OF ALL THE CHANGES THAT have taken place in Girl Land since the advent of modernity, none has been more radical than dating. The death of the old courtship system, in which middle-class parents were deeply involved in their daughters’ romantic lives, which unfolded largely in their own homes, under near-constant supervision, was a revolutionary development. This change, from the old system of a boy “calling” on a girl, in the company of her parents, to one in which he took her out on a date without supervision, was unprecedented, and altered the landscape of Girl Land forever. It gave middle-class girls a kind of power they had never before had, but it also exposed them to dangers they had never before encountered.
The essential and inescapable paradox of dating is that while girls have just as much of an interest in it as boys—in fact, as we shall see, to a certain extent, girls invented the custom—they have far more at risk in going out alone with a member of the opposite sex. Much of the cultural conversation involving girls and dating has been a process of informing them about these dangers. The terms of the conversation were at first highly coded and filled with euphemism (about what to do if a boy got “fresh,” about the importance of bringing “mad money” on a date), then increasingly frank and frightening (with descriptions of “date rape” and “teen dating violence”). Because Girl Land is drenched in romance—as well as in developing eros—the idea of being out with a boy is exciting, dreamy. But teens of the opposite sex enter those situations on unequal footing: if someone is to be forced into sexual situations, or beaten up, or left with the consequences of pregnancy, if someone is to get the worst of a variety of terrible things that can happen in the privacy and seclusion of a date, it’s going to be the girl.
Moreover, girls are notorious for being unimpressed by the kind of boys who seem safe and mild-mannered. When I was a girl, one of the most popular board games was Milton Bradley’s Mystery Date, in which players tried to collect the right outfits and accessories to go out on whichever date turned out to be waiting for her behind the white plastic door in the middle of the board. There was the Beach Date and the Formal Dance Date and the Bowling Date and the Picnic Date—each of them handsome boys, each capable of whisking you off to a day of unfettered excitement, but if you didn’t have the bathing suit and towel or the proper dress and high heels, you were getting left at home. There was an even worse fate that could befall you on Mystery Date: you could open the door and find none of the dreamy daters, but instead the “dud,” who was a grease monkey with a five o’clock shadow dressed in a mechanic’s uniform. Everything about the paradoxes and vulnerabilities of midcentury dating was conveyed in this character: he wasn’t a nerd or a geek, he was clearly someone who had dropped out of school altogether and who had so little respect for the girl that he hadn’t even washed up. He wasn’t just a dud, he was also vaguely threatening. As if that weren’t bad enough, the dud could ruin you: just opening the door to him meant you lost all of your accumulated outfits and accessories, the Milton Bradley equivalent of getting into trouble and being kicked out of your good home. But here’s what the game makers and the parents of girls didn’t predict: Girls liked the dud. They really liked him. They thought he was sexy and cool and kind of…dangerous. All over the Internet you can find women my age admitting that they secretly hoped they would get the dud, who was also sometimes called the “bum.”
The exact nature of what does and doesn’t constitute a date has changed over the years. In the fifties it might have been a relatively formal event in which a boy drove to a girl’s home and picked her up for an evening out, and today it might consist of them hooking up at an unchaperoned party. But the term has stayed with us, and the subject is of great and enduring interest to girls. Magazines for girls still carry starry-eyed articles about dating. When social workers in the early 2000s discovered an increase in the incidence of boys who beat up their girlfriends, they called the new phenomenon “teen dating violence,” because “dating,” as a term of art, still means something specific to young people. Whether it was the mad money handed out by fathers, or the instructions revealed in old guidebooks about what to do if a boy got fresh with you on a date, or the well-meaning counsel on the existence and prevention of date rape, the net result is the same for girls. They learn that underneath the glittering surface of dating lies the possibility of danger. And part of the allure of dating is that very danger—as the fondess for the Milton Bradley dud and songs like “Love the Way You Lie” can make clear.
A month before my senior year of high school, my parents and I moved from Berkeley, where I had grown up, to Long Island, where I was enrolled in a public high school in a bedroom community, and I attempted to survive long enough to get into college and escape. Emotionally troubled and desperately homesick, I decided that the thing to do was to find a good boyfriend, whose female friends would become my friends, and whose social world would become my own. That’s what girls did in those days, in high school: we had boyfriends. We didn’t call it “going steady”; that was a fifties term. We called it “going with” somebody, but it meant the same thing. I set my sights on a particular boy who was a varsity athlete on a top team. He was strong and powerful-looking and he didn’t say much, so I was free to project any personality I chose onto his blank canvas. Sold.
