Debutantes as Southern Royalty - Part 2

[Music] Hi, welcome back to Recovering Debs. I'm Mary Lambeth Moore. If you have an appetite for debutante stories, there is no shortage on TV this summer. There's Bridgerton, of course, the popular Netflix series that depicts English Debs in the 1800s. In the summer I term pretty, the main character's debut is a major plot line. Recently, I watched a bit of Palm Royale, which isn't about debutantes per se, but it seems relevant. Kristen Wiig plays a woman named Maxine who's desperate to be accepted by Palm Beach High Society. As Maxine throws herself against the invisible walls that keep her out, much drama ensues. In today's show, we're taking a break from personal deb drama as we dive into a more analytical view of North Carolina's deb scene. I'm excited to present part two of my interview with Anna Shelton Orman, focusing on research she did for an honor's thesis. Just this past weekend, Anna presented some of her findings at the annual conference of the American Sociological Society. One central point, among 15 debutantes she interviewed, 11 describe themselves as in some way ambivalent about the experience. So with all this ambivalence, why does the debutante tradition continue? Turns out that strong incentives exist that may keep it in place, especially for parents and the organizers of the ball. Anna has a lot of insight into the dynamics behind all this. So let's jump in right where we left off last week, continuing my interview with former North Carolina debutante and PhD student Anna Shelton Orman. Okay, now let's turn to your academic research. Your undergraduate honor's thesis has a very interesting title. I'll say it again. Bloodlines, ball gowns, trashed in the hotel room, hegemonic processes of debutantes as southern social royalty. Can you explain, first of all, what hegemonic means? Yes, of course. So the idea of hegemony comes from Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci. Hegemony refers to that system or process of domination, where people seemingly choose to participate in something against their own interests. And Gramsci theorized that hegemony is accomplished through processes of both consent and coercion. So to achieve consent, people in power provide some perks or incentives for participation, which in a capitalist society, for example, looks like hope. You know, if you work hard enough, you can win and achieve greatness and success. But there's also coercion in which people in power threaten punishments if you don't participate in a system. So in conducting my undergraduate thesis analysis, I realized that both consent and coercion were present in the ball too. That there were incentives, such as parties and dressing up and eating good food and making your family happy. But there were also punishments for not participating, such as disappointing your family, experiencing tension, and your family being cut off, supposedly, from future invitations. But in popular discourse, we don't focus on the punishments of not debuting. We tend to focus on the incentives, like partying and dressing up. And that focus on incentives contributes to the idea that devs are shallow, self-centered, enthusiastic participants who are participating out of their own self-interest because they like the idea of exclusivity. They like the idea of having their moment in the spotlight. When in actuality, devs find their prospects for not debuting to be very limited. They find that their options for resisting are constrained. It's really not a question about whether or not they want to. Interesting. Yeah, so I'm especially interested in the part about how people will do things that are against their own interest. How does that play into dev culture? Right, so I should say I interviewed 22 debutante insiders, 16 of whom were invited to debut, one person declined for invitation, and so I talked to 15 women who had debuted. And out of those 15, there was only one person who didn't describe something that made them uncomfortable about debuting. And the one person who didn't describe that was someone who debuted in the 1940s. And I was conducting the interview in 2014-2015. But all the other 14 debutantes described discomforts, either physical discomforts that they had with being on display at the presentation ceremony, or identity-based discomforts of, you know, this isn't really me, this isn't my scene, or ideological discomforts, such as this goes against my values when it comes to race, gender, and class. So in that way, I found that debuting is not a wholly joyful, uncomplicated event for women. There are drawbacks to it. And so that's what I mean when I say that this is not purely women saying, "Oh, I love everything about this. This only offers rewards and no drawbacks, so I'm going to throw myself into this fully." I see. So backing up a little bit, again, this was your honors thesis. When you were an undergraduate at UNC, what was your overall objective in the thesis? What were you trying to find out? Yeah, this is a great question. So I'll back up a little bit and say social science research can be deductive or inductive, and my work is best described as inductive. I went in with an open-ended question about how a process unfolds. So what I wanted to know was how Debs feel today about debuting and how they understand the purpose of the ball today. I did have a lightly held hypothesis that there would be what I'll call a bimodal distribution of enthusiasm, meaning that I thought that half of the group would love it and half of the group would hate it, that there would be these two extremes of degrees of willingness, and that we could maybe predict who loved it or who hated it, that there would be a pattern about who loved it and who hated it based on political ideology, for example. So I thought that I would