Anne Helen, this shit slaps! I'm currently reading "Veil & Vow" by Aneeka Ayanna Henderson, which is about marriage in modern Black culture, and also thinking about my own family's participation in Black Southern debutante balls. My mom picked the wrong daughter to be in the Delta Sigma Theta Jabberwock Cotillion because my sister was definitely not the right fit for that, haha.
The one time I ever saw my grandmother blush was when someone asked whether she had been a debutante. She had not- grew up on a farm in rural NC with 8 siblings, didn’t go to a restaurant until she was 18 or 19, worked in a hosiery mill for decades- but the idea she might have been was so incredibly flattering to her sensibilities.
How can we think about the debutante thing as a particularly Christian ideal? I don't know what goes on in other religions, but speaking as a Jewish girl, Jewish American culture has nothing similar, except maybe the contemporary bat mitzvah party, which in certain communities is heavily tied to conspicuous consumption. But the bat mitzvah has (I think) a completely different history as a religious ritual that entwines with the feminist movement in the US, says nothing really about eligibility for marriage, and is of course for much younger girls (much to unpack there about who gets to be a "girl" and for how long). Debutante balls in the US have always seemed to me to be very tied to Christian traditions and understandings about marriage and power, and I'm wondering where other religious practices come into it-- and whether the debut is just yet another way of maintaining Christian supremacy among the US elite.
That's a really interesting comment because I intentionally didn't cover Christian coming-of-age rituals like quinceañera, where a girl renews her baptismal promise, and purity balls, where teenage girls promise their dads they'll stay virgins until marriage (Blerg) *because* they were focused more on religion and less on creating financially advantageous marriages. That said, the upper class that debutantes helped create was definitely Christian and Christian supremacist and continues to be. I would say Protestant actually because Catholics were excluded too.
You can see how anti-semitism was intertwined with marriage and the social season in literature too. In Anthony Trollope's "The Way We Live Now," the massively rich financier (with the heiress daughter) Augustus Melmotte, is "rumored to be Jewish." Same goes for Julius Beaufort in "The Age of Innocence," who is also of "unknown origins" but married into old NY money. Not fiction, but in the 1920s, Ellen Mackay, a debutante heiress, got disowned by her super-rich father for running away to marry Irving Berlin. She later wrote for the New Yorker.
Oh, there are definitely more explicitly Christian debutante-type events, and it's interesting to know that you weren't focused on them. As I've been working to define my own Jewishness as a new adult, I've become really invested in finding the places where Christianity has been so ingrained and normalized as to be unremarkable, and remarking upon it, so it's just something I'm always looking out for-- definitely not a criticism!
I wonder if that is simply because it came from the beginning of Protestantism and added the other trappings along the way? I had lots of friends who did cotillion in Tennessee and Georgia, and there were definite Christian undertones.
I wouldn't say it's overt, but more Christian culture as it is in the South. White dresses (also worn for baptisms), pledges to be "pure," extreme gender stereotypes, and the purpose of women being for marriage/children. There are even "purity balls" (ha!) that mimic debutante balls, and those are super Christian, but they didn't have to do much different than the regular ones.
Sorry, I didn't read your whole comment about the purity balls! But cotillion/debutante in the South still had such Christian connotations, even without the overt purity element. I was Lutheran, so they weren't for me, but the more Evangelical or Baptist girls were the ones who participated.
Speaking as a Jewish girl, I think you're right. These debutante balls seem to be a part of the Christian hegemony. These events are completely foreign to me and almost mythical. Hence why it is so fascinating to read about them.
Incredible read and can’t wait to read the book! Anne Helen is right, your writing is beautiful and sharp.
Your discussion of performative leisure made me think of Golden Goose shoes. Certainly the eye watering price tag for Golden Goose emphasizes both the “performative” and the “leisure” aspects of their value as status symbols.
