Judith Martin


Judith Martin, better known by the pen name Miss Manners, is an American journalist, author, and etiquette authority.

Early life and career

Martin is the daughter of Helen and Jacob Perlman. Her father was born in 1898 in Białystok, then part of the Russian Empire, now in Poland. He immigrated to the United States in 1912. In 1925, he received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, in economics. Jacob married Helen Aronson in 1935, and they moved to Washington, D.C., where Martin was born in 1938.
Martin spent a significant part of her childhood in Washington, D.C., where she still lives and works, graduating from Georgetown Day School. She lived in various foreign capitals as a child, as her father, a United Nations economist, was frequently transferred. Martin graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in English. Before she began the advice column, she was a journalist, covering social events at the White House and embassies; she then became a theater and film critic.

"Miss Manners"

Beginning in 1978, Martin commenced to write an advice column, which is now distributed three times a week by Universal Uclick and carried in more than 200 newspapers worldwide. In the column, she answers etiquette questions contributed by her readers and writes short essays on problems of manners, or clarifies the essential qualities of politeness.
Martin writes about the ideas and intentions underpinning seemingly simple rules, providing a complex and advanced perspective, which she refers to as "heavy etiquette theory". Her columns have been collected in a number of books. In her writings, Martin refers to herself in the third person.
In a 1995 interview by Virginia Shea, Martin said:
You can deny all you want that there is etiquette, and a lot of people do in everyday life. But if you behave in a way that offends the people you're trying to deal with, they will stop dealing with you...There are plenty of people who say, "We don't care about etiquette, but we can't stand the way so-and-so behaves, and we don't want him around!" Etiquette doesn't have the great sanctions that the law has. But the main sanction we do have is in not dealing with these people and isolating them...

Martin identifies "blatant greed" as the most serious etiquette problem in the United States. The most frequently asked question she receives is how to politely demand cash from potential gift-givers, and the second most common question is how much potential guests must spend on a gift.
On August 29, 2013, Martin's children, Nicholas and Jacobina, began sharing credit for her columns.

Other

Martin was the recipient of a 2005 National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush. On March 23, 2006, she was a special guest correspondent on The Colbert Report, giving her analysis of the manners with which the White House Press Corps spoke to the President.
Some of Martin's writings were collected and set to music by Dominick Argento in his song cycle Miss Manners on Music.
Since its launch in 2008, Judith Martin has been a contributor for wowOwow, a Web site for women to talk culture, politics, and gossip.
Martin's uncle was economist and labor historian Selig Perlman.
Martin was portrayed by Broadway theatre actress Jessie Mueller in The Post, Steven Spielberg's 2017 movie about the Pentagon Papers.

Books