talk to one set of people who would only have good things to say about the dev ball, wouldn't mention race, class, gender, anything that made them uncomfortable, and then half of the people maybe would be really resistant to it and would invoke like I thought it was racist and classist and sexist. So with inductive research where we might have a loose hypothesis but we're really trying to understand a process better, we often use qualitative data which allows us to hear from participants in their own words and it allows us to go deep, such as like talking to one person for an hour instead of going wide, and by wide I mean like doing a short survey of 200 people, and it leaves room for the unexpected to emerge. So when interviewing devs I asked them to categorize themselves as enthusiastic, ambivalent, resistant, or declining, and I described enthusiastic as you are really happy to be making your debut, ambivalent as you had mixed feelings about this, resistant as you were really unhappy to be making your debut, and then declining as you were invited but declined your invitation. And again my hunch was that I wouldn't have a lot of people who were ambivalent, I would have one set of people who were all in enthusiastic and then one set who were really resistant. But out of the 15 devs that I talked to only three described themselves as fully enthusiastic and I didn't offer explicitly for devs to describe themselves using more than one category but most of them did. One dev said that she was on the tail end of enthusiastic, and then the other 11 devs used the term ambivalent to describe themselves in some way, and actually most of the devs described themselves as somewhere in between ambivalent and resistant, but no one felt like they could even call themselves resistant because they didn't even feel like there was a decision to be made. It was what I heard over and over again was the decision was already made for me. So that really changed the objectives of my research because again I thought that I was going to find these two distinct groups of people and that I'd be able to find patterns as to what differentiated one group from another. But instead what I found was, wow people across the board feel really complicated about this. And as I was talking to people it wasn't just that enthusiastic devs only had good things to say about it. I was surprised to find that not only was there a wide array of degrees of willingness, but that across those degrees of willingness devs talked about elements that made them uncomfortable and elements that they were excited for. So that's when I started thinking like okay there's something really interesting happening here where people really feel mixed emotions about this and there's an interesting interplay between incentives and punishments. And that's what directed me back to these theories of hegemony and allowed me to ground my analysis in those theories in particular. That's really interesting. I want to ask you about how difficult it was to even get people to agree to the interview. But I have a hypothesis and that is it might have been hardest to get enthusiastic devs to talk to you. Do you think that was true? It's a really important question because if that is true it means that my data are skewed towards less enthusiastic women. So this is something I've thought about. I think actually it was not very hard. I will say I only had one person who I reached out to who did not get back to me. And I do have reason to believe that she was pretty enthusiastic and so I regret that I missed the opportunity to talk to her and that her perspective isn't incorporated into my analysis. But the way that I framed the research to people was that I was interested in hearing about people's experiences debuting today and I wanted to know what the debutant ball meant today to devs and their families. So people were actually pretty excited to talk about it and it of course really helped that I had been a dev and I always led with that. You know that this was something that I had experience with too and based on my experience I was curious to hear from other people. And thankfully when I got to the end of my interviews several interviewees asked me how I felt about it and I tried to stay neutral and of course this was after the interviews were over so there was less threat of my positionality influencing what they said. But you know I would just stay neutral and say like I think that this is a really interesting event and I would say maybe something like I didn't have a great time at mine because I got sick you know or something to that effect. But people would ask me how I felt about it and then comment and say I really couldn't tell what you thought about it based on the questions that you asked. That helped me feel more at ease that okay people can tell me that they're enthusiastic and mean it and people can tell me that they were ambivalent and mean it. Like people aren't telling me what they think I want to hear because people aren't sure what I want to hear. They're not sure what my own take on it is. Among the debutants you interviewed did you feel like they had a good understanding of the purpose of the ball and the meaning behind it? It's a good question. I really heard the same thing over and over again from debutants across degrees of willingness which is that people very much denied that the ball today functions in a way that's racial or patriarchal. There was maybe a little bit more admission of yeah it was an all-white group but people kept coming back to it's just a party. In fact in my undergraduate analysis there were two main ways that I found people distanced themselves from unflattering perceptions of what the ball means. So one way that we could look at the ball is that it's it's sexist and racist right? That this is a space