I feel like shoes have a social significance that other couture accessories, like purses, have not achieved. For one thing, they are something you walk on! They are impossible to wear without actually getting them worn. The fact that Golden Goose sneakers imitate many older styles (down to the scuffs) of far cheaper sneakers feels so visceral for me, as someone who grew up wearing the older and cheaper styles. One of my mom’s most powerful memories from growing up extremely poor in Raleigh, NC, has to do with her generation’s Golden Goose equivalents. She still vividly remembers the Debs that went to her high school who all had pairs and pairs of Pappagallo ballet flats in colors to match every outfit. I have been trying to find out how much these shoes cost in the 1960s but I haven’t found a price…suffice to say, to my mom they were dazzlingly expensive. The fact that the Debs had pairs enough to match their outfits was beyond the realm of possibility.
The specialization of shoes is also interesting. I think something could be said for the fact that Golden Gooses are sneakers, rather than Manolo Blahniks (for those of us in the Sex and the City generation). Manolo Blahniks told us viewers that you were headed to a cocktail party at the Governor’s mansion…sneakers say you are going to put gas in the car. I am sure there is an argument to be made about the desirability of looking like an off-duty ballet dancer within the 1960s Southern country-club-attending, debutante world.
Anyway, I would love to hear your take on shoes! Or any take, for that matter.
The Golden Goose thing is a perfect example of the complexity of performative leisure. Poverty fetishism has deep roots in Western culture. There are tons of examples, but right now I'm thinking of Marie Antoinette (unfairly maligned most of the time!) creating Le Hameau so she could live the simple, pastoral life, which for her was milking cows into Sevrès porcelain.
When I was a teenager, we all wore L.L. Bean blucher moccasins held together by duct tape. Pretty much everything we wore was in tatters. I was totally unaware that this was a class performance at the time, the only thing I knew was that it was bad to be showy in any way. Now it's very clear to me that this was a super power move that one could only make with perfect hair, teeth, skin, background, accent, and in specific contexts etc. Money so old that you don't have to show it, which is meta-showiness really. This was in NYC/New England, and the South has never really dressed down in the same way. So your example of Papagallos is a much cleaner example of how important shoes are as a signifier.
Very often style or coolness, particularly white style, is about rejecting beauty norms and wearing things that are insistently ugly to show that you are beautiful enough or thin enough to get away with that. Also a power move. When things are too perfect, they can suggest something reactionary or fearful--here I am thinking of, say, women's hair at Fox News. Debutante dresses, hair, clothing, and shoes often fall into that conservative category. Girls who felt forced into debuting often tried to stage subtle rebellions, like one who showed off her shoulder tattoo of a sinking Mayflower at the Mayflower Ball. People who wear Golden Goose often talk about how well they're made. There are a lot of well-made shoes, but these are unique in that they're a way to be compliant while suggesting rebellion.
Papagallo shoes! Blast from my past and I think I may have been the first to decline an engraved debutante invitation in my home town’s history. Still a topic these many years later. But I remember getting the shoes and several pairs at a time. I had a clothing allowance, which I was sometimes forced to use for events and I remember about $20 in 1972/3 from this funny little store. Lily Pulitzer also springs to mind.
Two things. AHP, did you read Walter Johnson’s book on the history of racial violence in St. Louis? That Veiled Prophet horror is of a piece with it.
Second, that story you linked to about beer dads reminds me of a joke I never get tired of. Q: Why do you always take two Baptists fishing with you? A: if you take only one he’ll drink all your beer.
Oh wow this was such a fantastic and devastating read. I felt the 'existential exhaustion' question deep in my bones.
I would just like to know a bit more about the response to the book. Kristen mentioned "over-researching" out of fear people would underestimate/minimize how crucial these events and themes were through modern history. It seems so obvious to me how the whole debutante package represents a convergence of markets, law, gender, race, class, and (basically) power. Please tell me people haven't been dismissive!
Yeah, people have! But this happened *far* more before it was published and therefore validated. A lot of people *really* got it, but I did experience some straight up sexism, which I think anyone who is writing about something "frivolous" (code: femme) is going to experience. Especially from old white dudes, no surprise. Certain people were also mad that I was writing about the world I'm from and might reveal things, but that I didn't care about at all.
