79: Beth Bailey's Front Porch to Back Seat

Beth Bailey's From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America reads 20th century culture through the lens of dating and courtship.  She draws on prescriptive literature - advice books, newspaper columns, magazines for teens, college newspapers, and "scholarly" works by proponents of marriage ed - to reconstruct two major changes in courtship in America from 1920 to 1965.

First, courtship made a spatial shift from the female-dominated private sphere (calling) to the male-dominated public sphere (dating).  This shift began in the 1890s, when urban working classes went out on dates due to lack of space and privacy at home.  It was picked up by the upper classes and then "imploded" into the middle class in the 1920s.  The shift created a tension within the courtship, because while women were still urged to remain passive and protect their sexual virtue, the date now happened in the context of the marketplace, and men, with their superior purchasing power, now controlled the date.  This shift from private home to public marketplace also changed the meaning of courtship, from a thoughtful step toward matrimony to a "public commodity" that could be used to achieve social standing in a new consumer-oriented youth culture.  This shift was reflected in the new language about dating: advice books talk about price tags, supply, and scarcity, and describe virtue as a commodity, merchandise, or line of goods.