where white women in particular are presented to society by their fathers and we have these like antebellum notions of white femininity and white purity that are wrapped up in that. And then the second way we could think about this is that it's very socially exclusive that this is a site of demonstrating wealth and celebrating wealth. And of course those two are not mutually exclusive. In fact I argue they both of those things are happening in the ball. But those were the two main problematic elements that interviewees not just debutants but parents and dates and siblings that they kind of recognized one could view the dead ball through those unflattering lenses. And so participants sought to distance themselves from those perceptions. When it came to the sexism and racism people would say well it used to be patriarchal, it used to be about presenting women to society, and it used to be about you know separating. I mean honestly people did not talk about race very much. They felt more comfortable being explicit about the patriarchal functions about it. So really for that they said like yeah it used to be problematic, it used to be about one woman said an antiquated belief about your father giving you away. But it doesn't mean that today now it's just a big party. People haven't changed it just because you know why change it, it doesn't mean anything. Changing it would be too difficult. So we keep those things in place just because it's easier but that's not what it's about anymore. Now it really is just a party. So that was one line of rationalization or as I call like distancing right trying to distance themselves from those unflattering images and purposes of the dead ball. But then the other strand was elitism and a display of wealth and social exclusion. But people would distance themselves from that too by saying well I know that to some people it's about social status and families participate because they want to be seen and recognized as part of this community. But that's not why my family did it. My family did it because it meant a lot to my grandmother, it was a family tradition. So kind of making it an internal matter instead of an external like oh we didn't do this for other people to see us. We did this because of what it meant internally to my own family unit. So that's how people situated it was mostly it's a party and it's a family tradition. To your point about how this perpetuates power, the fact that these families are selected and it's so exclusive seems like something is being perpetuated. Right, absolutely. It's a way for families to continue to have belonging in this elite community and it is not just any old party. It is truly a way of displaying wealth and your social networks. There's a sociologist who talks about forms of capital that people have and the main three forms are economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital. So economic capital would be your financial means. We see that on display at the dead ball. This is not a party that's just like come as you are we just want to spend time together. No it really does have so much to do with money right because it's so expensive to participate. There's the fee for accepting the invitation and then once you get there you have to I mean buy a wedding dress and there's tuxedos and hotel rooms and the whole weekend is very expensive. So by the way this year it costs $4,600. That is just to accept the invitation and you know that's just the beginning of the expense. It's just the beginning. Yes it's so expensive. Yes so there's economic capital. Exactly so we can't pretend like it's just a party. It's not just a party. It's a very very expensive party. There's also social capital at play which is this refers to who you know, how embedded you are in advantageous social networks. So it is possible that someone is invited based on their accomplishments or knowing someone who has seen like their character or their service in the community. But this is by and large not something you know it's not something that you can apply to. It's not something that you can say hey I think I should participate in this because I have the money and I know what to do and I have the education etc. You really do have to be embedded in these social networks and know the right people. You have to be on people's radar to be invited. So that's another way that this is not just a tradition it's also about knowing the right people and cultural capital is also at play which is knowing how to act, knowing the right behaviors, knowing how things work, the etiquette, what to wear etc. So as one person in my thesis said you know maybe if people are new to North Carolina and they have a lot of money they could be invited but as he said everyone who has money doesn't have class. So what he meant by that was yeah you might be wealthy but you don't know how to act. You don't know how to really belong in this group. And so that was that comment came from a male person. Yes I had five men and you know people occupy multiple roles in the dataset so you know some people had been a brother, a father, and a date at one point. Other people had been a date and a sibling. But yes I talked to five men and 17 women. And also you interviewed a former member of the Terpsa Korean Club. That's right. Can you talk about that? Yeah absolutely. My status as an undergraduate student really aided my ability to get access to people. So he was very friendly and helpful. I think that as we were talking over the phone and I was asking him not just to explain how things worked but to explain like the purpose of the ball today and how the Terpsa Korean Club would respond if there was a woman present who didn't conform to their standards. I think he started getting a little nervous then maybe realizing oh this is someone who is trying to understand