1. Robert M. Coen, "Labor and Unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s: A Re-examination Based on Postwar Experience," Review of Economics and Statistics 55 (1973): 46-55; H. Thomas Johnson, "Postwar Optimism and the Rural Financial Crises of the 1920s," Explorations in Economic History 11 (1973-74): 173-192, on the farm bust; Wesley C. Mitchell, "A Review," in Committee on Recent Economic Changes of the President's Conference on Unemployment, Recent Economic Changes in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1929), II: 841-910. But cf. Charles F. Holt, "Who Benefited from the Prosperity of the Twenties?" Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977): 277-289.

2. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Long-Term Economic Growth 1860-1970 (Washington: USGPO, 1973), charts 2, 3, 4; Willard L. Thorp, "The Changing Structure of Industry," in Committee on Recent Economic Changes, Recent Economic Changes : I, 167-218; Frederick C. Mills "Price Trends" in ibid. , II, 603-656; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making the Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985).

3. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), Parts I, II; Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chap. 8.

4. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 130. The Lynds present an account of the 1920s family as ripe for overt change, yet so far reflecting this state only in subtle ways. As we shall see, the decade of the 1920s, by opening a range of new options, destabilized the youthful life course, restructuring patterns of family formation and altering thereby its tone.

5. The Responsibilities of American Advertising (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 40-41; Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization , ed. Daniel M. Fox (Cambridge: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1968).

6. Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Marchand, Advertising the American Dream .

7. Robert S. Lynd, "The People as Consumers," in William Fielding Ogburn, ed., Recent Social Trends, II (New York, 1932), 848; William E. Leuchtenburg, Perils of Prosperity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), chap. 10; Marcus Felson, "The Differentiation of continue

Material Life Styles: 1925-1966," Social Indicators Research 3 (1976): 397-421; J. Frederic Dewhurst and Associates, America's Needs and Resources: A New Survey (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1955), Appendix 4-5.

8. Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); J. F. Steiner, "Recreation and Leisure Time Activities," in Ogburn, ed., Recent Social Trends, II: 912-957.

9. Edmund K. Strong, Jr., The Psychology of Selling and Advertising (New York: McGraw Hill, 1925), 170; Paul H. Nystrom, Elements of Retail Selling (New York: Ronald Press, 1936).

10. F. Thomas Juster, Household Capital Formation and Financing, 1897-1962 (NBER General Series #83 [New York: NBER, 1966]); Edwin R. A. Seligman, The Economics of Installment Selling (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927), 1: 263-264.

11. Blanche Bernstein, The Pattern of Consumer Debt, 1935-36 (NBER, Financial Research Program, Studies in Consumer Installment Financing #6 [New York: NBER, 1940]), chaps. 2, 5.

12. By the end of the decade, two urban surveys found that around one-third of adolescent girls and somewhat fewer boys had a regular allowance. White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, The Adolescent in the Family (New York: Appleton Century, 1934), 292-93; Evelyn Dreser Deno, "Changes in the Home Activities of Junior High School Girls over a Twenty-seven Year Period" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1958), 51; Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child (New York: Basic Books, 1985), chap. 3.

13. Meeting of December 10, 1930, of Chapter 375 of Child Study Association of America. Child Study Association of America Collection, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

14. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 118, 131.

15. Ibid. , 121-122.

14. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown, 118, 131.

15. Ibid. , 121-122.

16. Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 152.

17. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 111.

18. Ibid. , 112.

19. Ibid. , 140; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition , 168.

17. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 111.

18. Ibid. , 112.

19. Ibid. , 140; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition , 168.

17. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 111.

18. Ibid. , 112.

19. Ibid. , 140; Lynd and Lynd, Middletown in Transition , 168.

20. LeRoy E. Bowman and Maria Ward Lambin, "Evidences of Social Relations as Seen in Types of New York City Dance Halls," The Journal of Social Forces 3 (1925): 288; Paul G. Cressey, The Taxi-Dance Hall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932).

21. Elon H. Moore, "Public Dance Halls in a Small City," Sociology and Social Research 14 (1930): 260; see also Gregory Mason, "Satan in the Dance Hall," American Mercury 2 (1924): 175-182. The dance continue

halls came under close scrutiny in the early part of the 1920s, charged with being the breeding grounds of a variety of immoralities, or at least their starting point, and proper rules of dance-floor decorum were prescribed informally and in law. American National Association of Masters of Dancing, "Rules, Regulations, and Suggestions Governing Social Dancing" (pamphlet, 1919), in American Social Hygiene Association Collection, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

22. Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out (Contributions in American Studies, no. 50; [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981]), 154, and chap. 5 generally; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), chap. 4.

