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Black Debutantes Were Waltzing Long Before ‘Bridgerton’
It’s cotillion season
Poised and graceful, the young woman glides toward the gathered crowd, a who’s who of her community’s most influential personages. Her purposeful strides belie the butterflies in her stomach. She pauses intermittently to curtsy. With each demure bend, her diaphanous gown settles around her like a cloud, its pristine whiteness setting off her deep chestnut complexion. Finally, she arrives at the waiting arms of her escort and begins to waltz.
Long before Netflix’s Bridgerton series captured our collective imagination, Black Americans were engaged in their own displays of privilege and pageantry. Debutante balls, also called cotillions, have been a social rite of passage for generations, says Miya Carey, a postdoctoral fellow at Binghamton University in New York.
Cotillions, a term Carey uses interchangeably with “debutante balls,” have roots in European traditions like the ones we see in period dramas like Bridgerton or read about in the pages of Jane Austen’s beloved novels.
Starting soon after emancipation, “Black people during freedom were modeling something similar where you get dressed up and it was more like a gala,” says Carey, whose research focuses primarily on cotillions in Washington, D.C. “The way we understand the debutante ball today, where we’re presenting this young woman to society, in the Black community, you kind of see that a little bit more in the earlier decades of the 20th century.”
Cultures around the world have rich coming-of-age traditions, from Latinidad’s quinceañera to South Africa’s Umemulo, that tell society when young women have mastered the skills and behaviors necessary for social success as an adult. They also signal the kind of upstanding family she comes from.
“[T]his presentation is about the family as a whole,” says Carey, referring to cotillions, which often took place in family homes or intimate settings until the 1940s. “Their parents can say, ‘Look at the type of daughter we raised.’ Although the debutantes really are the centerpiece, I do think that it was meant to be a celebration of the Black elite family as a whole.”
Marriage prospects were definitely on Black parents’ minds, but the historical…