the good the bad and the ugly about the Terps ball. And he was not comfortable with your using his name is that correct? Exactly exactly. And you know even if he had been comfortable I wouldn't have been able to use his name because of research confidentiality. So as we started as he and I started talking he double checked that I wouldn't be using his name. And I said no definitely not. I even if you wanted me to I wouldn't be able to. And he then went on to laugh and said well you know people act like the dead ball is this sensitive subject when really it isn't. So there was this interesting kind of tension not just in him but also other people that I interviewed where on the one hand they really wanted to make sure that I didn't use their name. On the other hand they were like I don't know why everyone makes a big deal about it it's not a big deal it's just a party you know it's like well but if it's just a party then why are we so uptight about people talking about it. And if it's just a party why do we need to dress a certain way and act a certain way and be invited to participate and have the money to participate. What did you learn from the young women you interviewed? Yeah I think my main takeaway there were five parts. One that not everyone was enthusiastic and one of the reasons that people kind of had these mixed emotions about it was because people didn't even have the room with their families to decline their invitation. They just did not perceive that to be an option at all. Right right so one of the questions I would ask women I would say walk me through your decision making process and I was surprised to find time and time again that women would say well there was no decision you know they would say I can't answer that question because it really wasn't like we sat down and thought about it and talked about it. And the women who did say that there were some conversations about it those were women who identified as at least partially resistant but even then they knew that I guess kind of similar to my situation that they could tell their parents that they didn't want to do it but at the end of the day it wasn't going to make a difference really those conversations would just be contributing to tension and in an effort to avoid that tension they didn't really push the matter any further. So that was a big finding that there were a lot of mixed feelings about participating and that people did not really perceive that they chose to participate and then this idea that there were both discomforts with debuting physical discomforts identity-based ideological discomforts but then also there were these rewards for debuting such as getting to drink underage and buy new dresses and go to parties and for a lot of people they knew people there so they at least got to hang out with their friends. Yeah I found that both of these elements were present across degrees of willingness. Interesting. And then the fourth big finding was that people did seek to distance themselves from unflattering stereotypes or notions of deb culture. So again it used to be sexist but today it's just a party. There are some people today who do it for status but my family does it for tradition and for the right you know noble sentimental reasons. And then lastly my big takeaway was that deb's really you know through this process of not being able to exercise free choice but very much being expected by their parents to debut this is this all kind of functions to kind of distill family's elitism and their wealth and social standing into their daughters so their daughters become like objects and representatives of their family standing to this community which that in itself isn't really a novel finding and by that I mean not a lot of research has been done but researchers before me have noted that debutante ball's function to signal class standing and to reproduce it so to make sure that you know because it's it's a coming of age right I think this is a really interesting tension with it. On the one hand it's supposed to initiate a young woman as an adult into this community and when we think about adulthood we think about autonomy self-actualization uh individuating from your parents and becoming your own person but there's tension involved here because this supposedly coming of age ritual actually like treats young women like little girls who have to just obey their parents and do whatever their parents tell them to do. Interesting and I think what you're describing is typical that's the scenario that you know I keep seeing over and over and hearing about and reading about I will say I know of one case in which a debutante wanted to participate and her parents were not enthusiastic. Interesting. She was not a legacy debutante you know she didn't have family history right and so I know that can happen and I mentioned it because I'll probably hear from some of them. Absolutely yeah absolutely but it's interesting to me that you had different women with different attitudes toward the ball but yet none of them perceived that they had a choice about it really is that fair? Absolutely and I should say to the women I spoke to very much oscillated throughout the interview by saying things like I wasn't forced to go but I didn't have a choice not to go. I think it's really uncomfortable to say especially as a young adult again this is a supposed to be a coming of age process where young women are entering adulthood and being recognized as fellow adults so it's really uncomfortable to say yeah I didn't have a choice I was forced to do this so throughout the interviews I saw a lot of inconsistencies and a lot of ups and downs of at one point women would say no I decided to do it but they would say I decided to do it because I knew that there would be this punishment you know this tension from my