Rose Dugdale, a debutante in 1958, reflects on the debutante season and how it led her to become an activist.
In 1958, 17-year-old Rose Dugdale was one of 1,400 young women who curtseyed before Queen Elizabeth II in the most prestigious event of the summer’s debutante season. It was the last time that the well-bred daughters of the most aristocratic and affluent families in the country would be presented to the monarch in a ritual that dated back 200 years. Princess Margaret, with characteristic hauteur, would later say: “We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.
” For the fiercely independent Dugdale, being presented to the queen was a means to an end. She had agreed on the condition that her parents allowed her to attend the all-women St Anne’s College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics. Sixty years later she would recall the debutante season as “a horrible marriage market in which you were being sold as a commodity
Rose Dugdale Debutante Queen Activism Marriage Market