Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, Kathleen Bogle [list of ebook readers .TXT] 📗

was a limit to how much sexual interaction would be permitted, with most of society forbidding intercourse until marriage or at least until the family had approved an 11

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engagement.4 Both the community at large and the family had a vested interest in ensuring that a child was not born out of wedlock.5

Second, familial supervision was deemed necessary in order to ensure that the mate chosen was suitable (in terms of social class, etc.) and had potential as a marriage partner.6 The mate selection process was heavily supervised by parents and other adults in part because practical considerations were of the utmost importance in finding a mate. For example, men were not considered eligible for marriage until they demonstrated that they could financially support a wife and family.7

However, in post–Industrial Revolution Western societies, romantic feelings were given greater importance. Over time, romantic feelings began largely to outweigh material considerations in the search for a potential partner.8 Romantic feelings are greatly affected by sexual attraction; therefore, sexual attraction became an increasingly important aspect of intimate partnering throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.9

Over the past hundred years, there have been three distinct scripts guiding young men and women’s intimate lives, each emerging during a period of transition. I will examine each one, but let’s begin by turning back the clock to the beginning of the twentieth century to see how young people at that time got together and ultimately formed relationships.

THE CALLING ERA

According to social historian Beth Bailey, for the first decade of the twentieth century “respectable” young men would “call” on respectable young women at their home. The object of the call was to spend time with the woman of interest as well as her family, especially her mother.10 Many rigid guidelines were followed during the “calling” era. Young women and their mothers controlled the practice of calling.

That is, they and only they could invite a young man to come to their home for a calling visit. Such a visit typically consisted of spending time in the woman’s parlor with her and her family. During the visit, the young woman might play the piano to entertain her guest. The young man and woman might be given some degree of privacy for part of the visit, particularly if the mother knew her daughter really “liked” the young man.11

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A perfect illustration of the calling script can be found in the Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life. In the film, the female lead, Mary Hatch (played by Donna Reed) has had a crush on George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) since childhood. One scene depicts an evening when George calls on Mary at home, where she lives with her mother. George wears a suit for the occasion, and Mary receives her visitor wearing a pretty dress. When George arrives, Mary invites him to sit with her in the parlor so they can listen to records. Since Mary’s mother does not approve of George as a suitor for her daughter, she repeatedly tries to interrupt the visit by spying on them from the top of the staircase in her bathrobe. Mary’s mother demands to know: “What are you two doing down there?” Mary, irritated by her mother’s persistent meddling, teases her by responding: “He’s making violent love to me, Mother!” Her joke shocks not only her mother, but her gentleman caller, too.

As entrenched as the calling system was among middle- and upperclass circles, this script did not work for the lower or working classes.

Most members of the lower class lacked the facilities to entertain young men in their homes. Thus, lower-class youth ultimately stopped trying to aspire to the middle- and upper-class system of calling. Instead, they began going out somewhere together, which became known as going on a “date.” The term “date” can be traced to the late nineteenth century, when it was first used as a slang term by some in the lower class.12

It referred to occasions on which a man obtained sexual favors from a lower-class woman.13 Later, the term spread beyond this narrow, illicit meaning and the more modern use of the word took hold.

THE DATING ERA—“RATING AND DATING”

The phenomenon of dating did not remain exclusively in the lower class for long. Dating emerged next among rebellious upper-class youth who began going out, away from the watchful eyes of parents. A date might consist of a woman dining out alone with a man or going to the theater.14 Regardless of the precise location of the date, it required that a man and a woman “went somewhere” outside the home in order to enjoy each other’s company.15 Dating was not a matter of upper-class rebellion only, but also grew out of changes in society. Women at this time in history were becoming increasingly a part of the public sphere, 14

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with growing numbers attending college, taking jobs, and in general becoming more a part of the public world that was still largely considered the province of men. With this increased access to the public sphere, dating began to supplant calling as a way for young people who were interested in each other to spend time together. In addition to women’s newfound freedom from parental and community supervision, the advent of the automobile was a major factor in creating and maintaining this new arrangement.16 Young men’s access to cars made the idea of taking a woman “out on the town” increasingly possible.

From its inception in the first decade of the twentieth century, dating spread throughout U.S. culture until about the mid-1920s, when it became a “universal custom in America.”17 In other words, by the 1920s dating was the dominant script for how young people would become sexually intimate and form relationships. Willard Waller’s classic sociological study on