Life & Wisdom Quote by Katharine Fullerton Gerould

Conventional manners, Gerould implies, aren’t merely niceties; they’re gatekeeping technology. Calling them a “literacy test” yanks etiquette out of the realm of private virtue and plants it firmly in the public machinery of belonging. Literacy is supposedly neutral: you either can read or you can’t. But everyone knows literacy tests have a history as “objective” screens designed to keep certain people out. Gerould borrows that cold bureaucratic logic and applies it to the everyday: the fork you choose, the tone you take, the timing of your thank-you note. Pass, and you’re “one of us.” Fail, and you’re marked as suspect.

The sting is in “the alien who comes among us.” She isn’t talking about extraterrestrials; she’s pointing at the newcomer: the immigrant, the outsider by class, the person who didn’t grow up with the unspoken rules. “Alien” carries legal and social freight in early 20th-century America, when anxieties about immigration, assimilation, and “Americanization” programs were thick in the air. Gerould’s phrasing catches the paranoid plural - “among us” - a community imagining itself as a besieged organism.

Her subtext is sharp: manners perform innocence while doing the work of exclusion. They let a dominant group convert taste into proof of worth, and prejudice into “standards.” The brilliance of the line is its moral inversion. Etiquette, marketed as generosity and refinement, becomes a pop quiz administered to people who were never given the textbook.