One day in late November he offered to drive me home from school, which seemed like an excellent, even propitious turn of events. My parents were away that day, meeting with my father’s publisher in the city. I could invite him inside without having to worry about them hovering; we could hang out. In the preceding eight weeks, absent any actual conversation, I had assigned him certain habits of mind and qualities of character; we were the Titania and Bottom of our high school. At last, with this ride, our destiny—as a love match in the making and as a union that would solve several of my most pressing problems—was at hand. But right away, things got off on the wrong foot. In the car, he seemed quieter than I had imagined him to be; I peppered him with flattering questions, but he said almost nothing. We got to my house, and I took him on a little tour. For reasons having to do with the difference in real estate values in the San Francisco Bay Area and Long Island, it was quite a place, and he seemed impressed by it—almost cowed by it—in a way that embarrassed me a bit. But there was something more to his reaction to the house, although I don’t know if I realized this at that moment or if it emerged during the endless, self-recriminating hours I later devoted to reliving and reexamining the events of that afternoon: I think the house surprised him. My arrival at the last possible moment at school had suggested perhaps that I was a marginal person, part of some vague train of family miseries and lost chances. That I didn’t come from much and could be treated accordingly. The house had a pond at the bottom of a garden, and he stood for a moment looking out the dining room window toward it, and then—suddenly, impulsively—he suggested that we go to the beach. I remember trying to convince him that we should stay in the house—I could make us a snack, we could watch some television—but he was adamant; it was the most animated he’d been the whole time, and so I agreed. And that was my mistake.
We had hardly left my driveway when I realized I didn’t like this boy. He had gone from being quiet to being almost mute. Why didn’t I tell him to just take me back home? Politeness, mostly, and also the gathering momentum of the afternoon, of having agreed to go. It seemed I’d just have to see the thing through.
At the beach, there was no parking attendant and no lifeguard; the snack kiosks were boarded up. There was no one in sight. I hadn’t expected it to be deserted. I was from California; I knew kids who surfed year-round. Almost as soon as he parked, the boy leaned over and kissed me. If I live a hundred years, I’ll never forget the shock of that kiss; it was aggressive and artless, and completely unconnected—obviously—to any feelings for me at all. He just sort of lunged over and landed it on me, and I reacted to it by reaching up my hand and pushing him away. I remember all of these moments very clearly: the way I pushed him away from me, confident that he would stop what he was doing when he realized I didn’t like it. I was sixteen; I’d been in situations like this before; I knew what to do. But then he did something that no one had ever done to me before: he ignored my protests. He kept going, pushing himself all the way against me and then reaching for the zipper of my coat. I struggled away, started to say something, but he was on me again, and I had a vague thought: he’s not getting the message. It seemed important to find some other way to let him know I wasn’t up for anything he had in mind; he was apparently an obtuse kid. I moved away, he didn’t stop, and that’s when I realized the truth of the situation: I was the one who wasn’t getting the message.
It was a few years before the term date rape would enter the national consciousness. It’s hard to explain how deeply that concept would change the way all of us felt about the time we spent alone with boys and young men, the rights we had, and the ones the men did not. When I first saw the term, part of an information sheet posted in the lounge of a women’s bathroom in my college, I stared at it for half an hour. You could be on a date, something you had agreed on freely, a set of risks you had freely agreed to accept, but if a boy forced himself on you, you could still be the victim of a rape? We just didn’t know that then. We sort of thought that if things got out of hand, then it was our fault. As it turned out, there was a long cultural tradition dedicated to making us believe it, but at the time I was at the beach with that boy, all I knew was that something terrible was happening and that it was somehow my fault. I wasn’t nice enough or pretty enough or entertaining enough to be worth decent treatment.
When that boy tried to force me to have sex with him, I reacted with something more than fear, more than anger, more than panic. I was suffused with a single, blinding emotion: outrage. I yelled at him, I kicked him, and I went for the door handle. He stopped. This was a kid who was applying—and would get accepted—to the best schools, and to this day I wonder if that’s what saved me. I created a context in which, if he had pressed ahead, there would be no way to interpret his actions other than as an assault. In short order, we were driving back to my house in silence. He let me out of the car and drove away.
Now, after so many years, this story doesn’t seem like much: a sixteen-year-old girl who went out with a boy she didn’t know well and who turned out to be a boor but not a monster. He did stop, after all. But I can’t tell you how much the experience shamed and scared me, how much I felt it had been a reflection on me and on my shortcomings. Deeply woven into my sense of the experience were the lessons I had learned from an informal but relentless curriculum, one delivered by the girl culture I was growing up in—teen magazines, romantic novels and movies and television shows I loved, as well as comments from adults and older girls. Embedded in all of that, never directly stated but nonetheless very clear, were the twin notions that it was a girl’s responsibility not to allow a date to get “out of hand” if she didn’t want it to and also that only a boy who didn’t respect you would attempt to force you to do something against your will. “Respect” was the word that was always used in this context, although it seems to me now only to underscore the inequality of power that exists on a date: my safety was not grounded in my own ability to defend myself, only in my hope that he would choose to respect what I wanted.