The other response I had sometimes, which was much more interesting, was reflexive class anxiety. I think things that happen to us or around us in early adulthood can really trigger horror memories and this subject can makes some people remember other classism they've experienced. So, I'd sometimes get "rich people stuff" or "that's stupid" and that is why I wanted tone able to say definitively "here are 600 ways this marriage act or property law changed life for all women not just rich ones."
Wow. Definitely putting the book on my list. So many questions, but I’m wondering about this culture and how debutantes reinforced gender roles at the same time. I’ve been reading about the racist origins of the strict gender binary and it seems like it developed at the same time.
Absolutely, and it's a great point. Debutantes were the purest form of compliant white femininity and, through their top rung social status, reinforced all types of white hegemony. Their power was not only related to creating rules for exclusion, it was also reproductive, and producing high status heirs to continue a family line was a huge part of their function. Fears around reproduction (and miscegenation) intensified in the colonial period. There were non-Western cultures where nonbinary people were not degraded, so when white Europeans began to colonize, nonbinary people in these places were suddenly in huge danger since they threatened the strict gender roles that reinforced white supremacy. So, yes, these things are 100% related.
This was another fantastic read. As someone who grew up in St. Louis, not wealthy but in proximity to those who were (one of the Veiled Prophet Queens of Love and Beauty was a classmate of mine), I have been long fascinated by debutante culture, though never once have I wished I could have taken part in it. It's so weird and foreign to me that in our day and age such things can exist and be a big deal. This overt and unapologetic display of white supremacy and aristocratic pretensions has always struck me as out of step with modern culture, but it perseveres all the same.
This article was also timely as I recently read "How to Be Posh" on Non-Boring History here on Substack - https://annettelaing.substack.com/p/being-posh . Annette discusses some of the same societal pressures and issues but from a different angle (she starts with George Washington!).
YESSS! I think you'll howl. I thought it was brilliantly OTT (it's Borat!).
Thank you also for taking the time to answer our questions. It's frustrating but not surprising how much criticism has been directed at you by people just because of the topic you've written about. No one at the top (or even in the middle) wants the power differential to be disturbed!
Hi Kristen, excited to read the book! I am interested in how your inquiry into this subject developed over time and what your research process was like.
Thanks! I just got vaguely curious about it one day in my twenties when my cousins started to debut. I had rejected the invitation to do it, and had really thought it was dead, so was intrigued that it was making a comeback. This was in the early 2000s and I sent it aside for a long time, but had this back-burner interest in it.
My research process, like all of them I am guessing, was all over the place. Nobody had ever really given this the time of day. People described it, but nobody had explained it. So I did spend a lot of time figuring out why we have debutantes at all. That involved reading a lot of English history, economic, social, colonial, literary (since there were so many debutante characters). I also read histories of girlhood and of marriage. I read about each individual locations I was covering as well and subtopics that seemed important like costume history, plus anthropological work on resistance to enslavement through fashion.
But the bulk of my work was archival. I read contemporary conduct literature and etiquette manuals, but women's diaries and letters made up the bulk of my research and were the most important sources. I went to a TON of historical societies and would tack on a day of research to any trip I was making. And I totally worship all archivists and librarians for helping me find these less obvious primary sources. They were like, "oh, you're looking for this? Here are fifty other things that I just happen to know about." The best!
If anyone is researching and has the ability to go to libraries and archives in person, it really helps to see where resources are located. Women's letters and diaries are often housed in the shitty parts of libraries or in the back of family archives and it was really motivating for me to continue the work when I saw that.
"The Kardashians have debutante roots, but I think they’re most like the 1930s debutantes like Brenda Frazier" - Wow. I just read about Brenda, and saw the photo of her taken later in life by Dianne Arbus. What a fascinating and tragic figure.
ONE GIANT LYDIA
I loved this interview so much and just ordered the book.
Anne Helen, this shit slaps! I'm currently reading "Veil & Vow" by Aneeka Ayanna Henderson, which is about marriage in modern Black culture, and also thinking about my own family's participation in Black Southern debutante balls. My mom picked the wrong daughter to be in the Delta Sigma Theta Jabberwock Cotillion because my sister was definitely not the right fit for that, haha.
Just bought Veil & Vow so thank you for that! Lol to picking the wrong daughter. I went to a *bunch* of wrong daughter debuts when I was in college.