family if I didn't do it or then they would resituate to say no actually I wanted to do it because I wanted to make my parents happy and so it would be this kind of like self-sacrificial agency. So yeah this question of choice and agency and enthusiasm my main takeaway is that it's all very nuanced in a way that we don't talk about with a dead ball and as an example of this Ellie Kemper who's an actress she participated in the St. Louis Veiled Profits Deb ball which has from what I understand more explicit connections to the KKK than the Terps the Korean ball does of course the Terps ball was established during the Jim Crow South and sociologists have noted that these elite white social clubs particularly in the south were founded during you know the post-reconstruction period as a way to like it was kind of like a white lash against black upward mobility in the south. I would also note that the Terps Korean club started only a few years after women got the vote. So yes exactly there's a lot going on a lot of efforts to kind of put a stake in the ground and say we're starting this tradition because they want to seal off the boundaries of our group and also have an annual space where we can remind young women maybe after they've gone to college like don't forget this is your community and these are our values. But with Ellie Kemper and the Veiled Profits Ball this was I don't know three years ago maybe that the news broke I think it was over the summer possibly that she had been like the head dev at this WTOMP ball and there's a picture of her going viral and people were calling her the KKK princess and this was particularly troubling because Ellie Kemper had been you know a celebrity who was outspoken about racial justice and so she issued a statement where she I thought it was so noteworthy she said hey guys when I was younger I decided to debut and of course knowing what I know about Deb culture and how these things operate I saw that statement and I was like but did you decide to debut you know when we use these words like decision and choice and agency and enthusiasm there's really so much going on under the surface that we can't fully capture because yeah there might be some rewards for debuting like oh I got to see my parents happy I got to go to these parties I got to spend time with my grandparents but just because there are perks doesn't mean that you had total free will to say no to it good point I mean I kind of admire that language that she used because she was taking responsibility for it but I imagine her decision was very nuanced right and it wouldn't be surprising to find out that she had some pressure is there anything else specific that you think we should say about your research anything else that people should know to understand it better so two things come to mind well I'll say every research I'm not just saying this because it's my research I'm saying this as a sociologist also about all research all research has its limitations there's no such thing as perfect research and the goal of research is not to say okay we've found the truth with a capital T it's to say okay there was something we didn't really understand before and now based on these data this data set we have a little bit more information so with any research there's a little bit of an asterisk that says okay let's let's think about how this doesn't conclude the research it really sets us up to ask different better questions in the future it's like at least we know now more than we did before so in my case there's a couple of limitations one is that these data were collected in 2014 and 2015 so here we are in 2024 a couple things there you know it's possible that some things about the dead ball have changed I don't think it's likely that a lot has changed just based on in my research I talked to people across decades and things seemed pretty consistent but it's possible that you know well you mentioned that now there are black debutants who are invited to debut I know of one for sure I don't know how many have been invited I know of one that has attended right and when I was conducting my research I asked everyone that I talked to were you aware of any non-white devs and people just like laughed at the question honestly so if I were to conduct this research today I would probably be hearing about this one black debutant and possibly more and then also a lot has changed since 2014 and our cultural landscape you know since then Trump has been elected president we've had COVID we've had the Me Too movement we've had a resurgence in Black Lives Matter with the murder of George Floyd and then we've also had a backlash against the DEI initiatives that were put into place after 2020 so so much has changed and it's possible that devs would be even more uncomfortable with some of those all-white elements and patriarchal elements and wealth exclusivity in the aftermath of all those developments of the last 10 years and it's also possible that there might be some updated logics kind of in lockstep with those developments and then also I you know I talked to 22 people which is not nothing but it's not talking to 200 people but with my research what I tried to do was to say okay we don't know really anything about how devs today feel about this so let's be inductive you know start from the ground up hear from devs themselves and now based on the patterns and it really what like there was a strong pattern in my data so based on that we now know more than we did before which is that people have mixed feelings about debuting their choices for saying no are limited there are both rewards and punishments yeah I agree with that because and I agree with it in part because it's very hard to find much hard information on debutant culture again it was such a delight to get online and find your thesis because