23. Maurice A. Bigelow, Adolescence (National Health Series [New York: Funk & Wagnalls, completely rev. ed., 1937 [1924]]), 86.

24. Ella Gardner, Public Dance Halls (U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Publication No. 89, 1929), 36-49; and see M. V. O'Shea, The Trend of the Teens (Chicago: Frederick S. Drake and Co., 1920).

25. Herbert Blumer, Movies and Conduct (Motion Pictures and Youth: The Payne Fund Studies [New York: Macmillan, 1933]), 195n.

26. White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, The Adolescent in the Family (New York: Appleton-Century, 1934), 292-293.

27. Bruce L. Melvin and Elna N. Smith, Rural Youth: Their Situation and Prospects (Research Monographs XV, Works Progress Administration [Washington: USGPO, 1938]). Chapter V is a fine review of the literature on the leisure and recreation of rural youth, before and during the Depression.

28. Alice Miller Mitchell, Children and the Movies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 123-124.

29. Lary May, Screening Out the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), chaps. 5, 8; Peiss, Cheap Amusements , chap. 6.

30. Edgar Dale, The Content of Motion Pictures (Motion Pictures and Youth: The Payne Fund Studies [New York: Macmillan Press, 1935]), 89, 94, 178.

31. Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency and Crime (Motion Pictures and Youth: The Payne Fund Studies [New York: Macmillan Press, 1935]), chap. 5.

32. Although only one in five girls taking "personal hygiene" in a New York City high school in 1918 said that they would have wished further instruction in sexual matters, the sex-education proponent analyzing the survey concluded that many more would have said continue

so were it not "that what was uppermost in their minds could not find expression for reasons well understood." At least one response, quoted verbatim, could have been emblazoned on the banner of the sex modernizers and certainly indicates that at least some demand for school sex education existed ahead of supply. "Many girls feel that the sex relation is vulgar and is very repugnant to them. They have a wrong opinion which ought to be rectified by the hygiene teacher and told in a way that would not make us hate the other sex for this." Benjamin C. Gruenberg, "What Girls Want to Know," School Review 26 (1918): 753-755.

33. Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

34. Wallace H. Maw, "Fifty Years of Sex Education in the Public Schools of the United States (1900-1950): A History of Ideas" (Ed.D. dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1950), 82-133.

35. "The Sex Questionnaire that Shocked the Nation," True Confessions (July 1929): 40+.

36. William G. Shepherd, "What Our Boys and Girls Think of Each Other," Collier's 74 (December 13, 1924): 48; Howard M. Bell, Youth Tell Their Story (Washington: American Council on Education, 1938), 90. In Maryland, black youth were especially supportive and far more likely to wish early instruction.

37. Michael Imber, "Analysis of a Curriculum Reform Movement: The American Social Hygiene Association's Campaign for Sex Education 1900-1930" (Ph.D. dissertation, School of Education, Stanford University, 1980); John C. Burnham, "The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes toward Sex," Journal of American History 59 (1973): 885-909.

38. Joseph Kirk Folsom, The Family (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1934), 230; Michael Gordon, "From an Unfortunate Necessity to a Cult of Mutual Orgasm: Sex in American Marital Education Literature 1830-1940," in James M. Henslin and Edward Sagarin, eds., The Sociology of Sex: An Introductory Reader (New York: Schocken, 1978), 68. Katherine B. Davis found in 1929 that four in ten of her married-women sample declared themselves to have been inadequately informed about sex at the time of their marriages and that virtually all of her unmarried-women sample favored sex instruction for both boys and girls. Davis, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), 63, 378.

39. D.C. Thom, Guiding the Adolescent (U.S. Department of Labor, Children's Bureau, Publication #225, 1933), 12. On parents' failings continue

in this task, see White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, The Adolescent in the Family , 192-211.

40. Quoted from the 1941 Yearbook of the Association in Maw, "Fifty Years of Sex Education," 130.

41. Laura Martha Myers, "A Study of a Personal Improvement Course for High School Girls" (M.Ed. thesis, The Pennsylvania State University, 1938), 34-41.

