finishing school

plural finishing schools · alternative finishing-school

1. datedA private school intended to furnish young women with the social skills and cultural education needed in order to fulfill successfully a woman's traditional role in polite society.

   Until the 1920s, most European high schools for girls were finishing schools.

   1998, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Nobel Prize Women in Science, Carol Publishing Group, page 3

   2 more examples

   "All she needs is a year or two at a fashionable finishing school, so that at eighteen she can come out with éclat," put in Aunt Clara.

   1875, Louisa M[ay] Alcott, chapter 4, in Eight Cousins

   On the advice of a well-heeled friend from Indonesia, she then decamped to Switzerland to attend the Institut Villa Pierrefeu. “They call it ‘the finishing school that refuses to be finished,’” Ms. Ho explained, the last in a dying form of pedagogy that asks wealthy women to scrutinize the folds in napkins with an intensity akin to Watson and Crick studying the double helix.

   2023 January 2, Maureen O’Connor, “The Etiquette Guru Who Broke Up With a Boyfriend Over Text”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

   Synonyms: charm school