3—
Modern Youth: The 1920s

Cultural Innovation

That the 1920s was not a decade of unalloyed prosperity as myth proposes should not blind us to the pervasiveness of cultural themes reflecting a sense of growing plenty that fed and was fed by a focus on the post-Victorian sense of individualized satisfaction. If some elements of the consumer economy lagged, many evolved rapidly.^[1] New expectations and elements of a revised organization of the youthful life course emerged from an enlarging and increasingly self-confident middle class, ineluctably intertwined.

In the 1920s, the United States moved a long way toward reducing the enormous heterogeneity that had been created by the headlong development of an urban nation and had for half a century focused the nation's cultural and political energies. Immigration, to take the most obvious example, severely constricted by the Great War, was now sharply reduced by statute. The proportions of the foreign-born who were passing through their childbearing years declined sharply, not compensated for by a comparable increase in second-generation "ethnic" youth. Emigration and death, in addition to cultural adaptation, both consciously foisted and unplanned, worked their effects on the foreign-born community. As the "second generation" of the last great stream of immigration grew up in the 1920s, the once-acute sense that heterogeneity was a "problem" for American democracy began to fade. Evidences of ethnic and cultural discontinuities, to be sure, were still numerous; but a sense of gradual assimilation had begun to overwhelm more conflictual imagery.

The twenties began with a sharp depression, as overoptimistic entrepreneurs failed to anticipate the degree of retardation

the changeover to a peacetime economy would entail, and precipitated a sharp depression. By 1922, however, the economy had largely recovered and in short order had absorbed the substantial enlargement in production capacity that war mobilization had produced. With productive capacity so near to ability to consume (given current organization of demand and wants), the precise recognition and imaginative reformation of demand and those financial and informational services that sub-served the closer coordination of activity, became crucial economic skills. Among the rewards for economic growth for many, then, was the accession to white-collar jobs that offered shorter hours, cleaner conditions, and prestige.^[2]

When Robert Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd traveled to "Middletown" (Muncie, Indiana) in 1923 to discover how the twentieth century had changed the now-booming American industrial heartland, changes in women's lives seemed to the Lynds to lie at the center of what felt new and different. Wives were more able than before to support themselves and better informed about sex and contraception; but the bread winner/ homemaker dichotomy had remained firm. Despite the absence of any sign of change in the ideologies in which this distinction was embedded, behavior had changed in response to the pervasive seeking after material well-being for oneself and one's family and the increasingly favorable evaluation of such motives. As new wants—for an automobile, for a tract house, for commercialized leisure—came to motivate family getting and spending, the coordination of daily life in the family changed, as did the family bonds that subtly drew on these patterns.^[3]

Even economically comfortable families seemed to the Lynds less able than before to derive unquestioned satisfaction from "the plans for today and tomorrow, the pleasures of this half-hour."^[4] The heroic economic performance of goods in the household appliance, health, cleanliness, beauty, recreation, and entertainment categories during the 1920s points out dramatically the newness of the consumer preference schedule that was emerging. Otis Pease plausibly finds a new cultural theme in the "conspicuous preoccupation with leisure and the

enjoyment of consumption. . . . Leisure to consume and to enjoy material goods was an effective guarantee of happiness. . . . [Advertising copywriters] looked on themselves, in effect, as crusaders for the liberation of a middle-class people from the tyranny of Puritanism, parsimoniousness, and material asceticism."^[5] The expansion of national, branded products presenting their case in national periodicals led to advertising campaigns of great skill and impact. The world of objects and possessions burned brightly in many of these 1920s publications, with new graphic techniques complementing a profound shift in advertising philosophy—toward evoking a favorable aura that might be associated with the product.^[6] A new standard of living was being defined, whether one thinks of advertising as manipulative or as merely educating the values inherent in the new goods being distributed. "Consumer durables" came to occupy a far larger corner of the daily routine, setting a kind of standard of interest and excitement in acquisition. "There is probably today a greater variation from house to house in the actual inventory list of family possessions and of activities by family members than at any previous era in man's history. The consumer's problem is one of selection to a degree never before known."^[7]

By the 1920s, Americans lived with an internal monologue about the short-run satisfaction of wishes. To be sure, there were voices that upheld self-denial for its own sake, but to young people, these voices increasingly sounded anachronistic.^[8] The psychology of advertising at this time recognized just this and identified the sexual as prominent among these wishes. "Advertisers should realize that appeals to the physical aspect of the sex instinct will get attention without question but will lead only to such action as is in accord with man's selfish wants. It is only when the psychological aspect is aroused that man wants to do something for his wife, sweetheart, mother or sister."^[9] Among the goods merchandised so successfully by the new methods were clothing, accessories, and toilet goods, all depending on links to sexual expressiveness. American young men and women had, of course, long prepared themselves for one another's eyes, but the new emphasis on "aura" had a

profound effect on many who beheld them, proposing legitimacy and propriety for an open and unashamed focus on self-presentation.

Contemporaries were momentarily exercised over a rapid expansion of consumer debt. So startling was this development that two-thirds of a sample of Oregon credit buyers raised moralistic objections to such borrowing against the future.^[10] Within the decade, consumer borrowing had become pervasive and was understood as a normal, neutral way of increasing purchasing power.^[11]

For many youth of the middle and more prosperous working classes, the material prosperity of the period meant they grew up with access to a family car, the enlarged range of casual social intercourse offered by the telephone, and the beginning of a "by rights" claim to discretionary spending within the family budget.^[12] A parents' group secretary's report reflects nicely both the dimensions engendered in the older generation, and their resolution of the matter.

In the young days of many of us, clothes meant quality, but that's not so now-a-days—at least the main thing is style, and continuous change in terms of color and style. Quality doesn't count for so much. Clothes are cheaper too. But with our early induced feeling for quality we can't understand this constant buying of cheaper clothes, and think it wasteful. . . . We need to reorganize our thinking. Why not more dresses as an expression of the individual?^[13]

Childbearing and even child rearing were postponed by some women who now could work gainfully, achieving a range of material comfort so that family life could embody the new sense of domesticity. As before, "child-bearing is . . . to Middletown a moral obligation. Indeed, in this urban life of alluring alternative choices, . . . there is perhaps a more self-conscious weighting of the question with moral emphasis." When Middle-towners reduced their fertility, they only shifted their emphasis "somewhat from child-bearing to child-rearing." By this point in a marriage, "in general, a high degree of companionship [between marriage partners] is not regarded as essential for marriage," although hopes for a lifetime of "being in love" were seemingly on the rise.^[14] Divorce became more imaginable for

women, and this now began to be a consideration in their initial choice of marriage partners, and marriage timing. "Apparently this growing flexibility in attitude toward the marriage institution reacts back upon itself; one factor in the increasing frequency of divorce is probably the growing habituation to it."^[15] It was not so much that marriages were less successful than before as that people were prepared—and women, with more gainful employment open to them, more able—to sever ties that had not proven satisfying. When the Lynds revisited Middletown in 1935, they noted "a growing belief" among youth "that marriage need not be final since divorce is no longer a serious disgrace."^[16]

In Middletown, marriage age continued to move downward, but not because unions had become more impetuous. Rather, young people responded to the ability to postpone fertility, the availability of remunerative work for wives, and the replacement of communitywide socializing by an increasingly privatized life.^[17] Weddings in Middletown were now often only a "brief ceremonial exchange of verbal pledges," but bride and groom were by convention and generally in fact linked by being "in love."^[18] In a sense, their courtship was now the better suited to exactly that value. "Sexually, their awareness of their maturity is augmented by the maturity of their social rituals," which still went on with subtle parental guidance. The Lynds' account suggests that a rather callous approach to the opposite sex was gradually being replaced by a deeper way of knowing, accomplished perhaps under the influence of the "personal intimacy" now permissible.^[19]

The 1910s and early 1920s were characterized by a "dance craze," which contributed to a new definition of appropriate heterosexual relationships among young people. Before the 1910s, open-admission dances had most characteristically been held by ethnic, neighborhood, and other established social organizations, largely catering to their own members, who, knowing one another, restrained one another's tendencies to overstep moral rules. But in 1911, a dance "palace" was opened in New York City, an arrangement that spread rapidly, especially in the early 1920s.^[20]

The dance halls dazzled and featured lively jazz, the sur-

roundings and the music (sometimes aided by liquor) encouraged the easy and spontaneous contact between unacquainted or slightly acquainted members of the opposite sex. The music was sensual, offering a rhythm in which two bodies moved smoothly to that music, together.

Into these halls come many types seeking many ends. There are those fascinated by the promise of a thrill, college boys whose purpose is to "sow wild oats," high school girls and boys in search of sophistication, the repressed and inhibited in conventional grundies, and frustrated women who seek Bohemianism. The majority, however, are not cases requiring social therapy. They find here a means of social contact. Here they may mingle freely with others in an emotionally charged atmosphere.^[21]

The new dances of the era (sometimes called "tough dancing") were less formalized in the steps they demanded of participants, correspondingly offering room for expressiveness of body movement, in keeping with the jazz-derived rhythms that underlay them. "The dances fostered an unheard-of casualness between partners, permitted greater options in holds and distances, and symbolized the high value placed on mutual heterosexual intimacy and attraction." Working-class boys and girls ordinarily came separately to the dance hall, seeking out partners during the evening. But middle-class youth drawn into this world typically arrived at the dance palace in boy-girl couples, their dance-floor intimacy part of a longer-term "career" as a couple.^[22]

Identifying the openness of sensual expression as the common element, an authority on adolescence explained the rapid spreading of petting among young people by the overt public acceptance of the new dances. "Some of the modern dances and petting are parallel forms of excitement and experience in sexual affairs."^[23] Despite the obvious risks, high schools were quick to institute dances, in an effort of varying success to take the play away from commercial dance halls and roadhouses.^[24] The meaning of dancing was, in the main, recreation and structured sociability, but inherently suggestive and potentially explosive. Boys, as a group, found it in their interest to press dancing in a sexual direction, which suited girls' purposes in-

sofar as the dancing also served as a declaration of generational freedom; but for them, the sexualization of dancing also inched the terms of the boy-girl negotiation that much closer to "going too far," at which point they had more to lose.

The morally innovative meaning of the movies was also apparent to adolescents.

