Straight by Hanne Blank

Author:Hanne Blank
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Beacon Press

DATING AND RATING

Around 1914, it became possible to go out on a date.[20] As the Victorian era drew to a close, and the cult of true love trickled down from the middle classes to the working class and the poor, a new style of courtship emerged. Dating arose as an urban alternative to the more rural and suburban custom of “calling,” a courtship practice where young men would hopefully await an invitation from a young woman’s family (usually the mother) to “call on” a young lady and visit her at her family’s home. By contrast, dating literally removed the courting couple from the domestic realm. In the “calling” system, courtship was not necessarily heavily policed—historians including Ellen Rothman have documented how many families went out of their way to give courting couples privacy and time alone—but it did mean that courting still took place in the context of a woman’s family and neighbors.[21] In the “dating” system, a young woman’s home may have been where a date began and ended, but the date itself had the city as its stage.

The two systems were worlds apart. Courtships carried out in cafes and restaurants, parks and theatres were simultaneously less supervised but more public than calling. They were less challenging to arrange, since a man could simply ask a woman for a date rather than having to wait and hope for an invitation to call on her at home. But they were much more expensive, requiring men to pay for food, entertainment, and transportation rather than taking advantage of the home comforts that were already there. Dating had far less in the way of safety nets or quality control for women, since a woman’s family had no real ability to vet who might ask their daughter out on a date, nor were family members likely to be in the next room when the date was in progress. On the other hand, this meant a great deal more personal choice for both men and women in terms of whom they might court and how they might behave in the process of doing so.

Dating was also suited to urban life’s opportunities for meeting people. Although most dates still happened among people who shared social circles—among coworkers or friends of friends—it was also quite possible for a man to approach a woman who was a complete stranger. Dating, like marriage, was to remain mostly segregated along ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic lines for many decades (it is largely so today), but the relative spontaneity with which a date could be arranged broadened the range of what was possible and, indeed, what might be considered permissible. Particularly in North America, the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time when many ethnically diverse Northern European immigrants “became white,” assimilating to an American ideology of race in which all white-skinned people were more alike than they were different because all whites were contrasted to all blacks. Dating between white ethnic groups was part of this

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