But here’s the bigger question: why in the world would I, a slight sixteen-year-old girl, have ever thought it was a sensible and safe thing to go first to an empty house and then to a deserted beach with a boy I hardly knew, whom my parents had never met, about whom I knew almost nothing at all? I was not a particularly levelheaded kid, but in making that decision, I was in no way violating any norms of proper behavior for a relatively cosseted and well-loved middle-class daughter. In fact, if my mother had happened to call the house that afternoon, and I had told her I was on the way to Cedar Beach with a boy from my school, she would have said good for you. I’d felt safe because I lived during a historical moment when dating—the catchall term for any event whereby two romantically inclined young people go on an excursion without any chaperone—was over a half-century old. Dating, filled with the excitement of romance and young sexuality, but also laden with dark, indirect warnings about a world of dangers and snares, had for so long been the prerogative of Girl Land, one of the main points of leaving little girlhood behind, that I was behaving according to every television show and teen guidebook and magazine and movie I’d ever encountered. The boy I’d chosen was a good-looking upper classman from my high school who’d asked to do one of the most fabled of all dating activities: take me home from school. How could that ever be a bad thing?
Dating was born in the years immediately following the First World War, the time that modern youth culture as we know it was emerging. Thomas Hine, author of The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, describes the twenties as “a society we can easily recognize as a precursor to our own. Although a majority of young people weren’t yet in school, there was a widespread belief that they ought to be, and would be soon. Well-developed, truly national news and entertainment media were enraptured by the styles of young people, who were among their most avid watchers.…Young people were, for the first time, setting styles in clothing, hairstyle, music, dancing, and behavior on their own, and both adults and children looked up to them as leaders. Young people were organizing their own social lives, and adults felt powerless when they rejected previous standards of propriety as irrelevant to modern life. Certainly, people in their teens had had fun before, but in the twenties, it became a right.”
The war reinvented the very notions of what it meant to be young, and what it meant to be old, or even middle-aged. It opened America’s first generation gap. “It was easy,” writes Frederick Lewis Allen in The Big Change, for young people “to think of themselves as a generation who had gone through the hell of war because of the mistakes of their elders, whose admonitions on any subject must therefore be suspect.” This new feeling of independence and liberation was not reserved only for young men. Wrote Paul Sann in The Lawless Decade: “The soldier home from the war did find something to cheer about—unless he happened to be an Honor Scout or otherwise excessive. Johnny found his American beauty drifting away from the prim morality of the pre-1914 world faster than the Model T would carry her.…She wanted to be the life of the party—indoors, or in the open roadster parked on the lonely road.…The curtain had come down on the girl he used to know. She was a flapper now, raring to go.” In 1922 Outlook magazine ran a piece called “A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents”: “I wear bobbed hair, the badge of flapperhood. (And, oh, what a comfort it is!) I powder my nose. I wear fringed skirts and bright-colored sweaters, and scarfs, and waists with Peter Pan collars, and low-heeled ‘finale hopper’ shoes. I adore to dance. I spend a large amount of time in automobiles. I attend hops, and proms, and ball-games, and crew races, and other affairs at men’s colleges.”
This new way of life took off with great speed, in part because the forces of modernity had a running start on the twenties. All of Freud’s major theories had been published before the war; Margaret Sanger’s campaign to provide access to contraception was also well under way by 1914. The American teenage girl, completely different from the girls of her mother’s generation—and all other previous generations—was a new creature, the product of a convulsive act of youthful self-creation, its tenets broadcast from city to town via all the newly born national culture and the dawn of mass media.
Chief among those media: the movies. Motion pictures, which were seen by millions of Americans every week, including a huge percentage of America’s young people, enjoyed the twenties free from the interference of either a Hays Code or a Legion of Decency, both of which would come to power during the artistically reactionary period of the 1930s. As a form of popular entertainment, the movies had emerged not from the concert halls and dramatic stages of America, but from the far seedier world of vaudeville and the boardwalk nickelodeon. Although they soon became a vehicle of middle-class entertainment, for a long while they dealt, in a fairly explicit way, with sexual themes and story lines that had a profound impact on the way young people, and in particular girls, saw themselves and the world around them. We may marvel at the group hysteria of teenyboppers screaming and fainting at the Beatles concert in Shea Stadium, but forty years earlier their counterparts had been brought to a similar frenzy by Rudolph Valentino. Still, there was a significant difference between the two cultural phenomena: the adorable four mop tops represented a kind of sublimated sexuality, to which the girls, in their innocence, felt free to respond. But there was nothing sublimated about Valentino and what he represented. The Sheik inspired the real deal, as the ads for his most famous movie vividly reveal:
SEE
THE AUCTION OF BEAUTIFUL GIRLS TO
THE LORDS OF THE HAREM
SEE
MATCHLESS SCENES OF GORGEOUS COLOR,
AND WILD FREE LOVE IN THE YEAR’S SUPREME
SCREEN THRILL—
3000 IN THE CAST
Girls of the 1920s had a mass-market sex symbol of their own to whom they could aspire—Clara Bow, the original “dirty girl,” the slum kid, who begged for money to get her photographs taken for a contest, so she could beam her pretty mug all over the world—an everyday affair for any contemporary American girl with access to a computer. In 1927, she gave girls all across the country a new notion of how to comport themselves. She was the “It” girl, from the movie of the same name, and the “it” in question was what we started to call “sex appeal” by the fifties. As Elinor Glyn, the author of the short story on which the movie was based, would later describe “it”: “With ‘it’ you win all men if you are a woman, all women if you are a man. It can be defined as a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.” Clara Bow was always getting naked (even if you didn’t actually see it on-screen) around men she wasn’t married to, and she was racy, wild. She may have shocked a lot of Americans, but in those days the motion picture business was so new, such a Wild West—like the Internet is today—that there was no system in place for policing it.