42. The expansion can not be laid to compulsory education laws. Almost all states that passed such laws in the 1910s had had more rapid rates of school expansion at the high school ages in the decade preceding the legislation. John K. Folger and Charles B. Nam, Education of the American People (1960 Census Monograph [Washington: USGPO, 1967]), 24-26. The White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, Child Labor (New York: The Century Company, 1932), Part IV, reflects both the difficulties of enforcing this shift in the construction of the youthful life course among working-class families and the strenuousness of efforts to accomplish that end.

43. Claudia Goldin, "The Changing Economic Role of Women: A Cohort Approach," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1983): 711.

44. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics , I: 379.

45. Tabulated from the Annual School Census of Philadelphia, in Philadelphia Board of Education, Journal and/or Statistical Report , annual.

46. Esther Mariel Cook, "The Relation between the Fluctuation of Juvenile Employment and the Enrollment of Pupils 14 and 15 Years of Age in Pittsburgh, 1923-1932," (M.A. essay, University of Pittsburgh, 1934).

47. Grayson N. Kefauver, Victor H. Noll, and C. Elwood Drake, The Secondary-School Population (U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Education, "National Survey of Secondary Education," Monograph No. 4 [Washington: USGPO, 1933]), 8-26.

48. John Modell, "An Ecology of Family Decisions: Suburbanization, Schooling, and Fertility in Philadelphia, 1880-1920," Journal of Urban History 6 (1980): 397-417.

49. Folger and Nam, Education of the American Population , 8-9. For a fine, naive, contemporaneous expression of recent changes as they affected school life, see Olivia Pound, "The Social Life of High School Girls: Its Problems and Its Opportunities," School Review 28 (1920): 50-56. On economic aspects of school prolongation, see Howard G. Burdge, Our Boys (Albany: State of New York, Military Training Commission, Bureau of Vocational Training, 1921), chaps. 13, 23. break

50. Duluth, Board of Education, Annual Report , 1921, 1926, 1937. In New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1922, only 21 percent of sixteen-year-old boys were found in a single grade, and only 26 percent of the girls; by 1930 these figures had increased to 38 and 39 percent, respectively. New Bedford, School Report , 1923, 1931.

51. Clarence Long, The Labor Force under Changing Income and Employment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), tables A-2, A-3.

52. Winifred Wandersee, Women's Work and Family Values, 1920-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), chap. 4.

53. Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations 1870 to 1920 (Census Monographs, IX [Washington: USGPO, 1929]), 287.

54. Phyllis Blanchard, The Adolescent Girl (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1920), 48, 50; Winifred Richmond, The Adolescent Girl (New York: Macmillan, 1936 [1925]), and The Adolescent Boy (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933).

55. E. B. Hurlock and E. R. Klein, "Adolescent Crushes," Child Development 5 (1934): 80. It is striking that this excellent piece of research was uninterested in the "crushes" it did discover, obviously components of the teenage dating scene.

56. Scholarly observation of dating began with the inquiry into 1930s college dating carried out by the sociologist Willard Waller. Although Waller described dating as a special case of dissipation, he nonetheless established the crucial point that it was peer-supervised, rule-governed behavior. Waller, "The Rating and Dating Complex," American Sociological Review 2 (1937): 727-734; idem. , The Family (New York: The Dryden Press, 1938), chap. 9; Michael Gordon, "Was Waller Ever Right? The Rating and Dating Complex Reconsidered," Journal of Marriage and the Family 43 (1981): 67-76; Samuel Harman Lowrie, "Dating Theories and Student Responses," American Sociological Review 16 (1951): 334-340.

57. Reed Ueda, Avenues to Adulthood: The Origins of the High School and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 132.

58. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful ; Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988).

59. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful , 262-273, 324-325.

60. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat , 80.

61. Regina Malone, "Has Youth Deteriorated? II: The Fabulous Monster," The Forum 76 (1926): 29.

62. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat , 78. break

63. Ibid. , 21.

64. Ibid. , 16.

62. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat , 78. break

63. Ibid. , 21.

64. Ibid. , 16.

62. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat , 78. break

63. Ibid. , 21.

64. Ibid. , 16.

65. Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 137-138.

