University of New Mexico: A Summary of the Article on Dating (Essay Sample)

****Excerpted from Reading Critically, Writing Well—A Reader and Guide, 5th edition. 1999. Axelrod, Rise B., and Cooper, Charles R. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. pp. 194-203.
Dating
Beth L. Bailey
Beth L. Bailey (b 1957) is a sociology professor in the Women’s Studies Program at the University of New Mexico. She studies nineteenth- and twentieth-century American culture and has written several books, including From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (1988) and The First Strange Place (1992). “Dating” comes from Bailey’s first book, a history of American courtship. Bailey tells us that she first became interested in studying courtship attitudes and behaviors when, as a college senior, she appeared on a television talk show to defend co-ed dorms, which were then new and controversial. Surprisingly, many people in the audience objected to co-ed dorms, not on the basis of moral grounds, but because they feared too much intimacy between young men and women would hasten “the dissolution of the dating system and the death of romance.” Before reading Bailey’s sociological explanation of dating, think about the attitudes and behaviors of people your own age in regard to courtship and romance.
One day, the 1920s story goes, a young man asked a city girl if he might call on her (Black, 1924, p. 340). We know nothing else about the man or the girl—only that, when he arrived, she had her hat on. Not much of a story to us, but any American born before 1910 would have gotten the punch line. “She had her hat on”: those five words were rich in meaning to early twentieth century Americans. The hat signaled that she expected to leave the house. He came on a “call,” expecting to be received in her family’s parlor, to talk, to meet her mother, perhaps to have some refreshments or to listen to her play the piano. She expected a “date,” to be taken “out” somewhere and entertained. He ended up spending four weeks’ savings fulfilling her expectations.
In the early twentieth century this new style of courtship, dating, had begun to supplant the old. Born primarily of the limits and opportunities of urban life, dating had almost completely replaced the old system of calling by the mid-1920s—and, in so doing, had transformed American courtship. Dating moving courtship in the public world, relocating it from family parlors and community events to restaurants, theaters, and dance halls. At the same time, it removed couples from the implied supervision of the private sphere—from the watchful eyes of family and local community—to the anonymity of the public sphere. Courtship among strangers offered couples new freedom. But access to the public world of the city required money. One had to buy entertainment, or even access to a place to sit and talk. Money—men’s money—became the basis of the dating system and, thus, of courtship. This new dating system, as it shifted courtship from the private to the public square, fundamentally altered the balance of power between men and women in courtship.
The transition from calling to dating was as complete as it was fundamental. By the 1950s and 1960s, social scientists who studied American courtship found it necessary to remind the American public that dating was a “recent American innovation and not a traditional or universal custom.” (Cavin, as cited in “Some,” 1961, p. 125). Some of the many commentators who wrote about courtship believed dating was the best thing that had every happened to relations between the sexes; others blamed the dating system for all the problems of American youth and American marriage. But virtually everyone portrayed the system dating replaced as infinitely simpler, sweeter, more innocent, and more graceful. Hardheaded social scientists waxed sentimental  about the “horse-and buggy days,” when a young man’s offer of a ride home from church was tantamount to a proposal and when young men came calling in the evenings and courtship took place safely within the warm bosom of the family. “The courtship which grew out of the sturdy social roots [of the nineteenth century]” one author wrote, “comes through to us for what it was—a gracious ritual, with clearly defined roles for man and woman, in which everyone knew the measured music and the steps” (Moss, 1963, p. 151).
The call itself was a complicated event. A myriad of rules governed everything: the proper amount of time between invitation and visit (a fortnight or less); whether or not refreshments should be served (not if one belonged to a fashionable or semi-fashionable circle, but outside of “smart” groups in cities like New York and Boston, girls might serve iced drinks with little cakes or tiny cups of coffee or hot chocolate and sandwiches); chaperonage (the first call must be made on mother and daughter, but excessive chaperonage would indicate to the man that his attentions were unwelcome); appropriate topics of conversation (the man’s interests, but never too personal); how leave should be taken (on no account should the woman “accompany [her caller] to the door nor stand talking while he struggles into his coat”) (“Lady,” 1904, p. 255).
Each of these “measured steps,” as the mid-twentieth century author nostalgically called them, was a test of suitability, breeding, and background. Advice columns and etiquette books emphasized that these were the manners of any “well-bred” person—and conversely implied that deviations revealed a lack of breeding. However, around the turn of the century, many people who did lack this narrow “breeding” aspired to politeness. Advice columns regularly printed questions from “Country Girl” and “Ignoramus” on the fine points of calling etiquette. Young men must have felt the pressure of girls’ expectations, for they wrote to the same advisors with questions about calling. In 1907, Harper’s Bazaar ran a major article titled “Etiquette for Men,” explaining the ins and outs of the calling system (Hall, 1907, pp. 1095-97). In the first decade of the twentieth century, this rigid system of calling was the convention not only of the “respectable” but also of those who aspired to respectability.
At the same time, however, the new system of dating was emerging. By the mid-1910s, the word date had entered the vocabulary of the middle class public. In 1914, the Ladies Home Journal, a bastion of middle-class respectability, used the term (safely enclosed in quotation marks but with no explanation of its meaning) several times. The word was always spoken by that exotica, the college sorority girl—a character marginal in her exoticness but nevertheless a solid product of the middle class. “One beautiful evening of the spring term,” one such article begins, “when I was a college girl of eighteen, the boy whom, because of his popularity in every phase of college life, I had been proud gradually to allow the monopoly of my ‘dates,’ took me unexpectedly into his arms. As he kissed me impetuously I was glad, from the bottom of my heart, for the training of that mother who had taught me to hold myself aloof from all personal familiarities of boys and men.” (“How,” 1914, p. 9).
Sugarcoated with a tribute to motherhood and virtue, the dates—and the kiss—were unmistakably presented for a middle-class audience. By 1924, ten years later, when the story of the unfortunate young man who went to call on the city girl was current, dating had essentially replaced calling in middle-class culture. The knowing smiles of the story’s listeners had probably started with the word call—and not every hearer would have been sympathetic to the man’s plight. By 1924, he really should have known better.
Dating, which to the privileged and protected would seem a system of increased freedom and possibility, stemmed originally from the lack of opportunities. Calling, or even just visiting, was not a practicable system for young people whose families lived crowded into one or two rooms. For even the more established or independent working-class girls, the parlor and the piano often simply didn’t exist. Some “factory girls” struggled to find a way to receive callers. The Ladies’ Home Journal approvingly reported the case of six girls, workers in a box factory, who had formed a club and pooled part of their wages to pay the “janitress of a tenement house” to let them use her front room two evenings a week. It had a piano. One of the girls explained their system: “We ask the boys to come when they like and spend the evening. We haven’t any place at home to see them, and I hate seeing them on the street” (Preston, 1907, p. 31).
Many other working girls, however, couldn’t have done this even if they had wanted to. They had no extra wages to pool, or they had no notions of middle-class respectability. Some, especially girls of ethnic families, were kept secluded—chaperoned according to the customs of the old country. But many others fled the squalor, drabness, and crowdedness of their homes to seek amusement and intimacy elsewhere. And a “good time” increasingly became identified with public places and commercial amusements, making young women whose wages would not even cover the necessities of life dependent on men’s “treats” (Peiss, 1986, pp. 75, 51-52). Still, many poor and working-class couples did not so much escape from the home as they were pushed from it.
These couples courted on the streets, sometimes at cheap dance h...