Clara Bow used her beauty and her sexuality as an aggressive tool for self-promotion; she was the forerunner to Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Lady Gaga. It was about a spunky young shopgirl who sets her cap on the swell who owns the department store, only to find herself fallen into ruin when—for complicated reasons of plot—he discovers her caring for a baby, and assumes it’s their love child. Her ability to triumph over all, to continue living a sexually free life, was a revelation to girls who saw the movie by the millions.
Girls’ pocket money was a significant force in the development of many of the cultural advances of the decades. An entire material culture developed, one fueled by this pocket money and so aimed especially at teenage girls, including an entirely new kind of consumer product: mass-marketed clothing designed to be worn not by little girls or by grown women. There were “subdeb” boutiques in the big department stores, and specialty shops, as we can see from these two ads printed in Baltimore newspapers in the middle of the decade:
THE TWIXTEEN SHOP
WHERE THE PARTICULAR NEEDS OF MISS
FOURTEEN-TO-TWENTY ARE CAREFULLY STUDIED
AND INTELLIGENTLY PROVIDED FOR.
JOEL GUTTMAN & COMPANY
WHATEVER THE HIGH SCHOOL GIRL NEEDS—
IN APPAREL AND ACCESSORIES—WILL BE FOUND AT
HOCHSCHILD, KOHN & CO
BALTIMORE’S BEST STORES
HOWARD AND LEXINGTON
Another factor in teenage girls seeing themselves as a distinct and even powerful new class was the emerging concept of adolescence as a separate developmental stage, one that might have challenges and pleasures all its own. It was an idea with roots in psychoanalytic thinking that came to widespread acceptance through the work of an American psychologist named G. Stanley Hall, whose revolutionary 1904 two-volume book on the subject, Adolescence, reported that “being a teenager is, in some respects, an unnatural act, an imposition of culture on biology. It means continuing to be a child when your body is telling you otherwise. Young people nearing the peak of their physical and sexual powers are expected to delay using them, and focus their energies on acquiring skills and moral values.” In fact it was the twenties—and not the fifties, as much of current popular culture would have us believe—that gave birth to what we mean when we use the term “American teenager”: that creature whose life is animated by spending money, a booming peer culture, and the particular social world that emerges through attendance at large coeducational public high schools. Twenties teenagers comprised America’s first youth culture, kids who communicated with one another via a private language of slang and gesture, whose indulgent parents saw the teenage years as a time for fun and social activity.
All of these advances both liberated and coarsened the typical American teenage girl, gave her a wide world of prospects her mother never could have imagined for herself, and eroded the various kinds of protections and safeguards that earlier generations of girls had experienced. H. L. Mencken drolly observed in 1916 that “the veriest schoolgirl of today knows as much as the midwife of 1885, and spends a good deal more of her time discharging and disseminating her information.” Lloyd Morris remarked of Jazz Age girls in Incredible New York: High Life and Low Life from 1850 to 1950, “If your concern was paternal, the flapper was a problem. Otherwise, she was a pleasure. Jauntily feather-footed in her unfastened galoshes, her flesh-colored stockings rolled below the knee and her skirt barely touching it, slender and boyish, the flapper came in to the tune of ‘I’ll Say She Does’—and frequently she did.”
It was within this new world of girl possibility and girl power that dating was born with surprisingly little resistance from parents. As historian Beth L. Bailey reports in her excellent account of the changes in American courtship, From Front Porch to Back Seat, the term “dating” was, by 1914, appearing regularly in Ladies’ Home Journal; by 1924, dating was a widespread practice among middle-class teenagers. The birth of car culture escalated the process; with cars and “parking” came petting, which consisted of any sexual activity short of intercourse and which replaced the much more innocent “spooning” and “snuggle pupping.” There was even a body of thought—well documented in a 2007 book called Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830–1930 by Crista DeLuzio—that petting was actually good for girls, that it served a purpose relating to something that only a few years earlier would have been among the most shocking statements you could make: that teenage girls had erotic desires of their own and were not merely the potential victims of adolescent male lust. Phyllis Blanchard, author in 1920 of The Adolescent Girl, wrote that so long as the girl was not trading these physical intimacies in the hope of gaining love, but rather wholly to satisfy her own physical desires, the new practice was entirely healthy, even “wholesome.…Contrary to a section of popular opinion, she may be better prepared for marriage by her playful activities than if she had clung to a passive role of waiting for marriage before giving in to her sex impulses.” G. Stanley Hall wrote that teenage flappers “not only accept, but glory in, their sex as such, and [through petting] are giving free course to its native impulses.”