It is important to consider that the movies do not come merely as a film that is thrown on a screen; their witnessing is an experience which is undergone in a very complex setting. There is the darkened theater . . . ; there is the music which is capable not merely of being suggestive and in some degree interpretive of the film but is also designed to raise the pitch of excitement, to facilitate shock and to heighten the emotional effect of the picture; there are the furnishings—sometimes gaudy and gorgeous, which help to tone the experience.^[25]

Between 1921 and 1930, average weekly attendance at motion pictures increased rapidly. A weekly movie habit, or more, was typical of unmarried youth, who characteristically attended with age-peers, except among those exceptional boys and girls whose "moral habits" were considered especially "high" by adult standards.^[26] Even in rural areas—at least those that were neither geographically isolated nor poverty-stricken—teenage patterns of recreation were no less transformed by this form of commercial entertainment.^[27] Films were very special events for their new fans in the 1920s, if hardly rare ones, and in their content no less than in the emotional "tone" their purveyance suggested a larger world of possibility to their viewers.

A movie is judged by the thrill it produces. . . . The scenes which make the greatest appeal to the boys are usually those which satisfy some desire which is in them. The scenes which appeal most to the girls are those which correspond but apparently do not satisfy some desire they have. The boys seem to be content with the things as they see them on the screen while the girls only long for the things that they see there.^[28]

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, by easy stages, and then the morally ambivalent dramas of Cecil B. DeMille led Americans to accept the body as a legitimate locus of pleasure and

gratification as a worthwhile and even necessary aspect of marriage, replacing the compartmentalization of sex implied by the risqué short films characteristic of the previous era of the American industry.^[29]

One student of contemporary motion pictures counted five and one-half love scenes per film. In love films in which the circumstances surrounding love could be determined, just under half the occasions of initial love were love at first sight and more than half the remaining occasions were at second or third sight. The formal needs of movie dramaturgy explained much of this, but there was a strong cumulative impact on young people's sense of the timing and sequencing of the emotional structure of the life course. Among the "goals of the leading characters," of 115 motion pictures studied, "winning another's love" was a clear goal in 70 percent. "Marriage for love" was present in 36 percent of the movies, "illicit love" in 19 percent. These three motives alone accounted for 45 percent of all goals detectable.^[30] For the more impressionable young viewers, the films provided explicit content for sex fantasies and instruction in lovemaking techniques.^[31]True Confessions , in working out its formula for morally subversive moralizing, moved from literally true confessions through a slick presentation of movie stars' glamorous, too-worldly lives, to a mixture of mythic confession and movie-star revelation.

If sexuality was purveyed commercially to youth in the 1920s in deliciously small doses, so also in what was deemed to be denatured form it was increasingly supplied gratis , by adult authorities. Right education about sexuality was an occasion for progressive educators to address children on a subject not perhaps of their own choice but under the circumstances, compelling.^[32] The sex-education movement, in fact, had grown from the successful suppression of officially—or unofficially—tolerated segregated urban vice districts during World War I. Ironically, the movement thus triumphant had ramified considerably beyond the suppression of prostitution, shattering in the process "the conspiracy of silence" about sexuality that had coexisted with tolerated but circumscribed vice.^[33] To banish vice, vice must be discussed, and thereby sexuality must be discussed, as a question of policy. The young conscripts of World

War I received a broadened range of official information regarding venereal diseases. Volunteer social hygienists told them yet more, placing their sexual drives into a larger context that moralized them but stopped short of the repressive levels of the prewar period. As tolerated prostitution was vanquished, the "social purity" movement expanded its concerns to include venereal disease, and thereby, sex education. At this point, a longlasting alliance was struck up with those promoting the notion of eugenic contraception, who sought to diffuse the motive and means of family limitation among the immigrant and working-class population.

By the 1920s, sex educationists were increasingly eager to free their subject from a narrow focus on the biological aspects of sexuality and to incorporate larger psychological and guidance components.^[34] Sexuality and the study of sexuality became a national fascination, as science and scandal.^[35] In the early 1920s, a large sample of junior high students was asked their opinion of taking a "course dealing with marriage, home and parenthood." At this time, only 46 percent of the girls and 41 percent of the boys who offered an opinion supported the courses—and a majority of the boys and one in three girls ventured no opinion at all. But by the mid-1930s, seven in ten Maryland 16-year-olds believed that the schools should incorporate sex education, one-quarter of these feeling that elementary school was the appropriate level. (Girls were slightly more in favor of sex education, especially early, than boys.) The only remaining pockets of opposition were among those youth who had dropped out of school at an early age.^[36] One would not call the viewpoint of this movement "modern" today, certainly not in the sense of an explicit embracing of sexuality as a good. But as a public movement, as a group of respectable propagandists with scientific and religious authority to speak publicly on issues that for some time had been hushed, it certainly was a "modernizing" movement.^[37]

Before the end of the 1920s, it had become conventional wisdom in substantial segments of the population that adult sexual expression was not merely permissible, but "a duty toward one's 'mental health' or 'whole personality,' " one that had a "pivotal place . . . in marriage."^[38] Thus, the U.S. Children's Bureau cau-

tioned parents that in responding to their developing children's questions about sex, "no attempt should be made to bolster up good, sound advice with statements of dangers which, in the first place, may not exist and, in the second place, serve no other purpose than the creation of unreasonable fears at the time and may well become handicaps to him later in life."^[39] By 1941, the American Association of School Administrators would seek to assume a moral entrepreneurship in the realm of the now thoroughly acceptable field by urging "that the school offer leadership to the entire community, and especially to parents, on problems of marriage and parenthood."^[40] A systematic study of the results of a "personal improvement" curriculum offered within Home Economics in a Pittsburgh high school in the mid-1930s provides evidence that the curriculum was effective in promoting girls' "social skills," adding to the like impact of simply growing older. At the same time, the special curriculum contributed most to the social skills of daughters of middle-class parents. Further, self-perception of social competence proved to be largely independent of social skills, while exposure to the special curriculum seems to have increased working-class girls' self-consciousness at their own social failings even as their objective social skills increased.^[41]

The High School and the Transition to Adulthood

In a setting of increasing disposable wealth, decreasing population heterogeneity, and an enlarged emphasis on the individual's ability to choose his or her own way of life, the idea of universal high school "took" as a broad-gauge instrument of socialization. The schooling explosion of the 1920s was characterized by a greater extension of schooling among most of those groups previously least exposed to schooling (and especially in urban places where high schooling was already relatively prudent): an educated population was presented as no less a public good than a private one.^[42] To be sure, even at the end of the 1920s, native whites of native parentage received more schooling than nonwhites and than the foreign-born and their children, but the differences had narrowed significantly. Table 7

suggests the pace and location of high school attendance by contrasting the schooling of the birth cohorts who were of high school age in the late 1910s and the late 1920s, subdivided by race, sex, and the degree of urbanization of the state in which they lived. In the decade, high school experience (about twice as common as high school graduation ) became modal for whites in all categories, especially (and most rapidly) in the most urbanized states. And in the most urbanized states, too, high schools began to reach a majority of black youth. Starting considerably below females in both high school attendance and graduation, males caught up slightly during the decade, but only in the more urbanized states. In those places, as well, the rate for nonwhites grew the most rapidly, and converged the most rapidly on the rate for whites.

The enlargement of the high school experience proved to be of particular importance to young women, both because they found in the high school an especially consequential social setting and because they learned there employable skills that were to be useful immediately and were to draw them back into the

labor force in later decades. As Claudia Goldin's fine cohort analysis of women's work patterns shows,

although change in the labor force participation rates of married women did accelerate [only] after World War II, many of the preconditions for the expansion had been set decades before. . . . New social norms of the 1920s may have influenced the decisions of many young women to delay leaving the labor force until their first pregnancy, rather than with marriage. . . . This change may have . . . provided that critical break on which future change was founded.^[43]

Each year in the decade saw greater numbers of both boys and girls graduating from high school. Between 1922 and 1924 there were annual increases of no less than 2.5 percent in the proportion of all 17-year-olds graduating.^[44] The reduction of child labor in good part preceded the school increase, especially at the youngest ages—through 15—for both boys and girls. In Philadelphia, the proportion of white boys and girls out of school and in gainful employment at 15 declined from nearly half in 1915 to one in six in 1925, at which point it leveled off. The proportion of white boys and girls out of school without work, although far lower, dropped even more precipitously. Black boys and girls, far less likely to be gainfully employed but somewhat more likely to be at home without work, showed parallel trends. Both public schooling and Philadelphia's strong parochial school system eagerly took up those who moved out of the labor force. The school trend slowed considerably in Philadelphia in the second half of the decade, but pushed up again in the Depression, never to be reversed thereafter, except briefly during World War II. In 1932, only about 5 percent of Philadelphia's 15-year-olds were out of school.^[45] In Pittsburgh, the numbers of boys at work at age 14 declined by two-thirds between 1923 and 1929, while the numbers of boys still enrolled at school at 15 increased by half. Girls had previously been less given to work, more given to school. In the seven-year period, enrollment gained and work declined by 40 percent. The distribution of what jobs there were shifted sharply away from adultlike work in heavy industry toward service, clerking, and message carrying.^[46]

In 1910, half of all boys of 15 had been gainfully employed, nationally. By 1930, the proportion was down to one in six. Girls at work at 15 declined from one in four to one in twelve. These figures bespeak a change in the operation of the family economy so rapid that it must have been felt quite consciously. The age at which children would begin "paying back" their parents for the investments they had made in them was postponed over this period for two years or longer, the greater part of this change coming in the 1920s. Communities proudly established more and more high schools, formally training their adolescents for a new kind of work life and participating in a democratization of secondary education that brought in students of less-favored socioeconomic background as well as students of less promising scholastic aptitude.^[47] Only the fact that parents were having fewer children allowed them, and their communities, to support the new youthful life course that was elaborated at this time. These patterns coincided with, and were intensified by, the development of nearly purely residential suburban areas much given to high-quality schooling, where parents had clearly made a choice about the kind of youthful life courses their children were to have.^[48]

In the 1920s, age homogenization within grades was a self-conscious policy of many high school administrators, accomplished even as the schools expanded rapidly to include students from families that were close enough to the economic margin to require supplementary income from their children from time to time.^[49] Failure to promote increasingly was seen to encourage dropping out, and this was seen as unfortunate. A dramatic example of the progress of age homogenization is found in the school system of heavily working-class Duluth, Minnesota. Among sixteen-year-olds attending Duluth public schools in 1920–21, only 25 percent of the boys and 36 percent of the girls were to be found in a single grade; five years of policies promoting age homogenization brought these figures to 33 percent and 40 percent. By the mid-1930s, they had been brought up to 42 percent and 54 percent.^[50]

The 1930 census affords a full picture of children's passage out of school and into the work force at decade's end. Figure 6, presenting the story for males, shows that by that date, after

Figure 6
 Boys' Passage Out of School and into the Work Force, 1930

the innovations of the past decades, the movement from school into work began apace for boys only between 15 and 16. School and extended gainful work were rather rarely pursued simultaneously. Nor did many more boys at any age emerge from school without promptly completing the transition to the work force. The proportion of boys enrolled in school who were at the same time in the work force rose from about one in seven at age 16 to nearly two in five at age 20, but the proportionate rise was more the product of leaving school than of finding jobs. Even at 16, fewer than one in three boys who had left school were not yet at work, a proportion that had dropped to about one in twelve by age 20. By 20 (by which age fewer than

one in eight young men were married), eight in ten had entered into adult labor force status.

