DATING

A leisure activity related to rituals and practices of courtship and unsupervised by parents, dating developed in the twentieth century in response to changes in generational relations and gender, schooling, work, and entertainment practices. It is strongly embedded in the changes associated with the new consumer economy. Largely, though not exclusively, linked to heterosexual mores, dating came to define adolescent and young adult relations through much of the twentieth century, first in the United States and then also in other Westernized societies.

The Evolution of Courtship Practices

In the nineteenth century, ideals of romantic love came to define courtship values aimed at choosing compatible marriage partners. As the stress on companionship between marriage partners eclipsed the earlier emphasis on patriarchy, new practices grew to replace the various forms of arranged or family-facilitated marriage that dominated marital choices among members of the middle class and the respectable working classes. Many of these were still adult-supervised and took place in social settings such as the home, churches, picnics, and other gatherings that included different generations.

At the same time, as the society industrialized and became urban, young men and women spent more time away from the watchful guidance of parents and other responsible elders. Adolescent girls spent time outside the home at work and at school. Both male and female adolescents now went regularly to schools that were expanding their age-required attendance upward into the teen years. And they went to work in impersonal factories, stores, nonfamily-based workshops, and offices. They also were frequently found in a variety of commercial amusements that proliferated in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities, such as amusement parks, dance halls, cafeterias, vaudeville houses, and movie theaters. Many of these arenas where young men and women mixed promiscuously became suspect for encouraging female immorality and challenging class boundaries. All these issues became especially acute in the context of growing immigration in the early twentieth century and the heterogeneity that threatened older limits on courtship behavior. They were also a threat to the mores of many immigrant groups, most of which were still patriarchally organized, and among whom access between young men and women was very restricted traditionally. These groups now saw their children go off to work in mixed social settings. Dating developed among young working people in response to these conditions. It was also developing simultaneously among young people at schools and colleges.

Dating Comes of Age

Still daringly modern in the early twentieth century, dating was, by the 1920s, an established and widely recognized ritual among older adolescents and young adults. It became the means by which private and unsupervised behavior that revolved around sexuality could at once remain within respectable limits and still provide a legitimate means to experiment with the new intimacy now available for an exploration of mutual interests and sexual pleasures. Dating was not supervised directly by parents or other adults. Rather, it was an activity whose clearly defined limits on personal expression were patrolled by peer enforcement of standards that limited eligibility and datability, while establishing hierarchies of evaluation. The young often introduced new standards of attractiveness and glamour into these evaluations, by which they measured a potential dating partner by incorporating models from the popular culture. But dating still enforced class, ethnic, and racial boundaries.

Largely because of the extension of education to the majority of adolescents (including immigrants) in the 1920s and 1930s in public high schools, and to a substantial minority in colleges and universities, these new peer definitions became effective. The long hours away and shift of authority from home and work to youth-based institutions and the coeducational nature of most of these settings made peer standards in dating dominant. The school social system was based in many extracurricular activities, such as sports competitions, informal and formal social events, and fraternities and sororities. These activities and groups established the networks that regulated dating behavior. But it was the enormous expansion of popular culture media, especially the movies, popular music, and sports that provided the new sources and models for peer-defined standards of style, dress, and language around which judgments about popularity and datability revolved. The new media idols not only altered the vocabulary of acceptable and proper behavior, but as popular culture relied on overt and latent sexual themes, this helped the young to question former limits on sexual propriety in their dating behavior.

Dating rituals were fairly standardized by the 1920s, and they increasingly involved recourse to commercial recreations such as a movie, a soda shop, or a roadside restaurant. Dancing also became a part of many dates as school-sponsored dances or hops and more formal proms became common. Among wealthier young people, local hotels became favored spots for dances and dates. In places outside of large cities, dating relied on access to an automobile, and everywhere it became dependent on the outlay of significant amounts of cash to ensure that the treat for the afternoon or evening was acceptable to the dating partner. Commerce was thereby embedded into the very structure of the dating relationship, which almost always meant that the male treated the female. Women, in turn, spent money on their appearance, including fashionable clothes, stylish hairdos, cosmetics, and beauty treatments. This emphasis on external criteria of success questioned former standards that highlighted inner virtues such as piety, thrift, and reliability. New consumer standards replaced these in the evaluations of possible life partners as each side made decisions about the prospective date and whether the dating would continue.

Courtship also changed in the 1920s and 1930s because exclusivity was not considered either essential to dating or its only necessary result. Some observers noted that young people had become the victims of a datingand-rating syndrome, which sometimes overwhelmed the long-term courtship objectives of dating, as young men and women of the middle class engaged in a whirl of heterosexual social activities. Driven by considerations of status rather than companionability, it became part of a complex hierarchy of popularity and desirability. Other youth, especially those from working-class backgrounds, adopted dating for the more permanent courtship possibilities it offered as selection among dating partners narrowed earlier into committed relationships. Both dating that led to exclusive attachments and dating that was part of a busy social life included a variety of erotic practices that became standard in twentieth-century youth before the premarital sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, among them kissing, petting, and fondling.

