Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1880 — The Plague of Formal Calls. [ARTICLE]

The Plague of Formal Calls.

Is rr not time that a protest should be made against the absurdity and un-‘ profitableness of our custom of “paying calls?” To visit our friends for the sake of their companionship is one thing—a thing to which no social reformer, however parsimonious of time, would wish to put a limit. To visit those whom we think a more intimate acquaintance might make our friends is another thing, but equally wise. Visiting with such ends in view, however, implies choice, while the term I have quoted above implies a social obligation of the most binding character. A social dishonesty is certainly implied in the accusation that one has not “ paid” the calls she “owes.” E What is this custom, simply stated, and what solid grounds for its existence would remain did we once remove the venerable lumber of custom and tradition with which it is now securely propped? Simply stated, it is customary for a woman, who moves in any society whatever, alternately to visit and to receive visits from every woman with whom she wishes to keep up even the most formal acquaintance. It is a per-petually-recurring ceremony, for one visit “paid” means a return visit “owed,” and so on forever. The purpose originally served by the custom • is the distinction it enables ns to draw between those we desire and those we do not desire to number among our acquaintances.. But a ceremony which is, perhaps, in its simplest form quite indispensable, may at last grow, through senseless iteration, into an intolerable burden. A woman in a large city who would not drop entirely out of its social life, must keep hard at work at her Sisyphean task, made doubly onerous by tLs custom of “ kettle drums,” teas and receptions. In a place like Washington, where political is added to rocial etiquette, the weight becomes almost unbearable. I heard a lady say once that she would never go back to'Washington as a politician’s wife, unless she were allowed to assume deep mourning for some fictitious friend. The only escape from the useless drudgery of. “society” seemed to her to lie in a course that would cut her off from all its pleasures as wtll. In small towns the case is almost worse, for there one gets but meager compensation in social pleasures of any kind, and though the list is briefer, the names bring more constantly recurring obligations. These are debts which we must discharge, not even with hard-earned dollars, but with , hours that are not to be regained or replaced by any effort, or at any cost. Is there any woman who would not rejoice if it were conceded that one visit paid to a new acquaintance, and one received in return, is enough. This much done, could we not wisely grant a -woman perfect liberty to visit where she wished to.go, and to stay away when she felt no contrary rmpnlae? To be sure, if she be resolute, a woman may do these things to-day, but with most disagreeable consequences to herself, because with much offense to othera Men, married men at least, have to a great extent freed themselves from thraUdom in this matter. Their wives leave their cards and it is imputed to them for righteousness. And abroad, women, too, are allowed a very wide margin of this fictitious visiting. Does not the fact that “sending carda’ is always hailed as a blessed relief, and often accepted as payment in full of one's debts, go far to prove that visiting itself will one day be “ eliminated by natural selection, or will pass, at least, from an important organ in our social body to an atrophied survival.— M. O. Van Rensselaer, in Scribner's Monthly. A deaf mute in Hartford, Conn., is said to have invented the notorious gametf flteoa.