there's not much and it was really interesting but a lot has happened since you wrote that thesis since then you have entered a phd program in sociology I'm sure you've learned a lot you are in your fifth year and so what would you say that you have learned that might shift further light on debutant culture since you've been pursuing your phd this is partially grounded in my academic knowledge but also just in my personal observations and further ponderings about this since I wrote my honor's thesis I've really been thinking about how people do not want to recognize that there's anything meaningful about the white dresses and the father presenting the daughter and how much it costs and the fact that overwhelmingly people are white I've really been thinking about how those elements get kind of re-encoded as just the way things are and I think one thing that's happening here is that you know if that's just how things are then okay why not change them you know if it's so important then uh and people take issue with them or they at least appear to be unflattering you know there's the risk of being called sexist or racist or classist if you're concerned about those things might not change them that people are tightly holding on to them people are tightly holding on and I think that that is partly you know in studying culture and how these group boundaries are maintained it's not just group membership that's maintained it's also group values so to think about southern conservative white patriarchal values yeah what would happen if instead of a chief marshal being a father figure what if it could be a mom you know like what if what if they made those changes I think that the reason that we don't see those changes happening is because it would be like seeding some kind of ground in a wider culture war I think that the dead ball is a site where it's okay to be patriarchal right and it's okay to be classist and to show your wealth and it's okay that it's all white people and if they were to change those elements like what other ground what other cultural ground might be lost I've also started studying more sociology of family and I think it's very significant that this happens after a daughter's first year in college because and this showed up in my data a lot that the women who felt more ambivalent and even ambivalent/resistant to debuting part of what they dreaded was their new friends finding out that they come from this community or they wanted in college to spread their wings and be involved in social justice efforts and they didn't want to be as one participant said label the snobby rich girl and for her this participant Catherine is her pseudonym she was worried that being a debutante would as she said throw her right back into that culture and I think that this is actually intentional and systematic I think this is part of the process is not just to signal to one's community that one still has the money to participate in the social networks and again that cultural capital but I think it's also a way of parents bringing their daughters back into the fold of elite conservative values after those daughters have had a year of being exposed I mean kind of like for me right I was in this sociology class and was being exposed to these new ideas and was like oh my gosh now that I you know I'm now resistant to this in a way that I wouldn't have been as resistant before being exposed to college curriculum and to new friends and you know people who are not in this world so I think it's very much a way that as people are coming of age families are trying to like bring them back into the fold of their own values I see because it's an age where young women might be at risk of straying from the values that their parents hold dear exactly yeah very interesting one thing we haven't talked about is how accepting or not depth culture would be of a woman who identifies as queer in some way right so you interviewed 15 young women is that correct 17 women 17 women okay did any of them identify as lesbian or queer as far as you know not as far as I know people would bring it up sometimes in the interviews of like oh now that I'm thinking you know now that I'm talking through what the dead ball looks like I wonder what this experience would be like for someone who was gay but no I didn't have an answer to that and no one else had an answer for that too so I think that's another big way that the research would look different today so I was debuting in 2012 and that was the same year that North Carolina passed amendment one restricting you know codifying into the North Carolina court that marriage is between a man and a woman and that marriage was the only legally recognized union so the climate in North Carolina when I was debuting was would not have been very friendly to people who were out but also I collected my undergraduate thesis data in 2014 and 2015 before gay marriage was legal before the Supreme Court ruled it to be legal so it was definitely a different environment when I was collecting my data and it wasn't something that came up a lot which is wild to think about because it doesn't feel like that long ago right well when you think about it like today if a young woman were invited to make her debut and she wanted to bring her girlfriend as an escort instead of a male marshal how do you think that would go over like a lot of people bring their brothers or their cousins true and they're always male but they're always male right I'm sure that a woman would not be able to bring a woman as her date I think it would be possible to be out as a deb and to have your female partner attend events but not to have your female partner be an assistant marshal but again I think probably people would say well that's fine because the assistant marshal isn't you know it's not supposed to be