Loved this interview and your observation about the Kardashians as modern-day Bennets.
And that boarding school term "the girls who get to be pretty" is perfect.
Wow! What a great interview! I felt, not for the first time, there is just so much more to know. Just ordered the book - thank you!
The one time I ever saw my grandmother blush was when someone asked whether she had been a debutante. She had not- grew up on a farm in rural NC with 8 siblings, didn’t go to a restaurant until she was 18 or 19, worked in a hosiery mill for decades- but the idea she might have been was so incredibly flattering to her sensibilities.
How can we think about the debutante thing as a particularly Christian ideal? I don't know what goes on in other religions, but speaking as a Jewish girl, Jewish American culture has nothing similar, except maybe the contemporary bat mitzvah party, which in certain communities is heavily tied to conspicuous consumption. But the bat mitzvah has (I think) a completely different history as a religious ritual that entwines with the feminist movement in the US, says nothing really about eligibility for marriage, and is of course for much younger girls (much to unpack there about who gets to be a "girl" and for how long). Debutante balls in the US have always seemed to me to be very tied to Christian traditions and understandings about marriage and power, and I'm wondering where other religious practices come into it-- and whether the debut is just yet another way of maintaining Christian supremacy among the US elite.
That's a really interesting comment because I intentionally didn't cover Christian coming-of-age rituals like quinceañera, where a girl renews her baptismal promise, and purity balls, where teenage girls promise their dads they'll stay virgins until marriage (Blerg) *because* they were focused more on religion and less on creating financially advantageous marriages. That said, the upper class that debutantes helped create was definitely Christian and Christian supremacist and continues to be. I would say Protestant actually because Catholics were excluded too.
You can see how anti-semitism was intertwined with marriage and the social season in literature too. In Anthony Trollope's "The Way We Live Now," the massively rich financier (with the heiress daughter) Augustus Melmotte, is "rumored to be Jewish." Same goes for Julius Beaufort in "The Age of Innocence," who is also of "unknown origins" but married into old NY money. Not fiction, but in the 1920s, Ellen Mackay, a debutante heiress, got disowned by her super-rich father for running away to marry Irving Berlin. She later wrote for the New Yorker.
Oh, there are definitely more explicitly Christian debutante-type events, and it's interesting to know that you weren't focused on them. As I've been working to define my own Jewishness as a new adult, I've become really invested in finding the places where Christianity has been so ingrained and normalized as to be unremarkable, and remarking upon it, so it's just something I'm always looking out for-- definitely not a criticism!
I didn't hear it as a crit at all! I'm really glad you raised it.
I wonder if that is simply because it came from the beginning of Protestantism and added the other trappings along the way? I had lots of friends who did cotillion in Tennessee and Georgia, and there were definite Christian undertones.
What sort of things did they do to make it overtly Christian? I'm super curious.
I wouldn't say it's overt, but more Christian culture as it is in the South. White dresses (also worn for baptisms), pledges to be "pure," extreme gender stereotypes, and the purpose of women being for marriage/children. There are even "purity balls" (ha!) that mimic debutante balls, and those are super Christian, but they didn't have to do much different than the regular ones.
Sorry, I didn't read your whole comment about the purity balls! But cotillion/debutante in the South still had such Christian connotations, even without the overt purity element. I was Lutheran, so they weren't for me, but the more Evangelical or Baptist girls were the ones who participated.
Speaking as a Jewish girl, I think you're right. These debutante balls seem to be a part of the Christian hegemony. These events are completely foreign to me and almost mythical. Hence why it is so fascinating to read about them.
This is fascinating and I love it and I really need to see if my library has this book!
Incredible read and can’t wait to read the book! Anne Helen is right, your writing is beautiful and sharp.
Your discussion of performative leisure made me think of Golden Goose shoes. Certainly the eye watering price tag for Golden Goose emphasizes both the “performative” and the “leisure” aspects of their value as status symbols.