Imagine what had come before: an expectation that a well-raised young woman from a thoughtful and caring family would be absolutely ignorant of sexuality until the night of her wedding, or at least the beginning of her betrothal. For the woman, the act of intercourse, coupled as it was with the act of being uprooted from her home, leaving her mother, being bound to another clan, was an experience that literally penetrated—and violated—her sense of who she was in the world, her safety in her home. There is no shortage of anecdotes and evidence from the historical record to suggest that the experience was very tense, often marked by a combination of ignorance, fear, anxiety. Wedding-night jokes are a lost form of American humor because their very premise—two sexually inexperienced young people intent on losing their virginity—is now so far removed from the reality that their comic shorthand makes no sense. The jokes centered, always, on something going wrong, and it was the woman who had to endure whatever ineptitude or frantic passion her groom brought to the event. To the groom fell either the opportunity for kindness and gentleness or for impatience and cruelty.
In Education of the Senses, the first volume of Peter Gay’s great exploration of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of the First World War, he devotes considerable energy to a study of those premodern wedding nights, which he observes are easy to imagine as pure cliché: “The brute in the bedroom, the sensual husband raping his shrinking, wholly uninformed bride, became a staple in the literature of bourgeois self-criticism…it makes for a plausible and—I must add—titillating scene in a melodrama for two: the timid frightened girl torn from the arms of her mother and thrown on the mercy of this man who is her husband.”
But in his readings of diaries and letters he found a more nuanced reality. Wedding nights did not uniformly constitute cases of “licensed rape,” nor did all middle-class couples arrive at the nuptial chamber in a state of total ignorance, either of human sexuality or—in some cases—of one another’s bodies. Not infrequently the period of betrothal, between proposal and marriage ceremony, was a time in which the couple was afforded some privacy, as the young man had already declared his honorable intentions; furthermore, “nineteenth-century bridegrooms were often patient and tactful.” Still, the wedding night—“with all its attendant leave-takings” was a hugely emotional and wrenching experience for a girl, made all the more so by her lack of knowledge about her own biology and even about the rudiments of reproduction.
Until the First World War, it was almost impossible for a well-raised girl to get access to the kind of information that would have made for a less anxious wedding night, and whenever someone emerged to provide it, he or she became a person of significant stature. This opened the door to both the helpful and the kooky, and sometimes to people with both traits, such as Ida Craddock, author of The Wedding Night, published toward the end of the nineteenth century. Craddock was born in Philadelphia in 1857 and raised in a strict Quaker home. She became the first woman to pass the entrance exams to the University of Pennsylvania, but her enrollment was blocked by the university’s trustees. She ended up studying and then teaching at a business college and writing a book on stenography. But in 1887 her life took an unexpected turn: she joined the Theosophist Society and became a student of the occult, eventually proclaiming herself a “priestess and pastor in the church of yoga.” She also wrote a series of books and tracts on human sexuality, which offered practical and useful information to readers, especially young and inexperienced ones. As a feminist, she argued persuasively for the encouragement of female erotic desire, but as a person who was admitted five times to psychiatric hospitals, she was prone also to giving advice that was frankly insane and sometimes outright dangerous.
The most famous of her works, The Wedding Night was a little pamphlet that explained with great sensitivity the plight of young women on their first night alone with their young husbands, and of the terrifying moment that each bride must face: “It comes when the last kisses of mother and girl-friends have been given, and the last grain of rice has been thrown upon the newly wedded pair, and the last hack driver and hotel or railway porter have been gotten rid of, and the key is turned in the bedroom door and the blinds drawn, and the young girl, who has never been alone in a locked room with a man in all her life, suddenly finds herself, as though in a dream, delivered over by her own innocent and pure affection into the power of a man, to be used at his will and pleasure.”
She counsels that in most cases “no genital union at all should be attempted, or even suggested, upon that night,” advice that has a long history (even the Kama Sutra advises bridegrooms to wait ten days before attempting sex with their new wives), and she tells men that they are not to force their wives into sex. “My dear sir, you must indeed be lacking in manhood to be unable to arouse sex desire in a bride who loves you with even a halfway sort of affection.” Fair enough, until you get to this bit of information: “As to the clitoris, this should be simply saluted, at most, in passing, and afterward ignored as far as possible.” In fact, Craddock was an advocate, in certain situations, of female circumcision.
But even for girls who had experienced petting before marriage, the wedding night was often their first experience of intercourse, and as such it was often a frightening one. The wedding night described in Joy in the Morning, set in 1927, is breathtaking because it is so fully realized and so patently autobiographical. Written by Betty Smith, who became famous for composing one of the most loved novels in all of Girl Land, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the later book fictionalizes her first year as a very young bride married to a young man studying law at the University of Michigan.
The story opens with Annie—who has just arrived after a long train ride from Brooklyn, and who is eloping—sitting next to her fiancé, Carl, on a wooden bench in the corridor of a town hall, “a small, red, very new suitcase” on the floor beside her.
“Will we have to wait much longer?” Carl asks the clerk anxiously. He is in a hurry; Annie is not.
The wedding takes place, and they arrive at the boardinghouse where they will take up residence, but the room is not yet ready, and there are a series of delays. They sell their tickets to the big football game and use the money for a wedding lunch, then return to the boardinghouse, but still they must wait.