66. E.g., Emory S. Bogardus, The City Boy and His Problems (Los Angeles: Rotary Club of L.A., 1926), 74-75.

67. Frederick T. Shipp, "Social Activities of High-School Boys," School Review 39: 773.

68. Edgar Schmiedeler, "The Industrial Revolution and the Home" (Ph.D. dissertation, Catholic University, 1927), 50-53.

69. Harvey C. Lehman and Paul A. Witty, The Psychology of Play Activities (New York: A. S. Barnes and Company, 1927), 55-57; Shipp, "Social Activities," 771; Sister M. Mildred Knoebber, "The Adolescent Girl" (Ph.D. dissertation, St. Louis University, 1935), 162; Albert Blumenthal, Small-Town Stuff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932).

70. Mildred B. Thurow, "Interests, Activities, and Problems of Rural Young Folk: I" (Bulletin 617 [Ithaca: Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, 1934]), 34.

71. Paul H. Landis, "Problems of Farm Youth—A Point of View," Social Forces 18 (1940): 502-513; O. Latham Hatcher, Rural Girls in the City for Work (Richmond: Garrett and Massie for the Southern Women's Educational Alliance, 1930): 52-53.

72. Frances Donovan, The Woman Who Waits (Boston: Richard G. Badger, 1920), chaps. 17-19; Frederick M. Thrasher, The Gang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927), chap. 13; W. I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl: With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis (Criminal Science Monograph No. 4 [Boston: Little, Brown, 1923]), chap. 4.

73. Peiss, Cheap Amusements , chap. 2.

74. William Foote Whyte, "A Slum Sex Code," American Journal of Sociology 49 (1943): 24-29; and see Dorothy Reed, Leisure Time of Girls in a "Little Italy" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, n.d.; Portland, Ore., privately printed, 1932).

75. Jane Synge, "The Way We Were: Farm and City Families in the Early Twentieth Century," unpublished manuscript (Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, n.d.), chap. 5.

76. Lehman and Witty, Psychology of Play Activities , 134-137.

77. Mary K. Holloway, "A Study of Social Conditions Affecting Stowe Junior High School Girls" (M.A. Ed. thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1928), 34, 40; Lillian F. Drayton, "Personal Problems of Adolescents in the Basin Area of Cincinnati" (M.Ed. thesis, University of Cincinnati, 1935), 104-106. break

78. Quoted in E. Franklin Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1940), 247; see also the balance of chaps. 8 and 9, and Drayton, "Personal Problems," passim .

79. Excerpt from response to query by Drayton in Drayton, "Personal Problems," 179.

80. Ibid. , 164.

79. Excerpt from response to query by Drayton in Drayton, "Personal Problems," 179.

80. Ibid. , 164.

81. Waller, describing dating at the Pennsylvania State University, far too cynically and simplistically characterized the date as incorporating mutual exploitation, with prestige and "thrills" in view. The Family , chap. 9; "The Rating and Dating Complex." And see Peiss's excellent treatment of working-class girls' choices of how far to go. Cheap Amusements , 108-114.

82. Fannie Kilbourne, "Pretend He's the Plumber," Ladies' Home Journal 46 (January 1929): 20+.

83. I read perhaps some 650 letters to two lovelorn columnists in three time periods—1920-21, 1925, and 1930-31—choosing and transcribing for closer analysis 326 of these, roughly divided among the three dates. Doris Blake was a syndicated columnist (first as "Doris Blake's Answers," later as "Doris Blake's Love Answers") in the New York Daily News , a pioneer tabloid appealing to relatively unsophisticated readers. Blake's column was the earliest I found which employed the letter-and-reply format (as contrasted with Dorthea Dix's essay-with-quotations format). Blake truncated her letters, obviously, and more so over time; Martha Carr's evidently local and nonsyndicated column from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , unfortunately a newspaper of far higher tone, regularized grammar and spelling but allowed correspondents to ramble on at considerable length.

84. New York Daily News , August 7, 1920.

85. New York Daily News , December 27, 1920; April 29, 1925; February 19, 1925.

86. New York Daily News , May 10, 1925; November 8, 1930.

87. New York Daily News , October 16, 1930, and November 5, 1930; St. Louis Post-Dispatch , September 17, 1931.

88. New York Daily News , May 25, 1925.

89. Middle-class girls and those aspiring to middle-class status who did not prosper under the new system shortly became its victims. As early as 1924, a California high school dean of girls set up a program to help those girls (54 percent in her school, by her reckoning) who were left out. There were many reasons for failure, "yet it will be observed that all of these various types have something in common. The non-social individual centers all her thoughts and activity upon continue

herself." Caroline Power, "The Social Program for the Unsocial High-School Girl," School Review 32 (1924): 773.