Figure 7 presents like data for girls and young women. The dominant trend here, as with boys, is that as they get older, there is a movement away from exclusive attention to schooling. The level of enrollment at each age, and the inflection points, in fact, are very similar to boys' levels. Boys, however, quite clearly had a single complementary activity: work. When boys moved from school, they ordinarily tried to move directly into work, but the "idle" proportion among girls was considerably greater and increased with age. The proportion of girls neither in school nor at work, in fact, was at each age almost identical

Figure 7.
Girls' Passage Out of School and into the Work Force, 1930

with that of girls at work. As it happens, the census data includes marital status for girls (but not for boys), which allows us to examine the extent to which the "idle" girls were generally married or, alternatively, helping around the parental home. The data indicate that only by age 19 were more than half the "idle" girls married. At age 17, by contrast, only three in ten girls who were neither at school nor at work were married. At this age, the "idle" constituted nearly one in four girls.

Dropping out of school, then, was itself in a sense normative for girls, rather than being immediately propelled by an immediate transition to wife or worker. Although the 1920s saw a very significant intertwining of courtship with schooling, it is equally clear that a subsequent—and far more elusive—phase of the female life course typically supervened before marriage. At the same time, the graph reminds us that gainful employment was quite common but far from universal for late-adolescent girls. For this reason, therefore, we may understand why girls less than half as frequently as boys both worked and attended school. Among the concomitants of recent economic developments was a noteworthy rise in women working at sales and clerical jobs.^[51] At this date, however, married women worked, essentially, under necessity: with no pressing family need for income, being a homemaker was commonly prescribed. Yet the concept of necessity was being broadened.^[52] The decade saw more, and more prominent, exceptions to that rule, and they seem to have conveyed to contemporaries a sense of a norm that was changing.^[53]

We can detect emergent in the decade a new sense of life course organization closely connected to extended education, a sequence of events deliberately geared toward material accumulation and personal gratification, in which middle-class women's work was seen as far more compatible with marriage than formerly. The new pattern can be seen to advantage in the data collected in 1941 from native white Protestant couples in Indianapolis who had married in the years 1927 to 1929. These data reveal a close, but by no means perfect, connection among the young people's socioeconomic background, their own educational attainment, and their labor force experience. Socioeconomic background and educational attainment helped deter-

mine a cluster of subsequent behaviors, including the age at which women married, the frequency with which they had worked before marriage and after marriage, and as we shall see later, the timing (and means of managing the timing) of their transition to parenthood. Thus, among women who graduated from high school, only 14 percent had married at 18 or younger, a figure contrasting strongly with the 53 percent of the girls who did not finish high school who had married by 18. Among women who did not complete high school, although they married younger, 21 percent never worked before marriage, a figure exceeding the 15 percent among those who did complete high school. After marriage, however, these patterns were to reverse: 52 percent of women who had not graduated from high school but 58 percent of the graduates worked shortly after the marriage.

School and marriage were incompatible statuses for women during this period, and work and marriage, if decreasingly so, were substantially incompatible as well. There is really no secure way of estimating the separate "contribution" to young women's marriage of leaving school, entering work, and simply growing older. Table 8 shows the proportions of young women in 1930 who were married, for each single year of age, according to school and work status. It is apparent that age had a large direct effect on marriage-proneness, apart from its indirect effect through discouraging school enrollment and, conversely, encouraging gainful employment. Even among those in school, as among those out of school both in and out of work, proportions married increased with each single year of age. The whole sequence is best described as an occasionally varying sequence of transitions, school leaving coming first and proportions attending school falling dramatically between the ages of 15 and 18. Leaving school can be said to have precipitated some openness to marriage, but not overmuch, with a greater effect on promoting gainful employment. After age 17, the proportions of young women out of school who were gainfully employed leveled off at a shade under half, but this was to a growing extent a product of the competition between work and marriage: of those who were out of school and unmarried , the proportion at work increased year by year, reaching a majority

by age 17 and two in three by age 19. The increasing proportions married of the entire group—38 percent by age 20—was drawn substantially from those who had completed the entire series of transitions, or who promptly left school or work when they married.

The exfoliating high school was already a hotbed of anxieties and longings when the automobile, World War I, and a new definition of adolescence banished the chaperone and direct parental oversight of courtship. "Who has not observed the various ways in which the high school girl, while not admitting her motive even to her self, endeavors to draw the regard of her male companions?" asked psychologist Phyllis Blanchard in 1920. The high school, Blanchard observed, was a haven of "incessant giggling" produced by girls' "new consciousness of sexual differences" and the rigors of new "social situations for which she as yet feels herself lacking in poise. . . . With the dawn of adolescence comes a new self-consciousness as the awakening sexual and social instincts induce comparison with others and emphasize personal deficiencies hitherto discarded."^[54] The old term "calf-love" no longer seemed to describe behavior

adequately and now seemed too dismissive. "If a child is the product either of a modern home or of a coeducational school of today, his adolescent fixations, if any, are likely to be directed heterosexually to a person of approximately his own age," wrote a researcher in 1934, contrasting his findings to those made in the first decades of the century. Child study experts observing adolescents in these settings discovered that girls now directed their early amorousness toward far more plausible love-objects, and shortly developed a vocabulary with which to engage them.^[55]

The Dating System

"The outside world of today has no use for flimsy worshipers of petty idols such as 'popularity,' " thundered a Minneapolis Central High editorialist in 1923, but popularity was the universally understood term for what the great majority of high schoolers sought to a greater or lesser degree. Popularity and cliquishness were closely related and tied closely to dating: both were parts of a new system of social relations governed informally but firmly by young people themselves . Well before the adult world took much notice, most boys and girls from their mid-teens on came to organize their social lives around an institution not of their elders' making.^[56] This was so even before they evolved the dating system. As early as the turn of the century, in places where high schooling was common enough that it enrolled a socially heterogeneous student body, it was there that students "transferred emotional ties from the family to the peer group. Students felt compelled to present themselves to win approval from their classmates," in activities in which they "carved out personalities derived from the role models of their parents and teachers, but infused with unique youthful styles to win popularity or prestige."^[57] Not all youth saw dating in the same light, to be sure, even in the high schools. Material wherewithal made a difference; so also did cultural heritage. And asymmetries of gender roles were the armature around which the dating system would evolve.

A fine historical account of the emergence of the dating system first suggested by Paula Fass and recently elaborated by

Beth L. Bailey^[58] understands dating as one among many of the achievements of a self-conscious generation, acting in part over and against its predecessors:

It was not caprice . . . that made them question traditional proprieties in sexual morality and in such areas as smoking, drinking, and dancing. These the young defined as the private sector, as a sphere for personal expression to be governed by need and taste rather than by laws and morals. . . . The young knew that their patterns and attitudes provided a margin of difference between them and their elders, and gave them a vehicle for group cohesion.^[59]

Fass and Bailey demonstrate that the symbols of generational revolt were preeminently borne by women and that they took the form of the narrowing of the differences in the behaviors of the two genders: language, clothing, smoking, hair style, and social intercourse between the sexes, the latter constituting a modest challenge to the double standard of sexual propriety. If "freedom" or autonomy seemed to contemporaries to be at stake, in retrospect, youth—and young women in particular—seem to have proposed no fundamental changes in the moral order, only the lifting of limitations, based on age and gender, on their own right to choose among conventional options. They challenged received definitions of authority, not morality, positioning themselves to take advantage of the alluring but hardly revolutionary range of new consumer choice created by an expanding economy. As Bailey astutely notes, "sex became the central public symbol of youth culture, a fundamental part of the definition that separated youth from age."^[60] If sex was now "as frankly discussed as automobiles or the advantage of cold storage over moth balls, why should our elders consider our interest in this subject a sign of unnaturalness or perversion? Should it not constitute the chief concern of those in whose hands the future generation lies?"^[61]

Young people, however, did attend to what their elders said in condemnation and alarm, and they formed their own responses partly in opposition to them with sex no less symbolic to them as to their parents. "In forging the new conventions and living with them, the meaning of youth's sexual experience was transformed."^[62] If young people in rejecting received court-

ship procedures also rejected traditional romanticism, they by no means rejected marriage or marriage based on love. The new dating system, as they understood it, was an institutional framework that subserved exactly this end.

While the Fass-Bailey description of the dating scene is persuasive, its focus on collegians slights evidence that the dating system evolved simultaneously among high school students. This part of the system affected more people and coincided with the phase of heterosexual awakening in participants' lives. Both the age homogenization of the high schools and their expansion promoted the evolution of a dating system, since dating depended on freely entered short-term agreements between near equals, differentiated mainly by gender and overseen by the opinion of mutually valued, interrelated sets of age peers. Age, with its correlated experience, earning capacity, was the kind of differentiator that could render too unequal the negotiation of dating's core. (In parallel with cultural expectations governing marriage, girls could date somewhat older boys.) Age homogenization limited exploitation and permitted the girls to move somewhat beyond the constrictive safety provided by adherence to the double standard.

The defining characteristic of the new dating system and, what is more critical here, of the graduated series of dates that might lead to a more lasting commitment between young men and women was that a date was away from home, proposed and paid for by the boy, unchaperoned, and not subject to detailed parental veto; it depended on the free election of the participants. "An invitation to go out on a date," as Bailey maintains, "was an invitation into man's world—not simply because dating took place in the public sphere (commonly defined as belonging to men), though that was part of it, but because dating moved courtship into the world of the economy," where the boy's money paid for the date.^[63] Certainly, some American boys and girls of the middle classes had coupled in every imaginable way without parental awareness before dating was practiced, but encounters of this sort lacked the continuity and regularity that the full evolution of the dating system after World War I would permit. (Bailey offers some evidence of "dating"—for instance, the use of the word—among select groups as early

as the mid-1910s.)^[64] Under the older system, there was no normatively sanctioned way for an adolescent to get "serious" about someone of the opposite sex without submitting the relationship for parental approval. Chaperonage asserted parents' oversight of what boys and girls might do together, and the home visit assured girls' parents of some control over whom their daughters might be seeing. Both were important, and both vanished with dating, which substituted peer oversight. Not the occurrence of emotional or physical intimacy but the question of whose advice guided young people in developing heterosexual ties was the critical difference between dating and the practice of "calling" and "keeping company" that it was rapidly supplanting in the 1920s.

