What to Do, When and Why

by Marjabelle Young Stewart

Advises the pre-teen girl on manners, beauty care, being a likeable person, and generally dealing with life's situations. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0883311054
• ISBN13: 9780883311059
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: Words Work Press (CT)
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.9" x 10.0"
• Age Range: 8 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 3

Customer Reviews

Great nostalgic read with still pertinent advice

While it's true that some portions of this book are a bit dated now, it is still full of good etiquette advice. I found this book when I was 11 years old, and have treasured my copy all these years. Without a mother to show me "what to do when and why" I found this to be my growing up textbook. It peaked my interest in self-care. I even started washing my hair! (ha ha) The gorgeous line illustrations alone make it worth having.

For Savoir-faire Everywhere

This book was distributed in the first set of poise-charm classes that I took at Gayfers department store in Montgomery, Alabama at age 11. Through weekly drills, we covered topics such as walking on a runway, making regular poise-pivot turns and Dutch boys, climbing stairs, doing introductions, maintaining good posture, and sitting properly, among others. In the end, we had a fashion show at the mall, and membership in the Jr. Gayfer Girl Club was extended to us, along with seasonal store discounts at 10%. This was the summer of 1983 when "Calvins" still meant almost everything and many girls in my class said that Tom Selleck was their favorite actor; it was before anyone had ever heard of a concept such as the "supermodel." By this I mean that few if any of us in the class had an idea of who Gia Carangi was or what she represented at the time. As I recall, Stewart's book covers numerous questions: How to set a table? How to make introductions? What to do when you lose your best friend or boyfriend- the kinds of relationships that are at best "iffy" from the start? (And this is where I first learned that word, along with a few others, for overall, Stewart addresses her young audience with the grace of Miss Manners and does not condescend to it by watering down her language). How to handle it when you are the target of gossip? She offers a party lexicon, consisting of varieties such as the "come as you are party." She addresses the importance of sending a "bread and butter" note after visiting someone. There are even, I think, a few recipes. And there's a section for filling in your family tree inside the front cover. We never engaged this book directly in our course, but this was reading that I complemented by poring over illustrated sections on "social graces" in one of the old and very thick dictionaries in our house, which seemed to cover just about everything. I was disappointed that in a later charm course I took at age 14, the official book was one from Seventeen magazine and more focused on makeup instead of the development of social skills along the lines of Stewart's book. I even read and referred to her book many times throughout my early teen years. I finally passed my much loved copy on to the preteen little sister of my boyfriend when I was 17, for I was tutoring her in math at the time. In retrospect, this is a book that part of me wishes I'd held on to as a keepsake, for only hindsight has allowed me to understand fully the difference that it helped to make in my social, emotional and personal development and maturation. In general, exposure to a text with that kind of orientation at an early age also introduced me to and gave me a deep love and appreciation for the "how to" genre, and to this day, as an adult working as a university professor and moonlighting as an artist, I regularly mix "how to" books into the range of selections that I read. This book may have also put me on the road to cultivating a love f