Class and status anxiety in an apparently egalitarian society have created ample opportunity for social advisors to judge correct behavior, especially with regard to formal ritual occasions like weddings and funerals. At the same time, etiquette as a social code of the elite was also identified with assimilation through mass media, permitting a series of published social arbiters to flourish from generation to generation. Emily Post’s 1920s Etiquette, for example, drew on the cachet of old money to advise on problems dealing with servants, accents and travel, as well as special occasions. Amy Vanderbilt, with another established name, took on a similar role for the postwar middle class.

While many baby boomers rejected such stylized behaviors as inauthentic in the 1960s, the uncertainties of multicultural lives as well as ongoing life crises have produced new figures for millennial behavior. These again cater to individuals without family guidance or education in such social traditions. Miss Manners (Judith Martin) in her columns and books adapts an ironic Victorian voice to current questions of shifting gender, family and ethnic conjunctions; Martha Stewart, while focused on style, conveys guidance in living for the leisured middle class. Etiquette has also been conveyed by mass media as part of the portrayals of class, as well as explorations of character, issues of marriage, bereavement, etc.

There are, of course, class and ethnic differences in behavior, ranging from expectations of participants in ritual events to issues of loudness, assertiveness or presentations of self in social situations that continuously divide multicultural and intergenerational gatherings. In such a setting, formality (derived from European models) may constitute a neutral ground or an additional layer of repression or exclusion.