Parents with cars or the wherewithal to get them indeed found them near the core of their conflicts with their children, as indicated in Middletown , where the automobile was the most visible sign of change. The Lynds note that "social fitness" and possession of an auto were closely linked in the minds of local high schoolers, explaining their exigency when addressing their parents on the subject. When, in the next paragraph, the Lynds explored changes in youth standards of sexual behavior, automobiles, along with movies, were cited as causes, or near-causes.^[65] In this matter, conventional accounts have taken the Lynds too literally, affected perhaps by the fascination automobiles have long held for boys in "wild" phases, sexual and otherwise.^[66] The far more mundane telephone would seem to have been a more crucial piece of dating technology, and the motion picture and the motion picture theater even more so.

Cars certainly were important to boys and girls who dated, and permitted much explicitly sexual behavior to transpire, but it is doubtful if the automobile importantly promoted the change that dating (or petting) constituted. For one thing, there simply were not enough cars to go around. Even in San Jose, California, at the end of the decade, nearly one in three high school junior boys never drove, and nearly as many again had the family car only "seldom."^[67] The car was in fact only the most conspicuous of the heightened consumption patterns that were associated with dating. Cars were no more literally prescribed than was any other unique item or gesture. It was in

large cities, where cars remained notably fewer than in the countryside and small towns, that dating evolved; there, the streetcar sufficed as a means of moving about on dates. Transportation was less important than the availability of somewhere to go to that the girl was willing to go to, and able to convince her parents to let her go to, a legitimate but individualized activity. Thus, a sociologist's inquiry into cultural change in the 1920s that compared rural with county-seat life observed that it was in the rural areas—where dating was not yet practiced—that parents saw the automobile as a threat to their authority.^[68]

The elaboration of dating as a system began in the first quarter of this century and spread apace during the 1920s and 1930s from its initially urban and middle-class center. A large study of schoolchildren in Kansas City, Kansas, and nearby communities in 1923–1926 found that among boys of 13, "having dates" (as the questionnaire collected from the subjects put it) was the tenth most favored activity (football was tops) and advanced to the fifth most favored by age 17. Girls at 13 (who liked reading best) were even more fond of dating, and retained their lead over boys in this regard, with dating the fourth leading activity at age 17. In a San Jose, California, high school, two-thirds of the sophomore boys and three-fourths of senior boys were dating in 1930. Data collected in 1933 from a large sample of high school girls (oversampled among Catholic schools) found that half of the freshmen and 84 percent of the seniors had begun dating. Blumenthal's 1932 ethnography of isolated "Mineville" found the dating system in operation.^[69]

A careful study of upstate New York rural girls in 1933 revealed that the institution had begun to make its way into the countryside. Only 33 percent of the girls aged 15 to 17 had never yet dated, and an additional 49 percent did not yet date "consistently." At ages 18 to 20, a somewhat greater proportion, 58 percent, were not yet consistent daters, suggesting that dates had arrived there quite recently. For each younger cohort of girls interviewed, dating had begun younger, as the institution diffused. These girls, when they dated, went to movies, dances, and parties and motor rides, just as did urban youth.^[70] But in less prosperous rural locations, social life devoted exclusively

to youth was exceptionally truncated. In the countryside, parents' capacity to exercise close supervision was often too great; many farm youth were even said to seek the city partly on this account.^[71]

Urban working-class youth seem to have had quite sufficient distance from parental oversight to erect a dating system, but other matters at first militated against it. The sociological accounts of Donovan on waitresses, Thrasher on the boy gang, and Thomas on girl delinquents discuss non-middle-class milieus of the 1920s which lacked both material wherewithal and peer groups with wide enough consensus to oversee dating. Here, dating in the sense we are discussing clearly did not organize heterosexual contact.^[72] Nor did it in factories and shops with mixed work forces, sexualized as byplay became there, precisely because females were at such a disadvantage in the work world that they ordinarily shied away from the kind of exploratory gestures characteristic of dating.^[73] Whyte's Boston observations in the mid-1930s pointed out the continued existence of ethnic working-class settings in which highly asymmetrical assumptions about gender roles rendered dating inappropriate.^[74] Working-class children at first could not control the time, place, or tempo of boy-girl contacts. They also lacked both the wherewithal for the "good time" dating asked of the boy and the effective, school-based, same-age peer group that oversaw behavior within the dating system.^[75]

Information on black youth is rare, but a suggestive account can be put together which argues that lower-class urban blacks, at any rate, had not by the early 1930s elaborated a dating system on the order of that developed by whites. In Kansas City, Kansas, in 1926, although black children did date a bit in their teens, boys and girls both omitted dating from their list of favorite activities.^[76] Instead, black boys and girls socialized commonly in large mixed-age settings of various sorts, some of which did but others of which did not offer the kinds of protections against boys' sexually threatening behavior that were provided by the elaborated dating system, as among whites.^[77] Such protections were both lacking and—for a subset of girls who were striving for "respectability"—necessary because talk of sexual matters—and not just as fantasy—was prevalent among

both black boys and girls. A proper seventeen-year-old Washington girl of lower-class background told an investigator:

We girls often discuss boys and having relations with them. All my girls friends think about the same as I do. They don't want to have any now. I know it's natural, and I don't object if people want to do it. But, you see, my mother trusts me and lets me go with boys because she thinks I won't go wrong.^[78]

Among urban black youth, relative license in sexual matters for boys, and a sharp discomfort caused by such license on the part of a self-consciously "respectable" grouping of the girls, fit with a marriage schedule that was appreciably earlier than for whites. The highly restrained attitude toward sexuality within dating that later marriage permitted seemed out of place to blacks who would shortly begin marrying, even without pregnancy. An eighteen-year-old boy in Cincinnati offered to a social investigator a plaint that, with moving naiveté, incorporated prompt marriage.

She has subthing of mine. I ask her to let me walk home with her but she said no. I have not got the nevers to ask her do she love me. I am going to stop school and get a job and I am going to ask her to marry me. she look like the morning star. she look like a sweet rose in a valley. I love her so my heart ach. it dance around. no Jive.^[79]

In more realistic contact with the severe family economic circumstances that promoted early marriage was a fifteen-year-old girl.

My father has no regular job and I have some more little sisters and a brother. Friends have told me I ought to marry. But I want to go through high school. I haves a good home and very kind sweet loving parents. There is a boy who loves me and ask me to marry. But I refuse.^[80]

Among middle-class whites, the fully evolved date itself had a compelling logic quite distinct from that of prior forms of courtship: it was a step in an ongoing negotiation, with rules defined and deviations punished by age peers. The logic of the

date anchored it in modest pleasures and centered the choices it occasioned in the daters themselves (within limits imposed by the peer culture). The home visit or chaperoned dance, in essence, had been either purely sociable—part of a group occasion—or explicitly related to courtship. The date might turn out to be either of these, or both, or, most commonly, something else again, but what it turned out to be depended on how well the negotiation at its core went, a negotiation regarding short-term gratification. By definition, boys planned and paid for "a good time" and asked of their girls a bit of physical intimacy. How a boy pled his case, how his date responded, and the future of the pair as a couple depended not only on the boy's sense of his investment and the girl's scale of values but also on the public commitment each was willing to make to the other and their capacity for emotional intimacy, which "modern" girls (like their nineteenth-century predecessors) wanted badly, and often missed, in their consorts.^[81]

A charming 1929 story in The Ladies' Home Journal celebrated the diffusion of the date and its code by a nice reversal. When a rich and attractive, but somewhat behindhand, girl coolly plans to hone her date-related skills on the young handyman at her summer place—the better to succeed with her chosen suitor—her conventionalized behaviors work too well: her wiles capture both the handyman and her designated boyfriend. But the handyman captures her—and turns out to be working his way through college, and thus acceptable and, at the story's conclusion, accepted.^[82]

The developing internal logic of the date can be discerned in the statements of those whose dating experiences seemed to them imperfect enough that they wrote to newspaper advice columnists.^[83] In the broad shifts in vocabulary, usage, and assumption contained in these published letters can be seen the progressive definition of the institution of dating as it spread. Internal evidence points to regular editing (even apart from selectivity) by the columnists, and scuttlebutt suggests some fabrication; newspaper readerships were narrower than the full range of the population, and only readers possessing both a sense of moderate anguish and a yen for disclosure would even consider writing. However, if the letters had not smacked of

verisimilitude, the advice proffered would have read as a parody of itself; and to judge from the generally sober (while distinctly adolescent) tone of the great majority of the letters examined that dealt with problems in the early stages of boy-girl relationships, adolescent readers were in fact reached. That parodies appeared frequently in the high school newspapers attests to the intense, if ambivalent, interest of young readers.

