Zobia Salam

Of the many valuable things a young woman can be, perhaps being a ’lady’ is still a priority. I say this after chancing upon an advertisement for a very different kind of educational space: a finishing school. Give us a girl, the ad says, and take back a lady. 

Finishing schools as formal institutions can be traced back to the nineteenth century. While boys belonging to the aristocratic and bourgeois class were packed off to boarding schools to learn classical and foreign languages and algebra, girls of these social backgrounds found themselves making their way towards finishing schools. The education imparted was different than what the boys received and what was necessary in making them ‘socially acceptable’. Girls learnt etiquette, manners, the tricks of running a household and hosting guests. the education one received prepares one for the world he or she will get. A finishing school education was expected to do exactly this: prepare women for the world domesticity and make suitable wives out of them. 

About a century later, the radical feminist movement began simmering and finally exploded by the 1960s with the impact that all but obliterated the demand for finishing schools. The feminisation and devaluation of the domestic sphere was challenged and ‘domestic talents once suggestive of elegance and good breeding began to look more like instruments of oppression’.

    Peculiarly, these anachronistic institutions are still flourish across India, ranging from ‘etiquette classes’ in the cramped alleyways of small towns and more established finishing schools stowed away in metro cities. Unlike European finishing schools of the earlier times, which catered to upper-class women, these institutions are marketed towards those Indian women who might not come from but have made it to the professional class; they now look to perform the part. Class moulds the performance of gender in distinct ways. In other words, the femininity of working class women will be different from that of bourgeois women, and the latter forms the ideal. As the private sphere comes to be dictated as the rightful women’s sphere, women who exist within it become the ideal. Working-class women are defined by their existence in the public sphere and this existence itself takes the shine away from their previously unmarred femininity. So being a ‘good wife’ and a ‘charming hostess’ with all etiquettes and graces intact, are not just feminine norms but bourgeois feminine norms. Finishing schools exist to teach these. 

Popular TV series Made In Heaven captured these angles through the story of protagonist Tara Khanna. As a wedding planner Tara’s exquisite taste and choice for her uber rich clientele is an extension of the same for herself. But these tastes which appear ‘natural’ on her have been carefully constructed through long hours spent at an etiquette school. She comes from a family with little money but climbs up the hierarchy by wedding herself to an upper-class man, a feat achieved by masquerading as the ‘ideal woman’ i.e. the bourgeois woman, soft-spoken, polite and delicate as against being the loud and rough-at-the edges woman from the lower rungs she really is. In moments when the mask slips, one truly sees Tara – stranded in the wrong place, with the wrong people and possibly in wrong ‘self’ she now (attempts to) inhabit. Perhaps what is most significant is the paradox: on one hand, this ‘education’ received in etiquette school (as against her school or collegiate education) is what makes her occupy the space she wants, personally (as the wife of rich man) and professionally (as a wedding planner catering only to the rich). But on the other hand, it is this very education that alienates her from herself.

I quickly glanced at what courses these educational institutions have on offer – social graces, fashion and housekeeping are always essential modules across curricula. This is telling of the fact that while the woman may move out and occupy the public sphere via a job gained through education, this education is incomplete. It will be completed – finished – only when she gains mastery over the private sphere. As for class, her upward mobility will not be dictated by how much money she’s able to make but by acquiring the gestures of having inherited it. Obviously, men looking at climbing the social ladder have relatively less to think about. Conspicuous consumption does for them what training in finishing schools would for women. Social graces might be add-ons to an ideal man, but for the ideal woman, they are a must. Manners maketh man? Perhaps, but definitely less than they maketh woman!