The expenses incurred by the male dating partner have led some historians to conclude that there was an established understanding about the exchange that men expected from their female partners, as they sought some sexual compensation for expenses incurred. Whether the exchange was quite so direct and calculated or it evolved from a set of expanded possibilities for intimacy, dating did result in new and looser norms about sexual experimentation. In most cases, these activities fell short of intercourse, and it was understood that women bore the responsibility for defining limits while men would try to push those boundaries as far as possible. Among those whose dating had become exclusive in some form of official engagement, studies from the 1920s and 1930s agree that intercourse would be a likely outcome for about half of the couples. This intimacy was understood as a legitimate expression of the commitment to a loving relationship oriented to marriage.

The Impact of World War II

World War II abruptly changed the dating routines as the national emergency left schools, colleges, factories, and offices empty of young men. The imminence of departure also encouraged more rapid sexual involvement and a rush to marriage. For the thousands of those called "Victory girls," who engaged in promiscuous relations with servicemen, the war led to short-term casual sex for unmarried and even married women, who came to value immediate over longer-term considerations. Catering to men on short-term leave, these women were targeted by the army as potential carriers of venereal disease.

During the long depression of the 1930s, most social groups delayed the time for marriage. The war radically changed this pattern, and, after the war, the trends toward early marriage continued and were soon accompanied by a dramatic baby boom that altered American family life and the preparation for marriage in significant ways. The return of the peace encouraged a return to the dating behavior established earlier, but it was now far more than in the past an active matter of adult concern and intervention. Adults manifested their concern by offering advice columns in newspapers and teen magazines, as well as in manuals for adolescents. This was usually offered by the new relationship experts who drew on the high valuation Americans placed on the science of psychology that was also involved in other aspects of child rearing.

Dating also had a shorter duration since women began to marry younger than at any time in American history. As a result, adolescents began to contemplate the road to marriage more seriously and at younger ages. In the 1950s, younger adolescents and even preteens appropriated some of the behaviors of their older brothers and sisters, and serious, "steady" relations became common in the dating process. This issue caused considerable concern to parents and experts who saw how its privacy and exclusivity created more occasions for sexual intimacy. "Going steady" was often accompanied by tokens of alliance such as pinning (wearing the fraternity or club pin of a boyfriend) or wearing a love anklet or name bracelet of a steady boyfriend.

The Youth Culture Changes Dating

Dating as either a youth-initiated ritual or an area of adult guidance became less significant by the 1970s when the rapid changes in sexual mores that accompanied the youth culture of the 1960s removed some of the reasons for dating etiquette by legitimizing premarital sexual intercourse. This change affected young adults especially since it altered the pacing of marriage and the sequencing of premarital courtship behavior. Couples now more frequently engaged in the whole array of sexual behaviors before marriage, and they experimented with living together as couples. Monogamous lifetime partnerships were less common for those looking toward marriage, as well as for married couples, as divorce became much more common. For adolescents, too, the more open sexuality that developed during this period made dating rules far less stringent and enforceable.

After the 1970s, dating as a form of socializing and courtship continued, and it still defined many heterosexual relationships, but older sexual norms were no longer a guide to personal behavior, and all rules had become much more flexible. In a similar way, same-sex dating became a possibility as such relationships came out into the open. The effective use of birth control, the availability of abortion, even among adolescents, and the greater tolerance for personal sexual choices after the 1970s meant that the rules that had been in place for most of the century and whose objective was to maintain social standing during a life-cycle phase marked by strong sexual drive were hardly as necessary anymore. Dating was no longer the expected means for heterosexual leisure activities nor the only route that could lead to steady coupling. Other possibilities, including group activities associated with the use of intoxicants and large music "raves" have grown up as alternatives. In these new social contexts, sexual enforcement (especially toward more experimentation) is provided by overt group regulation, not through internalized rules of dating practice. In these contexts, too, sexuality is often divorced from intimacy, which had been the dominant association in dating. And as the Internet became a part of social life, courtship and marriage services that rely on the computer have become more acceptable means to facilitate marriage choices.

Dating is still a vehicle to establish relationships in the twenty-first century among adolescents and adults. While its significance appears to have declined among adolescents, dating has remained a common adult activity. For a generation of adults who take divorce for granted, dating has become a necessity as they seek to establish new partnerships. But the dominant twentieth-century restrictions on sexuality, which harshly defined what was and was not permissible, that once defined dating, have given way to a much more benign form of entertainment, an entertainment in which commerce and money are still an essential component of having a good time.

See also: Cyber Dating, Hook-Ups, Men's Leisure Lifestyles, Teenage Leisure Trends, Weddings, Women's Leisure Lifestyles

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Addams, Jane. The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets. New York: Macmillan Company, 1909. Reprint, Urbana.: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

Bailey, Beth L. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

——. Sex in the Heartland. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Fass, Paula S. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Hine, Thomas. The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience. New York: Avon Books, 1999.

Modell, John. Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

Rothman, Ellen K. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Paula S. Fass