Urban youth were not yet entirely familiar with dating in 1920: even the simplest rules of the dating system might not be well understood. Doris Blake's early correspondents often asked about when boys might be and should be invited to girls' homes, reflecting the transition from the older tradition. But it was the goodnight kiss that provided the most common perplexity at this early date. W. A. wrote to Blake, "I am a girl seventeen years of age. I have been going with a young man three years my senior, whom I love and admire very much. . . . Is 11 o'clock too late to arrive home from a show or some other place? Is it all right to allow him to kiss me good night, even though we are not engaged?" Within a few years, kissing would imply to all only the most evanescent commitment.^[84]

The growing recognition that dates should incorporate an ambiguous mixture of physical pleasure and self-restraint did not by itself remove all the perplexities of daters. They had still to learn how to "read" the dating situation. R. S., for instance, could not quite fathom the implications of the behavior of the young man "that I care for." "He has declared his love for me also. But he goes to visit other girls and takes them to places and has never yet taken me anywhere. He's forever praising those girls. All this makes me doubt that he really cares for me. Do you think he does?" R. S. simply did not know whether "caring for" is in any way articulated to the dating system, and while she obviously intuited that there was such a thing as a boy's "line," she lacked confidence in her ability to discern it in action. Only over time were symbol and gesture fitted into a changing code of dating that was a thoroughly known part of the developing culture of adolescence. "I am 16, good looking and a good sport. A is 17, bashful, and not very good looking. His friends say he likes me"; "I am a young boy of 16 and am in love with a girl 5 months my junior. So far I have not told

the girl anything but have confided in two of my boy friends. One of these boys went back and told her. As a result she was just a bit peeved."^[85]

Culture, as always, though supportive, could also be confining, as when the peer group's influence extended too far into the dating situation. "Heartbroken" was a girl of sixteen, dating a boy of seventeen in 1925: "I love this fellow very much and I know he loves me. When we are at a party or a dance he is always with me, and he always asks to take me home, and I let him. He is very nice, but when he is with a bunch of boys he just says hello and keeps right on going. I would like to know the reason for this (he is very bashful), because I love him." Or a jealousy composed of confused frustration might appear a product of divergent definitions of the two partners over the degree of articulation of the dating system with intimacy, on the one hand, and the peer popularity system, on the other: "My friend's chum is keeping him away from me because my sister doesn't care to go out with him."^[86]

The reader of adolescent lovelorn letters from this period can hardly fail to observe the generally shallow connotation of the word "love." The notion, of course, was by 1920 carried into teenage courtship parlance through the insipid romantic fiction of stage, screen, and print, so teenagers had good authority for feeling "love" easily and often. In the 1920 letters, the vocabulary is limited to a few variant usages of "love" and occasional references to "care for." By 1925, the range of expression had widened a bit, with a new verb or two enlarging the capacity for discrimination and a raft of new, conventionalized intensive adverbs. By 1930, even the brief letters to Blake indicate a concern for emotional precision. Connie wrote Blake that her fellow "never told me he even cared for me." "Doubtful" reported to Blake that her "fellow says he loves me. I like him as a friend." Blue Peggy, seventeen years old, wrote to Martha Carr that she felt left out because while "several of my girl friends have fellows and seem so in love," she herself "can't seem to get enthused" over her "several boy friends." In Blue Peggy's view, being "in love" was something one might be but at least should "seem" to be at seventeen, and such a seeming

might be approached through enthusiasm in dating, if only she could experience even that.^[87]

In the 1930–31 letters, "steady" relationships of one kind or another, including references to "going steady," virtually absent before, were quite common. Lacking such a defined stage, earlier daters like Tootsie had been confused:

I am a young girl of 17 and am really in love with a young man of 19. I have known him for over a year. We are not exactly engaged, but he has promised not to go with any other girls, nor I with any other boys. I am in a suburb now and am attending school. He goes to a university. I love this boy with all my heart. But some time it is such a temptation to go out with the boys.^[88]

A few years later, a metropolitan seventeen-year-old would have known that going steady was easy to begin or terminate and that it combined clear behavioral prescriptions with undefined emotional commitment and was in fact merely the boundary between casual dating and the steep and demanding road to marriage, rather than the first step on that road. Tootsie could have negotiated with her young man for gradually enhanced emotional intimacy without such risk of irrevocable sexual intimacy or premature marriage, which was possible in an overheated, unstable relationship of "not exactly" engagement.

The main architects of the dating system were middle-class girls.^[89] Girls had more to gain by the establishment of dating, because the new version of the double standard that it put in place was considerably less restrictive to them than the one it replaced. Before dating, parents had tended to construe strictly girls' obligation to enter marriage untainted by even a hint of scandal, and they supervised courting accordingly, limiting both its occasion and the set of eligibles. The boy who came calling had not only to be prepared to behave himself but he also had to pass prima facie muster as a boy who by reputation would behave himself. Under the double standard, however, boys' reputations were both subject to repair and of far less interest to their own families. Girls were far more constrained by parental oversight.

Despite their substantially united front toward their parents'

generation, boys and girls had by no means identical interests in the new dating scheme. The female physical-growth spurt came earlier and provided a convenient sign for what contemporaries believed (and thereby encouraged) to be girls' earlier awareness of the opposite sex as objects of interest. Contemporary accounts of adolescent behavior had boys entering the high school ages still in a "gang state," while girls had long before turned to "fancies . . . of men and boys, and of herself as the center of attraction and interest. . . . She becomes interested in dress and personal adornment . . . [and] ruin[s] her healthy skin with rouge and lipstick."^[90] Furthermore, girls more often than boys remained through high school to graduation. If there were more girls in high school potentially to be seeking dates, so also higher proportions of them, particularly among the freshmen and sophomores, presumably hoped to date. Accordingly, girls sought to limit competition by defining its terms, and they sought to enlarge the pool of eligible boys. There was, of course, the alternative possibility for a girl to be a collegian's or an employed boy's "townie," but such a choice took the date outside its familiar negotiating balance and outside the supportive structure of peer-group gossip.^[91] Gossip and the clique system operated to limit the terms of competition among girls, most particularly by regulating the amount of physical gratification with which they could reward their dates. Commonly, such gossip took the form of "catty" statements that anyone could get boys by giving a good deal of sex: doing so would only counterfeit popularity.

The date, as a bargain, was unromantic but affectionate. In dating, style mattered a great deal. Performance was far more important than the unmediated expression of feelings. The very ordinariness of dating placed practical limits on the amount of romantic idealization that courtship could now support.^[92] The success of the dating system encouraged a set of rules, rules of performance more than of feeling, rules that even young boys and girls could learn. Thus, Ernie, thirteen, stoutly denied in 1931 that "I want to call on girls and take them out" but admitted to having girlfriends and that in defiance of his parents' wishes he liked "to have friendly talks with girls over the telephone." "Every boy my age likes to have

money to spend and to dress up," Ernie lectured a love advisor in 1931.^[93]

The Gendered Reconstruction of Sexuality

Petting, that delicate standoff between sensual indulgence and constraint, was almost universal in the sense that all daters petted at some time but not in the sense that all couples petted. Graduated physical intimacy became an accepted part of lasting teen relationships, both a marker of affection and a spur to increased commitment. The sexual histories collected by Kinsey and his associates point to a distinct sexualization of noncoital relations far more pronounced than the often-remarked increase in premarital coitus also recorded. The Kinsey data here point to an increase between the pre-World War I and postwar adolescent cohorts—from 29 percent to 43 percent of girls who petted before sixteen and an increase from 41 percent of boys to 51 percent.^[94]

A decided reduction in the typical age at which petting began was coupled with a marked increase, especially in women, in orgasm achieved by petting. Unconventional sex practices, like fellatio and cunnilingus, likewise increased, as did premarital coitus, especially with eventual marriage partners. Overall, the increase of sexualization of the whole path to marriage is inescapable, although qualitatively the downward extension of erotic petting was the most pronounced and the most significant in restructuring the life course.^[95] One particularly acute observer of campus mores understood the enlargement of sensuality in the lives of students as an offset, engineered by girls, to the economically based reluctance to marry that young college men were expressing, and in this sense it was a reassertion of older values regarding marriage rather than an abrupt assertion of moral innovation. "Since petting leads to 'dates,' and dates lead to more dates and to real romance [i.e., marriage], one must pet or be left behind."^[96] It was not thoughts of future bliss that bound two people together but mutual gratification in the present. "The modern lover daydreams not merely of a lifelong companionship, but of a lifelong state of being in love."^[97]

In American middle-class ideology before the 1920s, the

deferral of sexual pleasure until marriage had provided the pledge that cemented love unions—the chastity of the bride and the definition by the groom of his prior sexual experiences, if any, as the unfortunate yielding to instinctive drives and the temptation of "bad" women of no account. Adherents of the older structure of values maintained that "in the general wreck" of prewar values, "the wreck of love is conspicuous and typical. . . . Sex, we learned, was not so awesome as once we had thought. God does not care so much about it as we had formerly been led to suppose; but neither, as a result, do we. Love is becoming gradually so accessible, so un-mysterious, and so free that its value is trivial."^[98] Edward Sapir defined this concern presciently: "Sex as self-realization unconsciously destroys its own object by making of it no more than a tool to a selfish end."^[99] But by the 1920s, modest sexual pleasure was little more than one of several commonplace "thrills" available to young people. "The adolescent convention of petting is used not as a preliminary to the sex act but as a pseudo-substitute for it, as a means of working off tense emotions."^[100] Dating, and even petting, fit appropriately into a view of adolescent development that favored "an emotional attitude of free, wholesome contact with members of the opposite sex" during the teen years, when not thwarted by "psychologically inept efforts [by adults] to create inhibitions in the young" as by the "over-idealization of womankind . . . as . . . almost too delicate to touch."^[101]

Many young women of the postwar generation asserted in word and gesture that they were sexual beings quite like men—and not ashamed of it . Paula Fass sees this insinuation in the most characteristic and explosive aspects of the "new woman's" appearance. Bobbed hair, flattened breasts, shortened skirts created "a well-poised tension between the informal boyish companion and the purposely erotic vamp. . . . Smoking implied a promiscuous equality between men and women and was an indicator that women could enjoy the same vulgar habits and ultimately also the same vices as men." Such signs could assert sexuality as long as they could play off against the double standard, focusing on the right to be openly sexual rather than the still-outrageous notion of actually behaving with "mascu-

line" lustfulness.^[102] Sociologist Joseph Folsom, from his vantage point at Vassar College, argued that a "woman may conscientiously allow herself to feel passion to the same extent as the man, if she controls its expression."^[103]

The double standard was not overthrown but modified. Rearguard actions, like the bills submitted in a number of state legislatures regulating the cut and material of women's dresses, so patently attacked symptoms alone that they invited ridicule that pressed the argument further than most defenders were ready to face. "Why should men be permitted to tell us how to dress? Why should women always have to protect their 'feelings'? Why are not men made to control their 'feelings' just as women are? Why should the fact that a girl has legs arouse the wrong kind of impulses in a man? Does he think we travel on wheels?"^[104]

When asked for a stark statement of personal preference, sizable majorities of sophisticated young men and women (2/3 of the men and 7/8 of the women in one 1920s college study, half of the men and 2/3 of the women in another) rejected the dual standard.^[105] Girls could now express themselves sexually. Indeed, as Folsom remarked, "a new method of adjustment [of gender relations] has begun, namely, the education of women to find greater pleasure in sex." The great majority of contemporary testimony, however, indicates that even while girls who seemed unawakened sexually were made the butt of humor, girls (not boys) who (even if in love) proceeded to coitus and spoke too widely of the fact were devalued. "Our newer mores permit us to experiment widely with human emotions, yet they do not permit us to observe freely the results of these experiments."^[106] Young men of the times were "for the most part disposed to try to face the problem of sexual urgencies before marriage, and of responsibility, like the problems, on a more nearly mutual basis. To some extent, nevertheless, they too are likely to hope and expect that the girl will prove more worthy than they feel they can hope to be."^[107]

In time, the "modern" perspective became mere common sense.