90. Richmond, The Adolescent Girl , 53; cf. idem., The Adolescent Boy . And for an unconventional statement of the conventional understanding on this point, see Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Revolt of Modern Youth (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925), chaps. 5 and 6. Lindsey and Evans hold that "the high-school boy is a much less dramatic figure than the high-school girl. Generally, she sets the pace, whatever it is to be, and he dances to her piping" ( ibid. , 68).

91. "A School Girl's Misstep," True Confessions 6 (June 1925): 6+. A 1941 study of a St. Louis high school indicated that by senior year, two-thirds of the girls but just one in ten boys ordinarily dated persons from outside the school. Helen Moore Priester, "The Reported Dating Practices of One Hundred and Six High School Seniors in an Urban Community" (M.S. thesis, Cornell University, 1941), 41.

92. Waller's commitment to a conception of love in which idealization played a large part, I believe, blinded him to the affectionate element in dating and led him to believe that dating and courtship were wholly different activities. See Waller, "Rating and Dating"; Waller, The Family , chap. 8. See also Clifford Kirkpatrick and Theodore Caplow, "Courtship in a Group of Minnesota Students," American Journal of Sociology 51 (1945): 114-125.

93. Ernie to Martha Carr, St. Louis Post-Dispatch , April 3, 1931.

94. Computations from Kinsey data. See Appendix 4.

95. These trends pertain considerably more strongly to the informants who had attended college. We should recall that much of the apparent increase in the sexual content of life was captured within marriage, which was in accord both with received values and with the relatively new notion that the sexual pleasures of marriage were to be celebrated, not just tolerated.

96. Eleanor Rowland Wembridge, "Petting and the Campus," Survey 34 (1925): 394.

97. Folsom, The Family , 231-232.

98. Joseph Wood Krutch, "Love—Or the Life and Death of a Value," Atlantic Monthly 142 (1928): 207, 205.

99. "Observations on the Sex Problem in America," American Journal of Psychiatry 8 (1928): 529; Willard Waller, The Old Love and the New (New York: Liveright, 1930). Sapir spoke of trends he hoped would not overtake American culture.

100. Richmond, The Adolescent Boy , 192; R. H. Edwards, J. M. Artman, and Galen M. Fisher, Undergraduates (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 216-218. break

101. White House Conference on Child Health and Protection, Growth and Development of the Child, Part IV, Appraisement of the Child (New York: The Century Company, 1932), 140-142.

102. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful , 280, 294.

103. Folsom, The Family , 71, 408.

104. "One Girl" quoted in "To-Day's Morals and Manners—The Side of the Girls," Literary Digest 70 (July 9, 1921): 36.

105. George A. Lundberg, "Sex Differences on Social Questions," School and Society 23 (1926): 595-600; Daniel Katz and Floyd Henry Allport, Students' Attitudes (Syracuse, N.Y.: The Craftsmen Press, 1931), 252-253.

106. Folsom, The Family , 98, 412.

107. Caroline B. Zachry, Emotion and Conduct in Adolescence (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1940), 509. The study was conducted in 1934-1939.

108. Child Study Association, chap. 375, meeting of December 3, 1930.

109. Floyd Dell, "Why They Pet," The Parents' Magazine 6 (October 1931): 63.

110. For a classic expression of this conventional belief, see "A High School Boy Reveals Youth's Love Problems," True Confessions 12 (July, 1928): 34.

111. Quoted in Arthur Dean, "A Survey on Petting," Journal of Education 110 (1929): 414.

112. Jessie E. Gibson, On Being a Girl (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 141.

113. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful , chap. 5, is splendid on the meaning of sexuality, if a little underemphatic about the gender dialectic.

114. "A High School Boy Reveals Youth's Love Problems," 107.

