How to Introduce a Daughter.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue VI, 9 August 1902, Page 379

How to Introduce a Daughter.

How best to introduce a daughter to society is a difficult problem nowadays, and one that is much discussed among mothers. A few years ago there was no question about it. A coming-out tea was given, to which every acquaintance was asked, and the girl was launched. Nobody was offended and nobody left out, and the greater the crowd the better. Now, however, the matter is somewhat of a puzzle. To those who wish to escape the trouble of entertaining entirely the present fashion of simply enclosing the girl’s card with her mother’s in an envelope comes as an immense relief; but such people are in the minority. Most parents who can afford it, especially the mothers, like to entertain for their daughters, and the passing of the “tea” leaves them in doubt and uncertainty. Every other species of entertainment is, by reason of the necessarily circumscribed number of guests, more or less unsatisfactory. The dinner dance is, perhaps, the most popular, but to include all the two hundred and fifty social lights requires the purse of a millionaire. The mammoth theatre party and subsequent supper are open to the same objection. In fact, it is to be questioned whether any one large, expensive entertainment, except the much-abused tea, which includes everyone, and where no special effiort is necessary, is satisfactory. Society is proverbially ungrateful, as is proved by the fate of a debutante whose people gave a magnificent ball in her honour and who had no partner for the cotillion or supper at her next dance, says the New York “Tribune.”