Not so very long ago make-up was associated with prostitutes and the kind of women who laid themselves out to attract men and

parents still associate the use of cosmetics with that class—and though latterly make-up is part of the general effect of the costume. . . . Leader thinks that's all there too it—The whole design counts—it's a matter of taste. . . . It's surely not necessary to consider the moral end of it. Fashions change. . . . But we are ruled by fashions. . . . It is better to conform to the prevailing style—as well as possible—take it out of the realm of right and wrong.^[108]

The advice subtly moved beyond appearances.

However difficult it may be for parents who are themselves neurotically afraid of sex to accept the healthy conditions of our unsegregated modern adolescence, we cannot oblige them to turn back the clock to the patriarchal era. Our world needs adults who have grown up emotionally and who can be enough in love with their mates to stay in love without economic and social pressures. Petting-parties . . . are for Phyllis a natural and wholesome part of growing up emotionally into womanhood.^[109]

These cultural assumptions underlay a dating system in which boys were by convention assumed to be always on the lookout for some petting, but girls were conventionally assumed to get far less physical pleasure on the whole from the act itself.^[110] Boys pursued; girls rewarded boys who were affectionate, restrained, and provided a pleasant time; girls rewarded boys moderately. When girls were fond of petting, they found that their peer group (aided by boy gossip) stood in the way of their being too easy. Even for girls in love, peer pressure set limits to lovemaking. Thus, a high school girl noted in 1929, "The girl who permits liberties is certainly popular with boys, but her popularity never lasts very long with any one boy. You know the saying, 'Just a toy to play with, not the kind they choose to grow old and grey with.' "^[111] Boys' behavior could be modified. "Even freshmen girls know . . . that a boy who considers himself a gentleman may have standards that vary according to those of the girl with whom he may be," wrote a high school dean of women.^[112] Dating, thus, operated still within a double standard of sexual conduct that demanded of girls the strength to say no and the strength of mind to prevent matters from coming to such a pass.

In dating, physical pleasure was defined as properly a token of affection and commitment. Through dating, girls considerably before marriage could discover patterns of emotional intimacy with boys congruent with those the female subculture had long valued, but without ultimate commitment, physical or marital.^[113] Nor need the task of finding a good mate be forgotten, for the dating system elaborated a series of stages that led toward engagement and beyond. The tender interpersonal qualities sought in a good date, while not identical to those of a good mate, were nevertheless among the desirable traits. For female readers slow to pick up the detailed, subtle relationship among sexuality, emotional intimacy, popularity, and eventual marriage, "A High School Boy" in True Confessions explicated the ideal girlfriend and acceptable variants. "The kind of girl that will kiss you and let you know that the kiss means something and that that's all there is, there isn't any more, is one of the square shooters and if you can get her to marry you you're lucky, and you needn't ask any questions."^[114]

The terms of the dating exchange were widely understood among the young but not entirely uniformly. Petting was particularly often at the heart of misunderstanding, especially in that it incorporated a partial revision of the deeply inculcated double standard.^[115] Certain adolescents, like "Miss Dateless," found themselves essentially outside of the dating pool because they failed or refused to recognize that this fundamental exchange in dating was normatively governed and structured by a sense of the emotions appropriate to age and stage.

I am 20 years old and, to use the slang expression, "hard up for dates." I am rather small, but have my share of good looks. I am inevitably cheerful, like sports of all kind and like to talk of them. I am interested in good music. . . . But—I sit at home without the boys. I think one of the reasons is that I am not common enough. I let a boy know it if he gets fresh with me and scratch him off my list. I use cosmetics, but sometimes look pale near some of these "clowns." However, they get "dates."^[116]

Other girls, who yielded too readily to the combined pressures of boys' entreaties and the clear-cut injunction to date and—to

a degree—enjoy physical "thrills," were devalued as dates for being too easy. A popular and spirited girl, whose friend had inadvertently become the butt of boyish ribaldry ("they called her the 'lemon' because they said she was made to squeeze"), castigated the boys for their insensitivity. She recalled that she "told those boys just what I thought of them, and they hadn't a word to say when I got through, either." But then, her friend's behavior was to be explained by inexperience and excused because "she hasn't any mother."^[117]

The formal extracurricular life of the high school quickly came to be articulated with the gender-structured dynamics of the dating system. "It is a well-known fact that club pins are an absolute necessity when a young man wishes to plight his time-enduring regard for some lady; but, even considering this, it ought not be necessary to have more than three or four."^[118] Beyond visible symbols, word of mouth was powerful where everybody was likely to know everybody. "Why should we have so many idle gossipers in the school? . . . Much to our dislike we have many social groups and this lowers cooperation within the student body."^[119] Gossip, of course, while lowering cooperation, also regulated behavior—reassuringly for the most part, oppressively on occasion. Trends in fashion were sharply defined and served to mark out those who qualified for the dating pool. A "bobbed hair census" at Little Falls (Minnesota) High in 1923 indicated the strength of fashion: in each of the four classes, more than three girls in four had adopted this hair style, so rich in affirmation of modernity.^[120] Even among "subfreshmen," 65 percent had already caught on.

A ritualized jousting and chiding of the boy population in general (sometimes, happily for the historian, in the high school newspaper) served to bring marginal boys into the dating pool. Chiding served to educate boys to the proper ways of behaving toward girls, so that the rules of the dating system might be learned even by the more backward among them:

Boys, is it fair to make the girls come to a school entertainment unescorted? So far, I have not been to an entertainment without seeing three-fourths of the girls come without escorts. The most disgusting thing about it is, that the boys act as though they did

not realize the predicament they've placed the girls in. . . . I believe the faculty should make a rule that no girls come to the parties unescorted and that no boy be admitted without a young lady.^[121]

Or:

What has come over the boys of this school? . . . Is it the lack of carfare? I am sure that we girls would be happy to supply that . . . instead of going home alone after 11 o'clock. Fewer girls will be allowed to attend parties at school, since they must return late alone. Just because a boy is gentleman enough to take a girl home, is no reason that he is in love with her. All we want is common courtesy, not husbands.^[122]

Boys must be taught the nonbinding quality of a date, to distinguish it from the courtship system that dating was replacing. The complaint was not misdirected, for an earnest correspondent responded in the next issue:

There are many reasons. Not that the young man has not the price of carfare, or is too stingy, but that the girls of to-day are too different from those of yesterday. He has not as yet become acquainted with their ways. It will take a long time unless the girls do their part and bring the boys out of that bashful state which is keeping them from mixing in with the girls and being treated as equals. Therefore, act as though you wanted to be taken home, and I am sure you will not be disappointed.^[123]

"Bashful" was the word. Throughout the decade, female correspondents in high school newspapers would resurrect it as an adjective of mild condescension addressed to the boys they hoped to recruit to the pool of dating eligibles:

As usual, only senior and junior girls are to be present, but boys of the lower classes are allowed to come. In that case the senior and junior girls must wait to be invited before they can attend. It would be unfortunate to have these girls left out and, weird as it may seem, the task of inviting them is up to the boys—bashful and otherwise. Let's have as many junior and senior girls asked as possible, boys.^[124]

The public nature of the high school dance—aside from fueling the competitive element of the dating system—served girls'

purposes ideally. In the 1923–1926 Kansas City study, boys consistently ranked social dancing below "having 'dates' " while girls consistently ranked it above. When the Alexandria (Minnesota) High School in 1927 circulated a questionnaire to its students regarding more parties and, for the first time, school dances, both boys and girls voted overwhelmingly for more parties, but boys only split evenly on dances, which girls supported by five to two.^[125] "Stags" posed a problem, however, and girls pressed for the elimination of stags and the establishment of fixed-partner dates at school dances and no doubt elsewhere. For girls, the stag arrangement and its attendant "cutting in" at dances was an invitation to humiliation or boredom and left all the power of decision making in the hands of boys, who not rarely looked after one another's interests and gave no thought to the wallflowers the system inevitably created. "Just fancy knowing that a boy is dancing past the stagline and waving a five-dollar bill behind your back as an offer to anyone who'll come and take you away?"^[126]

Occasionally rebelling verbally against "girls who have dates four or five out of the seven days of the week" and the "sort of contest" among girls "to see who can get the most dates in one week," boys accepted the new regime.^[127] For them, it was something of a gain, in the sensual pleasures of petting, in the tenderness of occasional intimate conversation, in the articulation of "popularity" with the bumptiously democratic tone (and stratified structure) of the new, expanded, age-homogenized high schools. " 'It's just that I like to take her places,' explained one among the many suitors of Bette, the most popular date in the junior class. 'You're sure to have a good time with her. She's never a liability, you know that she'll be the belle of the ball. But really I'm not crazy about her.' "^[128]

Were the interests of middle-class girls harmed by the new institution they had promoted? Considerable evidence from the 1950s, to be discussed below, indicates that dating overwhelmed most other concerns for many high school girls—and many college girls—thereby perpetuating disadvantages in other realms to which schooling was relevant, especially the world of work. But domesticity hardly seems to have been the gender issue in the 1920s and 1930s that it was to become a

generation later. A more serious charge against the new dating mechanism concerns girls' sexual vulnerability. We have seen it to be the case that premarital coitus, both with fiancées and with others, did increase in the first cohort of girls within the new dating regime, at which point knowledge of birth control technique was obviously too shallow to offer reliable protection to many. But the evidence presented on age at marriage and pregnancy status at marriage do not point to forced marriages owing to pregnancy, nor to numbers of women condemned to spinsterhood through youthful loss of virginity and subsequent consignment to the category of "soiled goods." On balance, it seems that moral innovation did bring female sexuality into the arena of boy-girl relations in a new way but not without peer-group safeguards, imperfect but because quickly institutionalized perhaps no less effective than the foregone familial mechanisms that sometimes failed in the face of passion.

