Well, not really, but the movie apparently annoyed her, too, for slightly different reasons than it annoyed everyone else.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Jan17.html
A Snide 'Smile'
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page D02
If a Wellesley graduate of a certain age worries about attracting retrospective ridicule, her mind races to . . . posture pictures. Uh-oh.
These were photographs once taken of all students, ostensibly for health reasons connected with posture. As was revealed decades later, the photographs had been ordered in cooperation with a dubious sociological study done independently of the school, which purported to connect body types with intelligence (such as can be discerned from freshmen). These so-called posture pictures were not unique to Wellesley, nor to female colleges; Ivy League colleges, then all-male institutions, also mandated them.
The "uh-oh" is that the female photographs were taken nearly nude, and the male ones entirely so. Whatever effect this had on the posture, knowing that revealing photographs of oneself are out there somewhere beyond one's control ought to teach humility.
If people now want to laugh at the 1950s in general, as it seems they often do, and at Wellesley College in particular, Miss Manners would have thought this provided ample material. The fact that at the time it produced jokes, rather than protests, could illustrate the standard thesis that everyone then was gridlocked into conformity. And think of the visuals, starring innumerable current dignitaries.
But no. The new film with this thesis, "Mona Lisa Smile," passes up mentioning posture pictures for something more shocking: a scene purporting to show Wellesley students taking a course in, of all things, etiquette (and never mind that today's students of both genders are actively seeking remedial etiquette instruction).
But Wellesley did not teach etiquette. Miss Manners was there at the time, and you had better believe that she would have noticed. Even Posture and Relaxation, which served as a cover for the posture pictures, was only a mini-course in the Physical Education department, not -- more's the pity -- an area of study in which she could have captured high honors.
For one thing, the practice of etiquette is not an academic subject (nor, by Wellesley's standards, was journalism, another field into which Miss Manners later fell headfirst). The history and theory of manners are academic subjects, but even now few academics understand this element of philosophy, history, anthropology, sociology and literature.
For another thing, it would have been superfluous, as all the students, not just prissy Miss Manners, knew basic etiquette. This was not because they attended an expensive school, but because etiquette was something all children had to suffer through at home.
Innocent of the history of etiquette, the film is rife with anachronisms. Students were given the dignity of being addressed by title and surname, and faculty eschewed the title of "doctor," since their doctorates were taken for granted. "Poise" was a word associated with beauty contests, which were disdained; the term "gracious living" was said as a joke.
More deeply, the film fails to question the assumption that female students were at Wellesley to pursue marriage, when accomplishing this required an exactly equal number of males with the same goal. Whether they first establish their families and then build their careers, as then, or reverse the order, as now, does not strike Miss Manners as much of a change.
What does shock her is the realization that posing naked is hardly worth mentioning these days, but knowing how to behave is considered damning.