I feel like shoes have a social significance that other couture accessories, like purses, have not achieved. For one thing, they are something you walk on! They are impossible to wear without actually getting them worn. The fact that Golden Goose sneakers imitate many older styles (down to the scuffs) of far cheaper sneakers feels so visceral for me, as someone who grew up wearing the older and cheaper styles. One of my mom’s most powerful memories from growing up extremely poor in Raleigh, NC, has to do with her generation’s Golden Goose equivalents. She still vividly remembers the Debs that went to her high school who all had pairs and pairs of Pappagallo ballet flats in colors to match every outfit. I have been trying to find out how much these shoes cost in the 1960s but I haven’t found a price…suffice to say, to my mom they were dazzlingly expensive. The fact that the Debs had pairs enough to match their outfits was beyond the realm of possibility.
The specialization of shoes is also interesting. I think something could be said for the fact that Golden Gooses are sneakers, rather than Manolo Blahniks (for those of us in the Sex and the City generation). Manolo Blahniks told us viewers that you were headed to a cocktail party at the Governor’s mansion…sneakers say you are going to put gas in the car. I am sure there is an argument to be made about the desirability of looking like an off-duty ballet dancer within the 1960s Southern country-club-attending, debutante world.
Anyway, I would love to hear your take on shoes! Or any take, for that matter.
Hi Kate,
The Golden Goose thing is a perfect example of the complexity of performative leisure. Poverty fetishism has deep roots in Western culture. There are tons of examples, but right now I'm thinking of Marie Antoinette (unfairly maligned most of the time!) creating Le Hameau so she could live the simple, pastoral life, which for her was milking cows into Sevrès porcelain.
When I was a teenager, we all wore L.L. Bean blucher moccasins held together by duct tape. Pretty much everything we wore was in tatters. I was totally unaware that this was a class performance at the time, the only thing I knew was that it was bad to be showy in any way. Now it's very clear to me that this was a super power move that one could only make with perfect hair, teeth, skin, background, accent, and in specific contexts etc. Money so old that you don't have to show it, which is meta-showiness really. This was in NYC/New England, and the South has never really dressed down in the same way. So your example of Papagallos is a much cleaner example of how important shoes are as a signifier.
Very often style or coolness, particularly white style, is about rejecting beauty norms and wearing things that are insistently ugly to show that you are beautiful enough or thin enough to get away with that. Also a power move. When things are too perfect, they can suggest something reactionary or fearful--here I am thinking of, say, women's hair at Fox News. Debutante dresses, hair, clothing, and shoes often fall into that conservative category. Girls who felt forced into debuting often tried to stage subtle rebellions, like one who showed off her shoulder tattoo of a sinking Mayflower at the Mayflower Ball. People who wear Golden Goose often talk about how well they're made. There are a lot of well-made shoes, but these are unique in that they're a way to be compliant while suggesting rebellion.
Papagallo shoes! Blast from my past and I think I may have been the first to decline an engraved debutante invitation in my home town’s history. Still a topic these many years later. But I remember getting the shoes and several pairs at a time. I had a clothing allowance, which I was sometimes forced to use for events and I remember about $20 in 1972/3 from this funny little store. Lily Pulitzer also springs to mind.
Thank you for your memory!!
Two things. AHP, did you read Walter Johnson’s book on the history of racial violence in St. Louis? That Veiled Prophet horror is of a piece with it.
Second, that story you linked to about beer dads reminds me of a joke I never get tired of. Q: Why do you always take two Baptists fishing with you? A: if you take only one he’ll drink all your beer.
Oh wow this was such a fantastic and devastating read. I felt the 'existential exhaustion' question deep in my bones.
I would just like to know a bit more about the response to the book. Kristen mentioned "over-researching" out of fear people would underestimate/minimize how crucial these events and themes were through modern history. It seems so obvious to me how the whole debutante package represents a convergence of markets, law, gender, race, class, and (basically) power. Please tell me people haven't been dismissive!
Hi Bri,
Yeah, people have! But this happened *far* more before it was published and therefore validated. A lot of people *really* got it, but I did experience some straight up sexism, which I think anyone who is writing about something "frivolous" (code: femme) is going to experience. Especially from old white dudes, no surprise. Certain people were also mad that I was writing about the world I'm from and might reveal things, but that I didn't care about at all.