necessarily a romantic interest it's just supposed to be a young man so I think that element of it would kind of allow people to say oh you don't need to bring your partner as your date it just has to be a man and like your partner can maybe come to other events I could definitely see the process being more fraught for a trans deb than for a lesbian deb I can imagine that being a more stark site of tension and misalignment than someone who was lesbian and was expected to debut although I imagine both would be incredibly difficult yeah we know the celebrity fortune themester was a debutante and right you know she's she's a lesbian although she was not out even to herself at the time but I would love to talk to her too so if anyone has a line to fortune please let me know well we have covered a lot today and so I'm just going to end with a couple of big questions sure so you've had personal experience as a debutante you have a lot of academic knowledge about how social structures work what do you think the North Carolina debutante ball means to families today it's a big complicated question because people are complicated and society is complicated you know we're comprised of these larger structures but then smaller units like families and then all the way down to the individual so I think it we can take a lot of different perspectives on it I think that the ball accomplishes two things one identifying and maintaining this group of elite North Carolina families overwhelmingly white and allowing families to continue to be in that position and to reconnect with each other because a lot of these families see each other at multiple deb events or someone who I interviewed talked about how her mom saw her own assistant marshal at the interviewee's deb ball so it's a way to reconnect and to form and solidify and again signal belonging in this group and not just belonging but all of the different forms of capital that are required to fully belong in the group so money social connections and cultural behaviors I think also just like we just talked about it's a way for families to encourage their adult children especially their young daughters to maintain ties to this group after they go off to their first year of college and start to be exposed to different ideas and different sets of people it's a way to bring them back into the fold of their community of origin and to remind them what's expected of them as young women I think so those are maybe a little bit more structural those are things that I imagine a lot of families would say that's not why I do it that doesn't reflect what this means to me so on the individual level I think it allows families a time to celebrate each other or actually that that might be too generous to say celebrate each other a time to spend time together and to recognize oh isn't this cool that your aunt did this or your grandma did this and now you're doing it too I think it does provide a sentimental through line to increase family cohesion you know a sense of identifying with and belonging to one's own individual family unit if not this wider elite culture in North Carolina but the reason that I say I don't really think it's about celebrating individual people is because in my own experience and based on the experiences of many people in my data set this really is not a celebration of individual women if it was I think we would be learning more about women's accomplishments and aspirations and it's also not really a celebration of what people want because a lot of women just grit their teeth and get through the weekend so I'm sure there are some women who do feel very excited about it and feel celebrated by their families but I don't think that we can say as a general rule that that's what the DEB ball does I'm very happy for those women who find themselves in alignment with what they're expected to do and feel celebrated and supported by their families unfortunately we cannot say that this is happening across the board and my data indicate that that's actually not even the average experience of the of a debutante so it's pretty clear what some young women and families can get out of this but we have these young men uh under 35 years of age at least the active members for the most part they aren't looking for wives I believe a lot of them were married to me it's a little less clear what the Terpsa Korean club gets out of it people enjoy social clubs they enjoy having fun at these events and having a sense of belonging and the club exists to put on the DEB ball so I wonder how much of it I wonder how much individual Terpsa Korean club members really care about the DEB ball or how much of it is we enjoy being in this club and this club exists to put on the DEB ball so this is like part of our responsibility to put it on and to organize it so there's the boys committee and then the girls committee the girls committee would be like the wives of the Terpsa Korean club members and I think that they work together to play on the ball but just like we know that women oftentimes do a lot of the cognitive labor and emotional relational labor of planning events and doing administrative work my understanding is that the girls club is who's really doing the grunt work of putting on the ball and sending out the invitations managing RSVPs and even making selections so yeah it could be that the DEB ball is really important to these men but I kind of have a guess that really what's more important to them is their own social events outside of the DEB ball you know the other the more insular year-round Terpsa Korean only social events and the DEB ball gives them a reason to continue to exist as a club and it also provides them with the funds to put on those other events year-round so I think there's an economic incentive to continue to hold it and again to maintain to