Carl begins to go mad with frustrated passion. First they had been thwarted by the prying eyes of Brooklyn and the necessities of convention: “All our love-making in public: On the street, in subways, in trolley cars, movies, vestibules.…Always like animals looking for a dark corner.” Now, with the marriage license, he has earned his right to a dark corner, but still they sit and sit on the porch swing, waiting. The verandah and the soft air may delight Annie, but her happiness only enrages her new husband.
“I know how you feel, Carl,” she says sweetly, “because I feel the same way.” But it turns out she does not.
“You don’t know,” he tells her; “and you don’t feel the same. You can’t know how a man feels. A woman can bide her time and wait. But a man…Me! All keyed up and waiting…waiting all day…waiting years. It’s enough to drive a man crazy!”
And then an amazing thing happens; Annie says sympathetically, “I know. Carl, I’ll go get a Coke and leave you alone for a few minutes.” (Alone to do what?) “Like hell you will,” he says, and he grabs her roughly and pulls her on top of him: “He kissed her eyes, her ears, her mouth and the hollow at the base of her neck. He shoved his hand down her blouse and took hold of one of her breasts.”
She pleads with him not to do it there on the porch of the respectable house, but her whimpering only angers him: “Fury, added to sexual frustration, made him wild. He grabbed the top of her blouse and tore it down to her waist. The little buttons splattered on the floor. When he began pulling off her jacket, she opened her mouth to scream, but he got his hand over her mouth just in time. She put her two hands on his chest and shoved him out of the swing.” The swing then rebounds and clips him, hard, on the knees, and Annie begins to cry.
What a curious scene this is, and how keenly felt by its author—the little buttons spattering on the porch floor a detail so acute and so telling of the changing landscape of this girl’s life. And how frightening the moment is because now she is married to this man who—just a few hours earlier, before the marriage—would have been accused of attempted rape if he had done the same thing to her.
As Annie sobs, Carl vows, mysteriously, to “settle this once and for all,” and then he stomps inside to insist the landlady give them the room at once. He comes back all smiles: the room will be ready in fifteen minutes, and they are to go to a lunchroom first and have a dinner of sandwiches. “Carl,” Annie tells him in a sudden declaration of human rights, “I’m a person that don’t like to be grabbed in a swing.”
“I’ll remember,” he says somberly, and then they go back to the boardinghouse and change into their nightclothes. But Annie refuses to have sex. “Because you’ll hurt me. I know it.”
Finally, miraculously, Carl’s heart is moved. Instead of attacking her again, he pulls a chair by the window and asks her to sit in his lap. And then he rocks her like a baby and gently confesses that he’s as unschooled as she is: “he told her as much as he knew about the sex act, and she fell asleep in his arms while he was talking.” Eventually she wakes up and climbs into bed, and as he hangs his pajama top in the closet he asks her, “If I turn off the light will you take off your night gown?” To which she replies, “It’s already off.”
It took a husband-and-wife team, the American doctors Hannah and Abraham Stone, who were associates of Margaret Sanger, to write a guidebook that would educate millions of young American women on the facts of sexuality, desire, and the wedding night itself. Marriage Manual: A Practical Guidebook to Sex and Marriage, first published in 1936, notes that the new couple needs to get on with things: “It is usually best for the sexual union to be consummated during the first few days after marriage if feasible. If the defloration should prove to be very painful, or if there is much apprehension and fear on the part of the wife, complete penetration need not take place during the first sex act.…A gradual and gentle dilation carried out during the several successive relationships will considerably ease the discomfort and lessen the anxiety for the woman.” However, the doctors counsel strongly against allowing this period of husbandly patience to outlive its usefulness: “The longer the first relations are postponed the greater will be the feeling of anxiety on the part of the wife and of frustration on the part of the husband.” The burden of correcting this situation lay with the wife: “The woman should realize that complete relaxation on her part and an active cooperation are necessary for the consummation of the sexual union.”
It was from this territory of sexual ignorance and patriarchal courtship that girls of the 1920s began to embrace dating. But no matter how joyously they welcomed the new practice, and how easily their parents and teachers agreed to the new system, there was no denying that it came with a heavy new burden: it was girls’ responsibility to set and enforce the standards of how much sexual activity should take place on each date. “Women, according to their nature and in their own best interest,” writes Beth Bailey in her book on dating, were the ones who were responsible for setting the sexual limits, for how could dating work otherwise? “If men refused to allow women the power to control their mutual sexual experience,” the system could not function. Men were stronger, bigger; the job of controlling what actually took place on dates fell to women—to girls. “No boy—no matter whether he’s the head of the Wolf Pack—will persist in affectionate intentions, if he gets a positively negative response,” reported the magazine Senior Scholastic in 1946. The idea, the one that would many decades later lead me to believe it was okay to go to a deserted beach with a boy I hardly knew, was that any girl—no matter how slight or inexperienced—would be able to control what happened on a date, and if something did go wrong, it was her fault.
