Courtship and Dating

Courtship and Dating. Colonial Americans generally cared more about the suitability of their marriage partners than about love, which they expected to develop after marriage. As a result, couples courted publicly and received aid and advice from families and neighbors. Premarital pregnancy rates were low during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and premarital sexual relations, even if pregnancy did not result, produced strong social and even legal pressures for marriage. Toward the end of the Colonial Era, however, the ideal of romantic love gained wide currency. Many families allowed “bundling”—the controversial practice of letting courting couples spend an evening in bed together fully clothed, sometimes with a board placed between them. In the same period, the number of couples producing children before eight and a half months of marriage rose to nearly 30 percent.

By the early nineteenth century, couples began to consider romantic love prerequisite for marriage and based their unions on companionship. The era's fiction frequently drew on love themes, while articles, essays, and public orations stressed mutual respect, reciprocity, and romance as ingredients of good marriages. Young courting couples chose their own partners, and their letters focused on romance rather than on the practical matters that had dominated the correspondence of earlier generations. As romanticism developed, so did a new “separate spheres” ideology, which held that a woman's proper sphere of influence was in the home, and a man's in the public realm. As men and women increasingly occupied separate spheres, romance and candor became the strongest links between people living in different worlds.

As families and neighbors lost influence over couples, genteel standards of propriety came to guide courting behavior. Particularly after the Civil War, an elaborate system of rules governing courting emerged. On a woman's invitation, men conducted formal “calls” to her home, during which couples might converse, read aloud, play parlor games, or give a piano recital. Parents gave their children privacy to court alone, often removing themselves from the parlor, trusting that decorum would prevent improper behavior. As the century progressed, however, new opportunities for interacting outside the home emerged. College enrollments rose, and students developed their own rules governing relationships. More women entered the workforce, particularly as schoolteachers. And especially in urban areas, new public diversions like dance halls, amusement parks, theaters, andparks enticed courting couples away from the safety of their parlors.

World War I accelerated the disintegration of etiquette based on the separate‐spheres ideology, but popular magazines and advice columns quickly outlined new rules to replace the old. By 1925, traditional courtship had fallen out of fashion. Instead, young couples began to go on “dates,” which differed significantly from courting: They cost money, focused less on long‐term commitment, took place in public, and were initiated and paid for by men. Standards of sexual morality also changed, and the terms “necking” and “petting”—the former referring to kisses and caresses above the neck, the latter to the same below it—entered public discussion, giving names to previously unspoken private activities. In some circles, young people dated widely, rather than with one exclusive partner, since status hinged on being seen regularly with different desirable dates. During this period, for example, people considered dancing all evening with one partner a social failure: the “belle of the ball” was the young woman who danced with more partners than anyone else.

After World War II, “going steady”—two people dating exclusively—partially replaced the competitive system of the interwar years. For one man to cut in on another at a dance, once considered flattering to the young woman, came to be deemed rude. A profusion of articles, columns, and even marriage classes defined the new dating etiquette: Boys “protected” girls, exercising control by opening car doors, ordering in restaurants, and taking responsibility for asking girls for dates, while girls behaved submissively to help their dates feel like men. Americans began marrying younger and more often that at any point in the century, and married couples had more children.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, the sexual revolution—more a revolution in mores than in actual sexual behavior—turned this whole system on its head. Few of the carefully elaborated rules of the 1940s and 1950s still held. Couples still dated—some going steady—but women began to ask men on dates, many men stopped automatically reaching for the check, and living together became a widely accepted step toward marriage. The social norms governing sexuality fractured, with no unifying set of rules filling the void. “Singles” clubs and bars proliferated, and people of all ages sought congenial partners through dating services, the “personals” sections of magazines and newspapers, and Internet sites. Couples conducted courting on their own terms, as both men and women assumed more individual responsibility and initiative in finding a mate than at any previous time, while also exercising greater freedom in the process.
See also Gender; Family; Illegitimacy; Internet and Worldwide Web; Marriage and Divorce; Romantic Movement; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Urbanization.

Bibliography

E.S. Turner , A History of Courting, 1954.
Ellen K. Rothman , Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America, 1984.
Kathy Peiss , Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn‐of‐the‐Century New York, 1986.
Beth L. Bailey , From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth‐Century America, 1988.
Karen Lystra , Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth‐Century America, 1989.

Christopher W. Wells