Charm School Confessions: Swell Dames Spill the Tea
Every woman wants to get the best from life
and make the most of her opportunities, appearance and abilities.I believe that Charm is the magic key to happiness and success.
And I believe that every woman has the seeds of charm within her.
She has only to liberate it.Eileen Ascroft (1938)
The Magic Key to Charm: Instructions for a Delightful Life
As long as women have inhabited the earth, we’ve been seeking advice from each other. Charm schools, books, serials, and mail-order courses have always been with us in one phase or another, but their hey-day seems to have been between the twenties and sixties. In 1919 when England woke up after the nightmare of the Great War and realized an entire generation of men were lost on the battlefield, millions of English women who grew up believing marriage to be their birthright discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round. The tabloid press ran alarming stories about the “Problem of the Surplus Women – Two Million Who Can Never Become Wives...” and a new self-improvement niche came into being: teaching women to be charming and hence, marriageable.
In England advice columnists are called “agony aunts” and in 1938 a hugely popular serial began in London’s Daily Mirror by Mrs. Eileen Ascroft called the “Charm School”. Like her Victorian literary domestic counterpart Mrs. Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Ascroft filled her column with all the personal tips that any young woman needed on feminine wiles.
The Color of Charm
I adore pink. I love the pale Persian pinks, the little carnations of Provence and Schiaparelli pink, the pink of the Incas. And though it’s so vieux jeu I can hardly bear to repeat it—pink is the navy blue of India.
--Diana Vreeland (1903-1989)
Legendary Fashion Editor
Many writers have tried to describe charm, which is as easy as describing the color of pink. The playwright J.M. Barrie described charm in his 1919 stage play, What Everywoman Knows as “a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else; and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t much matter what else you have.”
During my wonder years, Enid Haupt, the famous editor of Seventeen Magazine (from 1953 to 1970) described charm this way: “A charming person is never petty or petulant—rather one who is genuinely interested in people and activities. Charm gives an automatic radiance that magnetizes and, to my way of thinking, is the true essence of beauty. Instead of fading with the passage of time, the charm of a personality grows with the years. One could even call charm a self-developed talent, for it reflects individuality, intelligence, and warmth of spirit. Almost anyone can achieve charm—its ingredients are really only self-discipline and thoughtfulness.”
A self-developed talent.
And I thought, I can do that. So can you.