As a physical object, the Seventeen magazine Book of Etiquette and Entertaining, published in 1963, is a beautiful and almost radiantly desirable thing. You can imagine it being given, mother to daughter, as a Christmas or birthday present, the sort of totem that lets the girl know that her own mother—however meddlesome and ancient she may seem—is an ally in the business of being a teenager in the modern world. It has a sumptuous white dust jacket, with a portrait of a beautiful girl in a robin’s-egg blue hair band, and inside are chapters on every exciting thing for which an American girl at midcentury could ever hope. It was written by Seventeen’s founding editor, Enid Haupt, an aging New York heiress with a passion for horticulture and the French impressionists, for whom the magazine had been created by her brother, Walter Annenberg. In the magazine’s pages, in the several guidebooks bearing her name, and in her nationally syndicated newspaper column, Haupt emerges as someone who sees a girl’s teenage years as a training ground for her future as a young wife, but also as a discrete episode, which—provided a girl has cultivated the right manners and built the right wardrobe—should be a career in itself.
The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining covers topics ranging from fashion to table manners, party throwing to partygoing. It was a book written for a mass audience, but which addressed them—flatteringly—as though they were all members of a particular upper class, half Philadelphia Story, half Barefoot in the Park. Yet (and this says as much about American tastes at midcentury as anything else) the clear feeling you get from the book is that girls did not read it as an exercise in social class aspiration, but as a template of the lives they were in fact living, requiring only a little adjustment. The endless advice on how to behave in other people’s country clubs could be dreamed on and then, with small modifications, applied to the way to conduct oneself during a swim meet at the crosstown Y. And, class aside, the book is filled with things girls wanted to read about: dances and dresses, how to receive a gift of flowers, how to accept an invitation. But most of all—through it all, in the chapters that deal with the subject directly and in the ones that seem to have nothing to do with it directly—it’s a book about boys.
On the subject of dating, The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining is comprehensive, exhaustive. It tells girls how to angle for a date, how to accept a date, how to refuse a date definitively, and how to refuse one yet still keep the door open for a second affair. It tells you what to do if you’re wearing the wrong thing for a date, if your young man doesn’t have enough money to take you out on a proper date, if you discover that you don’t agree with a date’s opinions on books or politics. Despite all of these possible blunders, the book still makes dating seem like the most wonderful, exciting, desirable thing that could ever happen to a girl. Yet, mixed in with all of this advice on the fun and romance of dating, there is counsel—sometimes tossed off as an aside, often couched as euphemism, that could easily be missed by a young girl. The core of this advice, although Enid Haupt would almost certainly be loath to put the fact so bluntly, is that dating can be dangerous. Woven pretty tightly within the fabric of the Book of Etiquette—and seeming like a subject that doesn’t have anything at all to do with what we commonly think of as etiquette—is the recognition of the fundamental power inequality between teenage boys and girls and the various ways that girls can end up as victims.
There is a section called “How to refuse a kiss,” and here, Haupt instructs girls, as they had been instructed since the 1920s, that it is their responsibility to establish how much sex can take place on a date, and furthermore, it is their responsibility not to embarrass boys who try for more. “If it’s a gay under-the-mistletoe or New Year’s kiss, enjoy it and don’t stir up a scene over nothing,” she tells girls, which on its own is rather shocking advice. If girls find themselves getting a different kind of kiss—a “boy-has-plans kind of kiss,” she writes that “humor or distraction is the best way to salvage the situation,” counsel that struck me because of the word “salvage,” as though being kissed in an aggressive way is still a matter of etiquette. But here is the advice that I found chilling, all the more so for the sophisticated, womanly way that it is given: “if one or both of you starts laughing or can be distracted, you can avoid the rather dull feminine response of scratching, screaming and kicking.”
I’m not the sort of person who gets worked up over things in guidebooks or newspapers or magazine columns from long ago. But this sentence in the Seventeen book stops me every time I read it. This, in essence, was the bill of goods that girls were sold along with dating—we might demand to be allowed to do it, but we’d better be prepared for whatever unpleasant things might take place. We were the ones responsible for them.
The hugely popular 1963 book Love and the Facts of Life by Evelyn Millis Duvall gives its readers endless fun, peppy advice about how to enjoy a date. “Many dates begin with a boy’s asking a girl to go to a special affair with him—a sports event, a musical program, a play,” she tells her readers, and each requires a special outfit, a certain kind of planning. Other times the boy asks a girl out for a Saturday night without the foggiest idea of what they should do—in which case the girl should think on her feet, suggesting a double feature or a concert in the park. Keeping conversation rolling on a date can be a challenge, especially for boys who aren’t as verbally adept or lively; a girl should work to draw out her date, asking him about his summer plans, courses, after-school activities. But she has another obligation to him: helping him to contain and restrain his sexual urges: down through the ages. It is girls’ responsibility to keep relationships between the sexes under control. “On the whole the girls are more slowly aroused and can stop love-making more easily than the average male.” How is she going to do this? By making a joke. A girl named Cora, we learn, was out parking with a boy when “his hand slipped down between her breasts and his kiss took on an intensity that was frightening.” But Cora had it under control: she “struggled free of his embrace, shook her curls with a jerky little laugh, saying, ‘Ooooh please, you are too much for me.’” We’re meant to read about this drama in the same breezy way in which it’s presented, but I can’t: Cora is being manhandled. If she’s not resourceful or lucky, she’s going to be raped.