possibly expand the boundaries of inclusions so that they get enough DEBs for each cohort to sustain their activities and then again like I said earlier I think these are probably men who are aligned with conservative social political economic values and the DEB ball is a big manifestation of that but it's it's an it there's interesting tension because the DEB ball is an annual space of overwhelming whiteness patriarchy elitism wealth that simultaneously wants to pretend like it's not that so I'm sure again a lot of participants and Terps members would balk at the notion that those values are what are maintaining the DEB ball but if those elements are not meaningful then why not change them so I'm sure that there is some some cultural incentive to keep reaffirming those values year after year and I would think like with any exclusive private club I mean networking alone probably is a big benefit absolutely and unlike most social clubs they do actually exercise power in this state because well they have anointed themselves to select who are you know the best in quote families of North Carolina and that carries a certain amount of power too yeah this was another interesting thing that came up in my research I would ask women how they think that their lives were changed by debuting or if they thought that there was any benefit to them of debuting when I asked that most women just laughed and said you know nope this this means nothing to me I can't imagine myself you know bringing this up in a job interview in the future and so I think again a lot of people would deny that there is power in being a DEB and therefore that being the committee who selects DEBs is not a powerful position but it's a very insular community where it means a lot to the people inside it but not a lot to the people outside it like of course you wouldn't bring up being a DEB at a job interview if the person interviewing you wasn't themselves a DEB you know it might actually look snotty it might work against you but as soon as you find out that the person interviewing you was a DEB being able to say that you're a DEB does carry so just like anything you know there these forms of capital that I've been talking about throughout this is social currency where the currency has different value depending on what context you're in so if a family and a young woman wants to stay in this community then being a DEB does have a lot of value in that community but a lot of people will say no it doesn't have value but that's only if we think about a DEB leaving that context and being in another context then sure being a DEB might not mean much or might even look you know funny or strange or uppity but insularly it does still carry a lot of weight which is why it continues well it's very interesting to me that the DEB she spoke to said no this didn't really make any difference in my life I wonder if it really doesn't make much difference to typical debutantes when and I don't think it confers much power on the DEBs but I do wonder if it confers a certain amount of power on the selectors the the club itself right that seems to be where the power resides yeah I think that's a good point for parents who really want to see their family continue to be included or maybe added to the group for the first time knowing that there are people who make that decision yeah that that puts those deciders in a powerful position I remember the year that I was debuting that that luncheon that I was talking about with my grandmother and my sister and mom was held at someone's house who we knew that that daughter who was a couple years younger than us would be a DEB one day like we knew that she would be invited but there was another woman there who was helping out and there were some whispers that she was there because she really wanted her daughter to be a DEB one day but her family wasn't currently a part of that community so she was like really kind of putting in the hours and trying to trying to align herself with that community so that one day her daughter would be invited and I think actually it was the next year her daughter would be up for invited and she was so congrats to them on their successful efforts mission accomplished yeah but to your point yes so if someone is in a position where they're like wow I really want to get my daughter involved I really want to be part of this I'm going to volunteer my free labor to these people you know to help them put on a party or I'm going to you know try to get in their good graces because they hold the power of making this decision well speaking of free labor I really appreciate your time and expertise thank you it's been fun oh well I could talk to you all day and I'm just so excited that you were able to come today and I appreciate it so much thank you man me too thanks for having me thanks for listening today special now next week we're taking a break but we'll be back on august 28th with another wonderful guest Dr. Cynthia Lewis professor emerita at Davidson College Dr. Lewis has written about the secrecy surrounding dev culture and I'm really excited to share our conversation I'm also excited about the good comments reviews and great questions we've been receiving we welcome more please send your questions and personal stories to [email protected] and we'll discuss answers in an upcoming episode this episode was produced by me Mary Lambeth Moore with sound editing by Bill Gowan and additional mixing by Max Gowan our theme music rare thing was written and produced by Max Gowan and performed by Quilt our logo is by archetype at archetype-usa.com thanks again to Anna Shelton Orman and thanks for listening see you next time I'm not a stranger this is just a cameo highlights on a paper written for me feel like an actor moving through a crowded room free between the lines there's nothing