prom magazine in 1971, with people dancing free form to music, without a partner and with dances melding into each other - the only form of dancing many people today have ever known.
Jaycox admits the most common response she gets after her talks is "I wish you would have talked about the decline in etiquette since people spend so much time texting on cell phones."
"And I respond that I base my talk around historic collections available at the museum, and we haven't caught up with cell phone etiquette," she said. "But I try to include a lot of social history in there, a lot of American history, along with popular culture, food, dance and courtship. This is just one way to look at social change in a light-hearted, fun way."