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Sent: 19 August 2011 04:48
There is quite a large body of literature on manners and etiquette
guides for 1950s guides. This topic can have quite a few different
interpretations - are you strictly looking for manners and etiquette
instruction, or is social hygiene and dating acceptable for your
topic? For the sake of brevity, I'm going to limit my comments to
manners and etiquette for pre-teens, excluding guides that were mostly
"how to be a good wife and mother someday" types of instruction. You
are also welcome to contact me off-list.
Early childhood instruction of this type went through a boom period in
the 1950s, particularly as a preventative for the "epidemic" of
juvenile delinquency. You mentioned that you are familiar with the
literature of the 1920s, so forgive me if I am repeating anything you
already know. Many of the books of this type in the 1950s were at
first just reprint editions of 1930s and 1940s books like "The Modern
Hand Book for Girls" (orig. 1933) and "Mother Goose Etiquette Rhymes"
(orig. 1941). You may also be interested in "Good Manners Please!"
(orig. 1949 by Gail Brook Burket).
You might find some pointers in developmental psychology and
educational psychology books of the period for the adult expert and
layperson - sometimes those books include a few titles.
Teenagers of the 1950s had a number of etiquette and social awareness
books available to them, everything from Dear Abby's "Dear Teen-Ager,"
books by Connie Francis ("For Every Young Heart") and Pat Boone
("'Twixt Twelve and Twenty"), and McCall's-type guides on fashion and
dating. But parents, particularly those identified as "the problem" in
preventing juvenile delinquency, were not considered likely to care
about instructing their children in manners and etiquette anyway.
This is where the schools come in - and the school filmstrip. This may
also be why so many who lived through this period don't remember any
specific titles - who remembers school filmstrips, anyway? (I slept
through many as a child in the 1980s.) The filmstrip was supposed to
be the new educational medium, and several companies produced
thousands of filmstrips on every conceivable superficial topic. (To be
fair, there were a few well-done serious films.) A few of these
companies: Coronet, Centron, Encyclopedia Britannica, Life Magazine,
Curriculum Films, Jam Handy Organization. The United States Government
also produced a few of these films.
I think for your purposes you'll be most interested in the Centron,
Coronet, and Encyclopedia Britannica catalogs. To the best of my
knowledge, these organizations made their 1950s films public domain,
but I would double-check. You can find a fun popular-press guide to
these films and the motives and production means behind them in
"Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films, 1945-1970" by
Ken Smith.
The Prelinger Library in San Francisco has an exhaustive Internet
archive and directory at
http://www.archive.org/details/coronet_instructional_videos. The
archive.org directory has a specific subject heading for etiquette:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Social+guidance%3A+Etiquette%22
Once you get some titles of specific films you want, they're all over
YouTube - I use KeepVid to download public domain YouTube videos at
http://keepvid.com/. If you're determined to
spend money to acquire
these films, the company Something Weird (link may not be safe for
work, they also have 1950s sexploitation and foxy boxing films by the
score) at http://www.somethingweird.com/.
Check for the "Campy
Classroom Classics" series. The quality of their transfer isn't great,
but if you get a defective DVD copy they're really good about sending
out working copies.
Okay, so that's where you get 'em and where you look for 'em. There
are too many to list and this is already getting long, but I'll give
you a few of my favorite titles for your topic:
"Acts of Courtesy"
"On Your Own"
"Getting Along with Others"
"Litterbug"
"Am I Trust Worthy?"
"Appreciating Our Parents"
"Manners in Public"
"The Golden Rule"
"How Friendly Are You?"
"Exchanging Greetings and Introductions"
"Your Table Manners"
"Writing Better Social Letters"
"Dining Together"
"Everyday Courtesy"
"Let's Play Fair"
"Playing Together"
etc.... too many to list!
I hope I have given you a good start and that instructional films are
not off the mark, but this really is the big innovation in etiquette
instruction in the 1950s. I do have some more specific book titles at
home in my collection, but I've been on the road for a while.
Happy viewing!
Jennifer Goodland
Affiliate Faculty
History and Honors Departments
Metropolitan State College of Denver
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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