From an item by Peter Ling on 'sex and the automobile in 39(11)
History Today (2012) -
By combining mobility and privacy, the automobile offered young
Americans in the 1920s a 'getaway' vehicle from parental supervision.
Consequently, students of American courtship attributed the rise of
dating to the automobile's arrival. Dr Evelyn Duvall in a 1956 textbook
for teenagers, for instance, declared simply that the car had changed
courtship.
To understand the automobile's contribution to this
change, however, one should first clarify the nature of earlier
courtship practices. The convention of calling was not universal
practice in late nineteenth-century America. It was a bourgeois custom
based on the concerns and capabilities of the middle classes. As a
courtship ritual, calling involved three of the pillars of bourgeois
life: the family, respectability, and in particular, privacy. The focal
point of calling was gaining admittance into the private family sphere
of the home which was the central expression of bourgeois status.
Although privacy itself had only become a realistic possibility in the
eighteenth century, thereafter it had rapidly established itself as a
necessity for the affluent and an aspiration for the poor. A badge of
respectability, privacy was profoundly important to the
nineteenth-century bourgeois family whose individual members each pined
for rooms of their own. Only affluence afforded such spaciousness and so
the separate parlour in which callers applied for admission into the
bosom of the family was itself a status symbol. As guardians of the
home, women were the chief arbiters of who could call and who would
never be invited. Daughters could invite male suitors to call but there
remained a parental veto on who would be received. In this way, family
honour and essential privacy could be preserved. However, parental
oversight always threatened to infringe the maturing offspring's right
to privacy. To uphold their own notions of honour and ethics, Peter Gay
points out, parents went to extraordinary lengths. They would 'open
their children's letters, oversee their reading, chaperone their
visitors, (even) inspect their underwear'. To the dismay of the younger
generation, bourgeois parents failed to respect the principle of privacy
they preached.
For the mass of working-class Americans, such
privacy was very remote from the daily reality of overcrowding. Cramped
lodging houses made the social niceties of 'calling' ludicrously
impractical. Of course, a large proportion of the American working class
was either immigrant or the children of immigrants and so tried to
continue in the New World their traditional practices of chaperonage and
female seclusion. However, as social workers like Jane Addams noted,
the need for everyone to earn money in impoverished working-class
households made such customs hard to maintain, while crowded living
conditions, simultaneously prevented the adoption of bourgeois habits.
The working classes consequently pioneered dating as an expedient born
of the opportunities offered and the comforts denied to them. Forced out
onto the streets, Addams warned, working-class youth was highly
susceptible to the enticements of commercialised entertainment.
