Yes, there is or was such a thing as charm school, and that’s what it was called. I don’t remember where it was held, as this was over 40 years ago (I would have been in my tweens). And it wasn’t my choice to enroll, my Camp Fire Girls group decided, as a group, that we would all attend these classes instead of our regular meetings for some months. I wanted to skip those meetings, but my parents, especially my mother, insisted that this would be Good For Me and that I’d Be Grateful When I Was Older. Hell, the whole reason I wanted to be in CFG was because I liked being outdoors.
We learned such things (very reluctantly, in my case) as how to sit, stand, and walk gracefully. When a lady sits, she crosses her ankles, not her knees, and attempts to tuck her feet slightly under the chair. She lowers herself gently into the seat, she does not plop down.
We learned hygiene, grooming, the proper selection of clothing for our coloration and body type, and the care and feeding of hair and nails. Since we were tweens, and this was the 60s, we were told that we were too young to wear makeup.
We were taught how to make conversation and act in public. We didn’t learn how to use fans, but only because air conditioning had become so common that fans were not common items any more.
I have no idea as to how one would look up such a school now, if they even exist. But they did exist back then, even during the Height of the Hippie Movement. Perhaps because so many parents saw hippies all around, the charm schools were there. I suppose you could take modeling classes to learn some of this stuff.
Yeah, we were told this too, as well as “Never do better than a boy in ANYTHING except things that are definitely feminine, like cooking and cleaning and taking care of a baby.” I was taught this, and I learned to recite it back when needed, but I never put it into practice. Any male who couldn’t keep up with me in any field would just have to learn to live with his inadequacies.
I remember this distinctly because I was only 8 or 9 and I remember thinking they’d called someone “noisette” and I couldn’t figure out why they were matter-of-factly calling her a nut.
(At the time I only knew it mean the chocolate covered nuts, and had no idea noisette also referred to mutton.)
It’d be nice to know what this term is, so it will be easier to tell the joke about the blonde, brunette, redhead and black-haired girl stranded on an island.