The Transition to Marriage

Youthful emotions were given more play in the heightened pace of courtship, which continued selectively into the 1920s. Details are shown in table 9, which presents proportions married at young and average ages for marriage, from which can be derived a sense of a cohort's movement into marriage.^[129] For both young men and young women, the table shows, the most prominent continued downward trend of marriage age was among the native whites of native parentage who lived in cities, the prime locus of economic and cultural innovation—including the new dating system. Urban marriage ages moved downward, approaching those of rural people of like nativity. By contrast, the downward movement of marriage age for second-generation Americans and for blacks, like those of rural native whites of native parentage, essentially ceased.

The continuing eagerness of young people for marriage was a matter of some relief to contemporary students of manners and morals, for it spoke to a considerable continuity of values at a point of apparent upheaval. Blanchard and Manasses, thus, reported that their survey revealed that "the modern girl seems to want marriage most of anything in life." In their college sam-

ple, nine in ten supported wives' work to permit timely marriage, but only half this proportion when wives' earnings "are not necessary."^[130] At the same time, they noted that this old-fashioned concern led to innovation, for girls now were choosing to remain at work after marriage "in order to achieve an earlier mating."^[131] New material circumstances, innovations in courtship practices, and changing prescriptions for prudence promoted a confusion about the right age to marry. Young

people—"modern" urban girls particularly—seemed to press for a downward revision of the marriage schedule. Thus, an advice book, in some alarm, told young women not to rush, reminding them quite inaccurately that "marriages are being made much later than they were a few generations ago."^[132] Correspondingly, "A Family Doctor" worried "with changing economic conditions, just how are we going to tide young people over the years when they are physically ready to marry but not yet ready financially." The author leaned even harder on young men, drawing on their sense of economic prudence to construct a right basis for assessing marriage. "If men entered into marriage as carefully and deliberately as most of them enter into business deals, the outcome would be more certain of success."^[133]

With girls newly able to display their charm and sex appeal unashamedly and in new social settings, boys had to be more careful not to fall too quickly. "She intends to marry at a more specific date if she can bring it about, have a definite number of children at desirable intervals, and earn a definite sum toward the upkeep where she needs to. . . . And she is determined to have more of a grip on the bank account than her mother, to help to swell it with her own earnings, married or single, and to do so in chiffon stockings and silk underwear."^[134] Success in entrancing men and designing one's own marriage, however, ran the risk not only of overprudent men but of experienced, exploitative ones. A popular short story on this theme, evoking the mythic opposition between country tradition and urban oversophistication, places a charming, capable young woman between the contrary pulls of a professionally ambitious spinster—her supervisor at the department store—and a good man from her old hometown. Ultimately, success at the department store required a too-blatant use of her body (in dress modeling). The plot resolves itself, on these grounds, in favor of the boy next door, and prompt marriage.^[135]

Figures 8 and 9 show the changes over the decades of the 1910s and the 1920s in proportions of men and women who had married by successive single years of age.^[136] Among men, it is apparent, the most substantial gains in proportions married in the 1910s had occurred at the younger ages—the late teens

Figure 8.
Changes in Proportions of Men Who Had Married, by Successive
Single Years of Age, 1910s and 1920s

and early twenties—for both native whites of native parentage and for blacks (native whites of foreign parentage followed essentially the same path as native whites of native parentage, here and elsewhere). Black women, too, had moved toward earlier marriage again—in the 1910s, especially at 17 to 20 or so. Native white women of native parentage were more likely to be married in 1920, too, but not especially so at the youngest ages. But we should not make too much of the age-specificity of the decline: the strongest point is its substantial generality across groups and the amplitude of the change in the 1910s. Thus, even

after leveling off after the youngest ages, about 2.5 percent more young men were married at any given age in 1920 than in 1910.

The 1920-to-1930 trends are trickier. On the whole, the 1920s represent a dampened continuation of the downward movement in marriage age. By far the greater proportion of

Figure 9.
Changes in Proportions of Women Had Married, by Successive
Single Years of Age, 1910s and 1920s

men married after age 21, and after that age, the 1930 data show even greater proportions married at single years of age than did the 1920 data. This is the case for both native whites of native parentage and for blacks. Since virtually all of marriages for people this young would have occurred at the very end of the decade, it is possible that the earliest phases of the Depression could have caused the observed downturn. More likely, however, is that just as 1920 was a period in which relatively young marriages for men became notably more common, the end of the decade saw a return to the previous pattern.

Beyond age 23, however, the 1920s saw an increase in the pace of men's marriage that was about as great as that in the 1910s. There can be no doubt (given the age schedule of men's marriages) that most of these marriages were taking place in the latter half of the decade, so it is safe to conclude that except for the relatively young ages, the 1920s were a decade in which, rather regularly, younger cohorts could look forward to somewhat younger marriages than their immediate predecessors and to distinctly younger marriages than in the generation of their parents.

Close examination of the year-to-year changes over the 1920s in numbers of first marriages of young men and women at selected single years of age in New York State (exclusive of New York City) reveals a rather complicated pattern. Among women, the most rapid increase before about 1926 was in young marriages—at ages up to about 20. After mid-decade, however, this trend reversed, and it was marriages between the ages of 20 and 25 that increased the most rapidly, particularly at age 21. For men, trends were gradual throughout the decade, toward younger marriages, at ages that increasingly approached those of women.^[137]

When we examine figure 9, we find that most of the trends for women in the 1910s and 1920s resemble men's. For older white women, nuptiality was increasing even more rapidly in the 1920s than in the 1910s. For black women, however, things were different. The decade's marked black migration from southern agriculture to northern urban centers definitively interrupted the increases in nuptiality that had characterized the previous decade. If the 1910s had brought a great enlargement

of marriage probabilities for black women, the 1920s was a decade of return to prior patterns. But these black women provide the only marked example in which the 1920s saw a clear reversal of the downward movement of the marriage transition that had lasted over a generation.^[138]

Because states differed from one another in the characteristics that may have promoted early marriage, we can enrich our sense of what lay behind the new life course scheduling by examining what was associated on a state-to-state basis with continuing nuptiality increase in the 1920s. The simplest and also the most powerful way to analyze these data is to examine proportions ever-married for the single age group 20–24, encompassing a critical half-decade of marrying for both male and female cohorts. (To avoid confounding with differential inmigration patterns, I examine only native whites of native parentage. No analysis of black marriage patterns is feasible by this method at this time, because black marriage patterns were considerably differentiated by region, and the period was one of great interregional migration among black people.) The analysis here, to be sure, is not causal, but, literally, only tells us what characteristics of states—rather large and heterogeneous places at that—were associated with increasingly earlier marriage in the years just prior to 1930.^[139] But by including as a predictor variable the extent of downward edging of the marriage age in the 1910s, we will be able to see not only what characteristics conduced earlier marriage but also which of these were especially relevant to the shifts, discussed above, in the trends that were already extant by the 1920s.

Earlier marriage during the 1920s was facilitated by whatever promoted relatively rapid population growth.^[140] The balance of migration—surely in a decade during which traditional channels of overseas migration were substantially plugged by restrictive legislation—probably indicates well the kinds of possibilities for starting a life on one's own that were reflected also in decisions to marry earlier rather than later. On balance, then, we may conclude that the prosperity of the 1920s conduced to couples taking the plunge into marriage. Two other easily measured factors were also reflected in the state-to-state patterns for males. The first—best measured by the proportion

foreign born in the population—suggests what inspection confirms: the states of the industrial belt of the Middle Atlantic and Midwest where large numbers of foreign-born persons resided more often than one would otherwise expect showed small or no statewide increases in proportions of men marrying young, a pattern strongly contrasting with the continued drop in marriage age in the homogeneously white areas in the Mountain and Western states (but not in the agriculturally depressed South). A second factor improving male marriage prospects depended not on improved resources in the hands of the potential groom but rather on improvements in the marriage market itself. Across the nation, ratios of native white males of native parentage to native white females of native parentage (taken as indicative of a single marriage pool) was in 1920 strongly skewed in favor of males in a considerable number of states, especially in the West, a product largely of "frontier" patterns of long-distance interstate migration. By 1930, this skewing had on balance considerably declined, and the state-to-state variance was markedly reduced.^[141] The approach of states to sex parity among native whites of native parentage "explained" just about as much of the downward movement of male marriage ages as did population increase or proportions foreign born. We need not insist on the details of the model; but we should recognize that both the means to contract marriage younger and easier access to appropriate mates explain how men came, on balance, to continue their trend toward earlier marriage in the 1920s. In states that were among the faster in population growth and also among those in which the sex ratio moved most rapidly toward parity, 2.2 percent more of the males at 20–24, on average, were married in 1930 than had been in 1920. At the other end of the distribution, in those states where population growth was slower and in which sex ratios among native whites did not move rapidly toward parity, or moved away from it, about 0.7 percent fewer men were married at 20–24 in 1930 than had been a decade earlier.

For women, the "market" for acceptable mates also improved, and in such a way that accounted for about as much of the continued if modest decline in women's marriage age in the 1920s as did population increase. But women were of course not aided by the general movement toward parity in sex

ratio that had been important for men. Rather, what improved women's marriage-market opportunities was an institutional change—the great expansion of the high school. Women at this time married on average between two and three years younger than men; and as high schooling became typical within the population, the age of school-leaving came close enough to marriage age that the high school and its informal social life became a critical arena for increasing numbers of girls to contract marriages. Accordingly, when states like California, New York, and Ohio added to the school rolls something like 25 percent of the 16- and 17-year-olds during the 1920s, it is not surprising that for women at ages 20–24, the proportions who were married increased rather markedly. In states that were among the faster half in population growth and the half in which school was extended the fastest, the average increase in the proportion married at 20–24 was 2.1 percent; in the states below par in population growth and school extension, the comparable proportion was a reduction by 1.6 percent in the proportion married. In assessing the significance of these patterns, it is worth considering that, outside of those alluded to, regional patterns did not appear; nor did proportion urban or pace or urbanization; nor did initial values of youthful-marriage proportions explain trends; nor did the trends in the 1920s merely continue on a state-to-state basis the trends of the previous decade. That is, marriage age dropped where circumstances facilitated it .

These factors, statistically significant, certainly do not deny the emergence of new values that addressed the right construction of the life course. But the state data do not seem to "require" normative change, suggesting rather that the sometimes-realized but always-intriguing possibility of earlier marriages for "modern" urban young people emerged out of the new material and social circumstances of the decade.