115. A mid-1920s college survey asked, "Is it right to kiss a man or woman you do not expect to marry?" Substantial minorities of 25 percent of the boys and 40 percent of the girls answered no , indicating that they still accepted sexual pleasure only in the context of courtship. Lundberg, "Sex Differences," 598. The classic 1920s exposition of cultural change in girls' sexual expressiveness is New Girls for Old , by Phyllis Blanchard and Carolyn Manasses (New York: The Macaulay Co., 1930). Theodore Newcomb's thoughtful conclusion that by the 1930s, a "less compulsive and more spontaneous demonstration of affection between boys and girls" was common suggests the only gradual accomplishment of this cultural change. "Recent Changes in Attitudes toward Sex and Marriage," American Sociological Review 2 (1937): 662. break

116. "Miss Dateless" to Martha Carr, St. Louis Post-Dispatch , October 31, 1931. And see the exchange between Doris Blake and H. Ann and Peggy, "Doris Blake's Love Answers," New York Daily News , October 28 and November 27, 1930.

117. Gibson, On Being a Girl , 150.

118. Editorial, St. Paul Central High Times , December 16, 1927. And see letter from A.C., Minneapolis South High Southerner , April 13, 1921.

119. Little Falls The Comet's Tail , February 24, 1928, editorial. Also see Lynd and Lynd, Middletown , 162-164.

120. Little Falls The Comet's Tail , March 27, 1923.

121. L. C. in Minneapolis South High Southerner , February 29, 1919.

122. "One of Them" in Minneapolis South High Southerner , October 27, 1920.

123. Minneapolis South High Southerner , November 18, 1920.

124. Letter of E. D., St. Paul Central High Times , March 26, 1926.

125. Lehman and Witty, Psychology of Play Activities , 55-57; Alexandria High Al-Hi-Nuz , December 16, 1927.

126. "We are Bachelor Girls of 30," True Confessions 26 (June 1935): 38-39.

127. Russ Brackett, letter in Minneapolis West High News , May 2, 1924; and "One of the Many Sufferers," letter in Little Falls The Comet's Tail , February 11, 1930.

128. Quoted in Caroline B. Zachry, Emotion and Conduct in Adolescence , 121.

129. For all intents and purposes, the 1930 census data reflect the impact of the relatively booming 1920s rather than of the crash and certainly not of the Depression. Only about half a year had passed between the stock market crash and the census, and while some marriage decisions undoubtedly took this into consideration, most of the decadal changes, and even the changes in the changes, can be attributed to the "prosperity decade" rather than to its denouement.

130. New Girls for Old , 260.

131. Ibid. , 181. See also Wembridge, "Petting and the Campus"; Ernest R. Burgess, "The Romantic Impulse and Family Disorganization," Survey 57 (1926): 290-294; Alexander Black, "Is the Young Person Coming Back," Harper's Monthly 149 (1929): 337-346; and, for the parents' perspective, see Jessica H. Cosgrave, "Romantic Love," Good Housekeeping 81 (November-December 1928): 36.

130. New Girls for Old , 260.

131. Ibid. , 181. See also Wembridge, "Petting and the Campus"; Ernest R. Burgess, "The Romantic Impulse and Family Disorganization," Survey 57 (1926): 290-294; Alexander Black, "Is the Young Person Coming Back," Harper's Monthly 149 (1929): 337-346; and, for the parents' perspective, see Jessica H. Cosgrave, "Romantic Love," Good Housekeeping 81 (November-December 1928): 36.

132. Ann Bruce, Love and Marriage (Franklin Publishing Company, 1931), 66, 91. The overprudent male was a subject for gentle ridicule, however. Blanche Bruce, "The Adventure of the Lost Trousseau," Ladies' Home Journal 37 (1920): 14+. break

133. A Family Doctor, "Youth's Greatest Problem: Wait or Mate," True Confessions 12 (October 1928): 113.

134. Eleanor Rowland Wembridge, "The Girl Tribe—An Anthropological Study," Survey 60 (1928): 198.

135. Temple Bailey, "Wait for Prince Charming," Ladies' Home Journal 43 (October 1926): 20+.

136. Census 1920-1 , 391-393; Census 1930-1 , 846-847.

137. New York State Department of Health, Division of Vital Statistics, Annual Report , 1922-1930; S.V. DePorte, Marriage Statistics, New York State . . . 1921-24 (Albany: State Department of Health, n.d.). These permit construction of the best series of single-year-of-age first marriages—based on registration data—that I have discovered.

138. The foreign born and to a lesser extent the children of the foreign born do provide a very striking counterexample, but this may easily be a result of compositional changes in these groups.

