In this chapter I collect a number of topics related to the growth of politeness in the eighteenth century, chief among them the new cultural vitality of women. Politeness in the largest sense is a universal: all societies, no matter how small or undeveloped, will fall apart without cooperation, based on a collective agreement on how to handle status (power); this agreement is codified in the rules and rituals of politeness. But women are politer than men – or so the eighteenth century believed, and the rise of the polite lady as an almost archetypal figure in novels, in the drama, in letters and memoirs and essays of the middle decades of the eighteenth century was, in Johnson's phrase, a “powerful fact.” Another sense of the term politeness is associated with civilizedness and high culture and luxury. Paul Langford reminds us in the introduction of his very useful history of England 1727–1783 that luxury was a central preoccupation of these years, Wealth of Nations the most influential book of the period, and politeness “a logical consequence of commerce” – even though the great majority of people had few luxuries, virtually zero political power, and not much opportunity to exercise politeness (1989: 3–4). If “all property” depended on “the chastity of women,” as many people believed, then any account of “a polite and commercial people,” as Blackstone called them, must reckon with changes in the position of women during the period.