American writer
Marjabelle Young Stewart |
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| Born | May 16, 1924
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| Died | March 3, 2007 (aged 82)
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Marjabelle Young Stewart (May 16, 1924 – March 3, 2007) was an American writer and expert on etiquette.
Early life
Stewart was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Marie and Clarence Cullen Bryant (a great-grandson of poet William Cullen Bryant). She and her three sisters lived in an orphanage after her parents divorced, where her youngest sister died of a mastoid infection at age 2. After her mother remarried, they returned to live with her. She attended Thomas Jefferson High School in Council Bluffs. After graduating, at the age of 17, she married scientist Jack Davison Young and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1941. She worked in a naval yard before taking up modelling.[1]
Career
Young became one of Washington's top models and created her own agency in partnership with two other women. When she met the humor columnist Art Buchwald, he suggested a co-partnership with his wife in writing a book about etiquette. Stewart collaborated with Ann Buchwald on two other joint books and then she started writing her own.
She went on to teach etiquette and manners to children, including Richard M. Nixon's daughters, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's granddaughter and President Johnson's son.[1][2] Her husband started a business to teach etiquette training and Stewart began teaching classes for professionals and college students.[1] She went to class equipped with a complete place setting that included china, 10 pieces of silverware, five different sizes of crystal glasses, and "a silver salt cellar with accompanying shell-shaped spoon".[3]
She moved to Kewanee, Illinois in 1965 after her divorce from Mr. Young and remarriage to attorney William E. Stewart. She created a network of etiquette classes, which at its height had locations in several hundred U.S. cities. These classes were called White Gloves (for girls) and Blue Blazers (for boys); they usually ran in cooperation with department stores. She wrote fifteen books on etiquette including, Marjabelle Stewart's Book of Modern Table Manners (1981), Can My Bridesmaids Wear Black? And 325 Other Most Asked Questions (1989), and Executive Etiquette in the New Workplace (1996).
In 1977, she began issuing an annual list of best-mannered cities. Cities like Savannah, Georgia, Madison, Wisconsin, and New York often appeared in the list.[3]
After a car accident on June 30, 1997, Stewart was charged with a DUI.[4]
In 2018 her video Table Manners for Kids: Tots to Teens was featured on the internet show Best of the Worst hosted by RedLetterMedia. It was voted as the best tape of the night. The panel members called her attempts to teach children table manners a "losing battle".[5]
Stewart died of pneumonia at a Kewanee, Illinois nursing home, at the age of 82.[3]