139. A like analysis, for the decade of the 1910s, was carried out as early as 1928 by William Fielding Ogburn, who, however, did not choose to analyze as narrow an age group as I and thus spent a great deal of the analysis worrying about changes in age distribution and in ethnic distributions in the state population. The results are reported extensively in Ernest R. Groves and William Fielding Ogburn, American Marriage and Family Relationships (New York: Henry Holt, 1932). Unlike Ogburn, I employ ordinary least squares multiple regression.

140. In part, this is to propose what is almost a demographic tautology, for by promoting early fertility, early marriage tends per se to be associated with relatively rapid population growth. But a look at the states in which population growth in the 1920s was especially rapid convinces one that other factors are at work as well, those that promoted immigration. The four most rapidly growing states during that decade were California, Florida, Michigan, and Arizona, with rates of growth all exceeding three in ten, well above anything that natural increase could explain. Nor were these states characterized by particularly high fertility. Many of the high-fertility states in the depressed agricultural South had rates of net population growth slow enough to suggest that natural increase was being offset by outmigration.

141. Obviously, one doesn't "search" for a mate across a whole state, or in a way limited by state boundaries per se . We may very reasonably suppose that the overall decline in the skewing of sex ratios also was reflected in declines within more meaningful local marriage markets. break

142. Based on retrospective accounts taken in 1940 and published in Census 1940-4, 142-165.

143. Robert L. Hauser, Fertility Tables for Birth Cohorts by Color: United States, 1917-73 (Rockville, Md.: U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 1976), 424-425.

144. Too many years had elapsed since the vital events in question to expect very precise retrospective information on the 1920s from the 1975 Current Population Survey of marital and fertility histories, but the gross patterns discernible there fill out this picture usefully.

145. Regine K. Stix and Frank W. Notestein, Controlled Fertility: An Evaluation of Clinic Service (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1940), 25.

146. This study was carried out in 1941, asking about the family-building practices and beliefs of a near-representative sample of fecund white Protestants of native birth who had lived in cities for at least some years before their marriages (all in 1927-1929) and were living in Indianapolis at the time of the survey. See Appendix 4 for a discussion of machine-readable data files.

147. The relationship of schooling to fertility control was largely direct and not the product of a joint tendency for more educated women to marry older and for older-marrying women to practice more fertility limitation at this date early in their marriages.

148. James Reed, From Private to Public Virtue (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 124.

149. Stix and Notestein, Controlled Fertility , 53.

150. Middletown , 124; and see Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue .

151. Paul H. Gebhard et al. , Pregnancy, Birth and Abortion (New York: Harper & Brothers and Paul B. Hoefer, Inc., 1958), 70.

152. Data on contraceptive methods in Indianapolis rest on retabulations of data presented in Charles F. Westoff, Lee F. Herrera, and P. K. Whelpton, "Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility, Part XX: The Use, Effectiveness, and Acceptability of Methods of Fertility Control," Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 31 (1953): 314, 317, 324.

153. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), chaps. 10-11.

154. P. K. Whelpton and Clyde V. Kiser, "Social and Psychological Factors Affecting Fertility, Part VI: The Planning of Fertility," Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 25 (1947): 73.

155. F. I. Davenport, "Adolescent Interests: A Study of the Sexual Interests and Knowledge of Young Women," Archives of Psychology 66 (New York, 1923); Westoff, Herrera, and Whelpton, "Social and Psychological Factors." break

156. Easily the greatest proportion of the variation in the propensity to use birth control was explained by wives' formal schooling, rather than by their ages at marriage. There was very little variation by husband's income at marriage or by Protestant sectarian affiliation.

157. Samuel A. Stouffer and Lyle M. Spencer, "Marriage and Divorce in Recent Years," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 188 (November 1936): 58.

158. Samuel H. Preston and John McDonald, "The Incidence of Divorce within Cohorts of American Marriages Contracted Since the Civil War," Demography 16 (1979): 10-11; USNCHS Vital Statistics 1974, III: 1-5, 2-5; William L. O'Neill, Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

159. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Marriage and Divorce 1930 (Washington: USGPO, 1932), 24, 35; Thomas P. Monahan, "The Changing Probability of Divorce," American Sociological Review 5 (1940): 536-545; USNCHS Series 21-34, tables 3, 4; USNCHS Series 21-38, table 1.

160. May, Great Expectations , 158-159.