The Importance of Teaching Manners and Proper Etiquette

Whenever we see something in the media that causes embarrassment, we become nostalgic. We look back to a time when the world was different.  There have always been two sides of the track in the United States: one was dull and the other one was polished.  Every now and then, we hear the call for the days when people had manners and dignity.  The WGBH Media Library & Archives produced a television series that first broadcast in September, 1995. It was called Chicago: Rock and Roll; The segment titled, Respect,  featured interviewee Maxine Powell.  Powell founded the Motown Finishing School within Motown Records in 1964. She already had a school where she taught etiquette and modeling before then. That is how she met Motown Records founder Berry Gordy.

Looking back, no one could have imagined the impact that Motown records would have on shaping United States culture. Maxine Powell said to Motown’s artists, “Artist Development is going to be different than the records. You’re gonna’ learn how to perform. You’re gonna’ graduate and become a great performer. You’re gonna’ appear in number one places around the country, and even before the King and Queen. It was my pleasure to work with the artists because they were diamonds in the rough and they just needed grooming. They needed to find out who they were, that they were loved, and to believe that they could be successful, wherever.” The way Motown artists presented themselves in public made the United States proud, because they were excellent representatives of how the United States could be. What went wrong with people’s manners and their  knowledge of etiquette?

Around the same time, moral standards in the U.S. were being sabotaged and re-defined. According to women’s liberation ideology, women could choose to do whatever they liked to do without shame. The Free Love Movement and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s began a push for mainstream acceptance. An important book addressing this topic is, Sex For Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry, by Ronald Weitzer (2nd edition), which openly describes sex worker theories and the way morals have changed.  Weitzer stated that, “An alternatives perspective, what I call the polymorphous paradigm, holds that there is a constellation of occupational arrangements, power relations, and worker experiences.” He is talking about the sphere of prostitution and how it happens in society. In the past, there was little academic interest is sex trade work, because it was considered immoral and a product of  promiscuity. 

Weitzer further explained how, “Within academia, a growing number of scholars are researching various dimensions of the work, in different contexts, and their studies document substantial variation in how sex work is organized and experienced by workers, clients, and managers.” Moral standards were corrupted, creating an environment were how people did things were stressed above what they did.