Parenthood

The decade of the 1920s was a period of overall fertility decline, a continuation and intensification of prior trends. In several respects, these years were marked with a sharpening of the differences in family behavior between classes and between ru-

ral and urban residents. Strongly associated with the fertility decline, among white women, was the spread of secondary and higher education. Black women, too, reduced their fertility, but for them, the decline was also quite steep within groups divided by educational attainment, as it was only among the more well-educated whites. On the whole, these patterns of decline for whites (blacks were not so tabulated) held in both urban and in rural nonfarm areas, although they were attenuated among farm women.^[142]

When we turn from overall fertility to the timing of initial parenthood, the pattern becomes more complex. Decline in first-childbirth rates was sharpest among women already somewhat on the old side to be having a first child—those 24 or 25 and Up.^[143] By contrast, among those 18 or under, there was but little overall reduction in initial fertility. Indeed, something of a peak in first-parity fertility was attained by young women around 1925. While, overall, the 1920s were a period in which the likelihood of becoming a young mother at first grew, then declined markedly, for older women not yet mothers the pattern was one of slow decline for the first half of the decade followed by rapid decline in the second half.

Corresponding to and complementing the rise in nuptiality in the first part of the 1920s was a tendency to slightly more rapid movement into parenthood after marriage, a tendency that was common to whites and blacks, and across socioeconomic levels.^[144] The trend was not matched, however, by similar increases in the years following the first one or two after marriage, a pattern that is congruent with the overall decline in fertility during the decade. First parenthood, then, following a marriage that often was earlier than in preceding decades was relatively often attained relatively early in the marriage: a substantial subset of couples was taking advantage of a period of relative economic promise by moving quickly through the steps of family formation. Other couples—notably those who had already resisted parenthood for the first phase of marriage—were more often than previously postponing parenthood for several more years, many presumably having chosen the temporary childless marriage as desirable for a while and having been in command of the technology that enabled this. After mid-decade, however,

this pattern ceased and was replaced by one in which more couples than in the first half of the decade delayed parenthood longer after marriage. It is apparent from the data that it was not lifetime childlessness that took the place of the trend toward early parenthood within early marriage but rather a somewhat delayed parenthood within marriages that themselves continued to be contracted earlier in the American life course.

Birth control was rather widely but by no means universally diffused even in the late 1920s. Clinic data collected in the 1920s and 1930s indicate that the proportion using some method of fertility limitation had nearly doubled since the early years of the century, condoms being the method accounting for much of this increase.^[145] At the time of the late 1920s marriages of the native white Protestants who were to be studied by the first major survey of such matters, the Indianapolis Fertility Study,^[146] about two in three of these couples employed some method of birth control (not necessarily a contraceptive method, of course). The proportion doing so was only slightly in excess of half for wives who had ended their schooling before attending any high school but exceeded seven in eight among wives who had attended college.^[147]

A retabulation of Kinsey data indicates that there were at this time sharp changes in marital contraceptive use (at least among Kinsey's relatively sophisticated respondents).^[148] Coitus interruptus and the douche gave way to the diaphragm, while condom use remained constant. Retrospective data from relatively sophisticated New York City couples showed, likewise, a reduction by about half in dependence on withdrawal, but the condom, rather than the diaphragm, was becoming the contraceptive method of choice.^[149] Women who used diaphragms were not only in a sense taking control of their own bodies; they were also taking a part in a revolution of sexual attitudes, in which the formerly unspeakable was necessarily now spoken.

Contraceptive information was not yet so widespread as it would be in subsequent decades. The Lynds described contraception in Middletown as publicly condemned but gradually tolerated as inevitable, couples of advantaged backgrounds being the quickest to embrace the practice. The Lynds were

struck by a conflict between individual beliefs and behaviors and far more restrictive official group norms about birth control (as about much else) that suggested "an underlying bewilderment considerably . . . widespread and more pervasive of the rest of their lives."^[150] The Kinsey data indicate that perhaps one in four women who had sexual intercourse before marriage conceived premaritally—a proportion that gave no signs of declining in the 1920s, even as the proportion of young women placing themselves at risk increased.^[151] Only 6 percent of Indianapolis wives who were to practice some form of fertility control before their first births had known any contraceptive practices so much as a year before their marriages; another 35 percent learned shortly before their wedding day. The largest category of brides who practiced fertility control before their pregnancies learned about contraception on their wedding night . Indeed, almost 6 percent practiced fertility control in some form without ever learning about contraception. When wives knew of a method before their marriage, quite routinely that method was douching, a method that was under their own control, if not especially effective from a strictly contraceptive standpoint.^[152] About half as many knew of the condom at this point; almost none of the Indianapolis wives knew of the medically controlled diaphragm.

The organized movement arguing the virtues of birth control and making an effort to diffuse contraceptive information reached few women, having elected a physician-and-patient model rather than a public-health model and promoting the highly effective but highly cumbersome and intricate diaphragm.^[153]

In Indianapolis, only half of those couples marrying in the late 1920s who tried to postpone their first birth succeeded.^[154] The risks of pregnancy were considerable even among those who approached coitus planfully, which suggests how extreme they must have been among neophytes, many of whom, even at marriageable age, were ignorant of all but the absolute rudiments of sexual matters.^[155] Such uncertainty helped sustain the general understanding that premarital coitus was on balance not to be entered into with anyone whom one was not prepared to marry.

Within marriage, almost six in ten of the Indianapolis women who had not finished high school used contraceptives of some kind or other between their marriage at the end of the 1920s and their first childbirth. Three in ten postponed childbirth to beyond their second wedding anniversary. The comparable figures for high school graduates were four in five contraceptors and 45 percent with their first births so late. In Indianapolis, some means of fertility control was employed after marriage and before first conception by only half of those who, not finishing high school, married before 19. But two-thirds of their educational peers who delayed marriage somewhat more practiced family limitation in some form. Among high school graduates, 77 percent of those who married young employed a method of birth control, and no less than 85 percent of those who married at 23 or older, with the intermediate group middlingly prone to limit fertility.^[156] The results are visible in the way these different groups of married couples structured the transition to parenthood. Fewer than one-quarter of the early-marrying non-high-school-graduates were childless on their third wedding anniversary (most of those with children having had them within the first year of marriage), but 35 percent were if they had delayed marriage until after 23. Among high school graduates, the proportions ranged from 36 percent of the young marriers childless at three years, and 51 percent childless among those who married late.

Girls' access to contraceptive information at this time, in fact, was closely related to their backgrounds and the kinds of lives they were moving toward. The clearest indication of this is probably the relationship of the timing of contraceptive education to level of formal education they eventually achieved, as shown in table 10.

We see at the end of the 1920s a diffusion of a morally significant piece of technological information. For those girls who were advancing the most markedly toward "modernity," contraceptive information was beginning to become something learned in adolescence, in advance of marriage, potentially able to structure boy-girl relationships, potentially able to affect the way marriage and family building were approached. Still modal, however, was for contraceptive knowledge to enter only

as an element of explicit premarital instruction rather than as a part of the common wisdom of adolescence. (Girls of the most straitened socioeconomic background—and many of these must have seemed "bad" girls by the standards of the day—were the most likely to have learned about contraceptive methods in their girlhoods.)

Conclusion

Dating, petting, birth control, and an increase in the sexualization of life generally can be seen as having their roots as elements of the youthful life course well before World War I. That these new arrangements ramified through the experience of family life is apparent in contemporaneous revisions of divorce. The decade saw a rapid increase in the numbers of divorces which greatly alarmed contemporaries. In terms of crude divorce rates, however, the entire decade of the 1920s seems far more like an accommodation to patterns rather suddenly introduced during the war period and its immediate aftermath.^[157] More precisely, divorce trends in the 1920s can be here seen in good part as a response to impermanencies structured into marriages at their inception . When one examines rates based on cohorts of marriages begun at different dates, the second half of the 1920s was a time when divorce did seem to pick up mo-

mentum.^[158] Divorces characteristically occurred progressively earlier within 1920s marriages, although the most substantial enlargement of the deterioration of marriage occurred around the modal point for divorce, three to seven years into marriage. Accompanying the increase in the number of divorces was a parallel growth in the proportion of all divorces in which the stated grounds were "cruelty," rather than "desertion," the previous modal category. "Cruelty" was as close as the legal rules of most states at the time came to permitting divorce on the consensual grounds that the marriage just did not work out.^[159] It was as though the visible challenge to lifetime marriage suggested by changing attitudes as the 1920s advanced led, in turn, to an increased willingness to contract marriages that were less and less seen as permanent at their inceptions. Elaine May's reading of divorce actions leads her to conclude that while "most divorcing urbanites were not in the vanguard of a moral revolution" at this time, they were subject to a new "confusion surrounding domestic aspirations" and the nature of marital happiness.

The pursuit of happiness took couples . . . into wedlock, and then out again. Along with marriage, divorce was another step in this quest. . . . But, . . . rather than a triumph, it often seemed like a personal failure. In the divorce court, unhappily married individuals blamed their spouses. But away from the Court, they often blamed themselves.^[160]

The 1920s promoted the emergence of our modern youthful life course, normatively sanctioned for the middle class, spreading among other urbanites: extended schooling combined with an early and gradual peer-structured courtship system, while promoting an early and often romantic marriage, in which the romance was in effect prolonged by the modest postponement of parenthood. The value change so often remarked in the 1920s was the sound that the middle class made in recording its somewhat ambivalent approval of what had increasingly become its own behavior and in proposing these values to the rest of the population as the right way to live. Where these values seemed morally vulnerable and also felt bad, as in the case of easier divorce, there breast-beating occurred, along with a

tendency to try to excise that portion of the evolving family-formation process and define it as the product of individual error, capable of being reformed out of existence.

In the largest sense, we are dealing with a change in the way families organized their behavior over their life cycles and understood the ways they were doing so, thus influencing the way that individuals, in structuring their own life courses, anticipated coming into their own. This reorganization was considerably influenced by more general aspects of the outlook of Americans in the 1920s, an outlook in which proximate gratification of the self was more highly prized (or less commonly condemned) than before and in which optimism about the material possibilities of the future was at a new high. At the same time, such values—and the material circumstances that underlay them—were not uniformly shared throughout the population. They were, however, held particularly commonly by young people, thus creating a modest but challenging rift between generations and thereby setting newly formed families off on their own somewhat more than otherwise would have been the case.

Shortly, the Great Depression was to alter the economic organization of the family—and, to an extent, its moral organization. The impact of the extended economic downturn on the way young people came of age and sought to form their own families was ramified and was the more dramatic because of the contrast it posed to the 1920s. The life course had changed in the 1920s, when individuals gained new options. In the 1930s, fresh reminders of external constraint on the individual would modify once again the youthful life course.