Targeted primarily at women, etiquette columns have appeared in American newspapers and magazines since the mid-nineteenth century to guide readers through the tangled thickets of social convention and polite behavior. In part, these columns began as responses to the cultural anxieties of a newly emerging middle class, but they also derived from related American mythologies of moral perfection and self-improvement. And despite contemporary society's avowed indifference to propriety, these concerns clearly persist, as evidenced by the enthusiastic readership of Judith Martin's etiquette column "Miss Manners."

Godey's Lady's Book was among the first periodicals to dispense etiquette advice to American women. In the years before the Civil War, when literacy rates had reached 50 percent, Godey's enjoyed a circulation of 150,000. Editor Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale was determined to avoid subjecting her subscribers to the day's political unpleasantness, so she frequently turned to contributor Mrs. James Parton, known to...