As with Enid Haupt’s advice on how girls could avoid unwanted kisses, all of Duvall’s counsel regarding this aspect of dating seems steeped in euphemism. You shouldn’t let a boy get “fresh” or “take advantage.” It seems only to hint, darkly and obscurely, at what life can really be like in a parked car with a boy or young man who turns out not to be such a good guy after all. In fact, the importance of having a date meet your father, which is presented as a point of etiquette, was really another coded message: the father will size him up, intimidate him a bit, let him know that if something goes wrong he won’t have just a sixteen-year-old girl to answer to; he will have her father.
The first man to recognize the force of a girl’s sexuality is her own father, which is one of the reasons that fatherless girls are always in greater jeopardy. The father is the first line of defense between a girl and the men who would exploit her sexually. Long before she has even entered Girl Land, when she is still blissfully unaware that anyone might have designs on her that run counter to her own best interests, before she has any understanding at all of sexuality, he is nervously watching her, and the men around her, spoiling for a fight. The father’s job is to protect his girl, and also—during the bittersweet interval in which her sexuality is emerging—to warn her, obliquely as well as directly, of the dark side of male sexuality. When a father gave a daughter “mad money”—a custom still in practice when I was a teenager, at least in my house—he was really warning her, subtly, about the possibility of what we now call “date rape,” that even an apparently nice boy can suddenly turn and make demands, force himself on her. Girls with a father living at home always fare better in the dating world, because malevolent adolescent boys (as opposed to the many good ones) don’t want to come up against the authority of grown men. In fact, the hallmark of most dangerous teenage boys is that they have never been held to account by a grown man, and they move more confidently in a world of women, where they can threaten and cajole.
All of the dating guidebooks from the twenties until fairly recently make it clear that a girl must introduce her date to her father before she goes out with him, and that if she doesn’t have a father, she should introduce him to some older male family member. The guidebooks made this seem like a point of etiquette, but it was really another of the quiet safety mechanisms built into the system: the boy should not leave the house with the girl until he has had to confront the person of her father. Even today, we see dads wanting to be involved in their daughter’s teenage romances. Rule 4 of W. Bruce Cameron’s 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, an open letter to potential suitors, informs young men interested in his girl, “I’m sure you have been told that in today’s world, sex without using a ‘barrier method’ of some kind can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am that barrier, and I will kill you.” This little speech would have more resonance if he’d delivered it to his daughter. She is the one, of course, who will make the decisions about how far to take her sexual relationship, but the notion harkens back to something older, and is embedded into the very notion of dating.
I never told anyone what had happened to me that afternoon at the beach. I had been so glad to get home unharmed, so ashamed of what had almost happened, that it seemed like a dark secret that I should never share. A few months later I started dating a nice boy who became my boyfriend for the rest of senior year, and then I went away to college. The summer after sophomore year at college, I got a job working at a department store on Long Island. It was an especially good and fun job, working in the men’s shirts department; my boss loved me, the hours were excellent, and I had money of my own. One day, when I was standing at my glass counter (wearing a pink shirtdress, which I remember thinking was both very cute and exactly the right thing for a young woman working in the men’s shirts department), I became aware of a young man walking toward me; I glanced up and saw that he had turned his back and was walking away, and I went back about my business. But a few minutes later, in my peripheral vision, I saw the same young man headed toward me, purposeful, single-minded, determined. It was the boy who had forced himself on me at Cedar Beach.
I felt differently about myself then: I had made friends, I had gone to college and had yet another boyfriend; I was much more sure of myself. I certainly wasn’t afraid. I was standing on the fluorescent-lit sales floor of Abraham and Straus at ten in the morning. But I braced myself; what was he about to do to me? When he got closer, I realized he was shaking, and when he got all the way to the counter I saw that he was nearly crying.
“I just always wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” he said, in a desperate, urgent way. “I’m sorry about what I did to you.”
I was so unprepared for the moment, so eager for it to end, that I sort of batted my hand away as though it had been no big deal. I said some idiotic thing like “Oh, don’t worry about it.” But he wouldn’t go away, and he was clearly overcome with his guilt. “I’m just really, really sorry,” he said again while I stood there uncomfortably. He was like the date raper of apologizing! He was going to force that apology on me whether I wanted it or not.
Many years later, I was able to view him, and his embarrassing moment in the department store, with a bit of compassion. Between the moment he had tried to assault me and the one in which he came to me in tears, he had realized that he had done something terrible. Like me, he had been only a teenager, after all. It must be a sobering thing for a young man of his age to realize what he was capable of doing.
It really seemed as if he wanted something else from me that day at A and S, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, and I certainly didn’t feel beholden to him in any way, so I finally just turned from him and busied myself with something else, and he was forced to go back to where he came from, and I never saw him again.