The other response I had sometimes, which was much more interesting, was reflexive class anxiety. I think things that happen to us or around us in early adulthood can really trigger horror memories and this subject can makes some people remember other classism they've experienced. So, I'd sometimes get "rich people stuff" or "that's stupid" and that is why I wanted tone able to say definitively "here are 600 ways this marriage act or property law changed life for all women not just rich ones."
Wow. Definitely putting the book on my list. So many questions, but I’m wondering about this culture and how debutantes reinforced gender roles at the same time. I’ve been reading about the racist origins of the strict gender binary and it seems like it developed at the same time.
Absolutely, and it's a great point. Debutantes were the purest form of compliant white femininity and, through their top rung social status, reinforced all types of white hegemony. Their power was not only related to creating rules for exclusion, it was also reproductive, and producing high status heirs to continue a family line was a huge part of their function. Fears around reproduction (and miscegenation) intensified in the colonial period. There were non-Western cultures where nonbinary people were not degraded, so when white Europeans began to colonize, nonbinary people in these places were suddenly in huge danger since they threatened the strict gender roles that reinforced white supremacy. So, yes, these things are 100% related.
This was another fantastic read. As someone who grew up in St. Louis, not wealthy but in proximity to those who were (one of the Veiled Prophet Queens of Love and Beauty was a classmate of mine), I have been long fascinated by debutante culture, though never once have I wished I could have taken part in it. It's so weird and foreign to me that in our day and age such things can exist and be a big deal. This overt and unapologetic display of white supremacy and aristocratic pretensions has always struck me as out of step with modern culture, but it perseveres all the same.
This article was also timely as I recently read "How to Be Posh" on Non-Boring History here on Substack - https://annettelaing.substack.com/p/being-posh . Annette discusses some of the same societal pressures and issues but from a different angle (she starts with George Washington!).
Anyway, this was a great interview. Thanks!
Thanks for
Kristen, I just had a flashback to that scene from the debutante ball in the latest Borat movie. Did you see it, and did it make you cackle?
No, I didn't, but now I will!
YESSS! I think you'll howl. I thought it was brilliantly OTT (it's Borat!).
Thank you also for taking the time to answer our questions. It's frustrating but not surprising how much criticism has been directed at you by people just because of the topic you've written about. No one at the top (or even in the middle) wants the power differential to be disturbed!
Hi Kristen, excited to read the book! I am interested in how your inquiry into this subject developed over time and what your research process was like.
Hi Stacey,
Thanks! I just got vaguely curious about it one day in my twenties when my cousins started to debut. I had rejected the invitation to do it, and had really thought it was dead, so was intrigued that it was making a comeback. This was in the early 2000s and I sent it aside for a long time, but had this back-burner interest in it.
My research process, like all of them I am guessing, was all over the place. Nobody had ever really given this the time of day. People described it, but nobody had explained it. So I did spend a lot of time figuring out why we have debutantes at all. That involved reading a lot of English history, economic, social, colonial, literary (since there were so many debutante characters). I also read histories of girlhood and of marriage. I read about each individual locations I was covering as well and subtopics that seemed important like costume history, plus anthropological work on resistance to enslavement through fashion.
But the bulk of my work was archival. I read contemporary conduct literature and etiquette manuals, but women's diaries and letters made up the bulk of my research and were the most important sources. I went to a TON of historical societies and would tack on a day of research to any trip I was making. And I totally worship all archivists and librarians for helping me find these less obvious primary sources. They were like, "oh, you're looking for this? Here are fifty other things that I just happen to know about." The best!
If anyone is researching and has the ability to go to libraries and archives in person, it really helps to see where resources are located. Women's letters and diaries are often housed in the shitty parts of libraries or in the back of family archives and it was really motivating for me to continue the work when I saw that.
So fascinating, thank you! I appreciate her unvarnished opinions and thorough research. Wow.
"The Kardashians have debutante roots, but I think they’re most like the 1930s debutantes like Brenda Frazier" - Wow. I just read about Brenda, and saw the photo of her taken later in life by Dianne Arbus. What a fascinating and tragic figure.