Straight (20 page)

The 1838 correspondence between the American abolitionists Angelina Grimke and Theodore Weld was similarly revealing of the priorities of the era. Lasting only three months, their courtship letter-writing was deeply influenced not just by shared Christianity and abolitionist
principles but by Grimke's fiery feminism. In Grimke's essay “Letters to Catherine Beecher,” she blasted the contemporary culture of masculinity, calling it “a charter for the exercise of tyranny and selfishness, pride and arrogance, lust and brutal violence,” and pilloried conventional expectations of femininity as robbing women of their essential humanity and rights. Weld was sympathetic to these views, and agreed with his beloved's assertion that “when human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit . . . sinks into insignificance and nothingness.”[
17
]

In the course of their courtship, Grimke and Weld's shared feminism, and Grimke's keen and critical awareness of gender, brought them to the point of questioning heterosexuality altogether. They did not call heterosexuality by that name, of course; the word did not yet exist. Yet in the midst of their whirlwind correspondence, Grimke wondered aloud, “Why does not the love of my own dear sister and of my faithful Jane [Smith, Grimke's dearest female friend] satisfy, if as a human being I must have
human love?
Why do I feel in my inmost soul that you,
you
only, can fill up the deep void that is there?”[
18
] It was a good question. Grimke and Weld certainly do seem to have experienced their love for one another as spiritual, so much so that they both worried they might unintentionally be engaging in idolatry. They also believed that the spirit had no sex or gender but was transcendent and universal. If love was spiritual and the spirit had no sex or gender, then why indeed did it seem to matter so much exactly
whose
love existed in their lives? Why should they both long to be together physically? Why, as Grimke asked Weld, was it true that “those of our own sex
cannot
fill the void in human hearts?” Weld, who confessed that it had never before occurred to him to wonder why this was so, fell back on religious explanations. Maleness and femaleness were part of God's plan, and the apparent inevitability of their mutual attraction was, too. Yet at the same time, neither he nor Grimke was willing even to theoretically root their love in something as base, as potentially sinful, or as fraught with power imbalance as biological sex.

Just as Charles Kingsley worked to find a way to reconcile lust and spiritualized love for his fiancée and himself, Angelina Grimke and Theodore Weld battled together to hammer out the terms of a marriage that could provide them with emotional, political, and spiritual
unity. Romantic love did not “come naturally” for these nineteenth-century couples. It was much too important for that. This demanding, complicated model of love swiftly became seen as such a vital part of marriage that, as of the 1860s, even the law began explicitly to accommodate it. As Harvard-trained lawyer and law professor Robert C. Brown put it in 1934, “[T]he most important legal action given for the purpose of protecting marital relations from unjustifiable interference by outsiders is what is known as the action for alienation of affections.”[
19
] Love was not love, as Shakespeare put it, that bent with the remover to remove. Love was serious, mutual, obligatory business. Popularized in literature, spiritualized and made equal in practice, by the end of the nineteenth century romantic love between men and women had become a defining component of heterosexuality all its own, a newly standard destination in the itinerary of an average life.

DATING AND RATING

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

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

Dating was also suited to urban life's opportunities for meeting people. Although most dates still happened among people who shared social circles—among coworkers or friends of friends—it was also quite possible for a man to approach a woman who was a complete stranger. Dating, like marriage, was to remain mostly segregated along ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic lines for many decades (it is largely so today), but the relative spontaneity with which a date could be arranged broadened the range of what was possible and, indeed, what might be considered permissible. Particularly in North America, the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a time when many ethnically diverse Northern European immigrants “became white,” assimilating to an American ideology of race in which all white-skinned people were more alike than they were different because all whites were contrasted to all blacks. Dating between white ethnic groups was part of this process, and led in many cases to the motley national ancestries so common among those who appear today to be simply “white North Americans.”[
22
]

Economically, dating was tailor-made for the urban worker. With factory-based industry well established, many turn-of-the-century urban workers could reach their peak earning level quite early in life. Even if not, most could at least find a reasonably regular wage. Not yet responsible for wives and families, young urbanites tended to have money to spend on streetcars and cab rides, dances, restaurants, and the occasional corsage. Such spending patterns only became more commonplace as the rituals of dating spread both up and down the socioeconomic ladder. Dating, like marriage, was an overtly economic transaction, and was at least superficially organized along what had become traditional male-provider lines. Men paid for the opportunity to date women, just as they expected to be responsible
for the economics of the marital household and the support of their wives. Paying for dates was both a symbolic demonstration of the male-breadwinner paradigm and a pragmatic reflection of the superior earning power men had in comparison to women.

But women also had an economic role to play in dating, one that proved critical to the development of modern consumer culture. Men paid for the dates themselves, but women paid to become attractive enough to be considered hot dating property. In the less family- and community-centric world of dating, an attractive appearance was instrumental not only to an individual man's subjective response to her; it also determined how she and her beau were perceived when they were out together in public, and how much status he would acquire from being seen dating her. Female beauty became the coin of the realm. But beauty was also naturalized and spiritualized. Just as one would not freely admit that a suitor's money had a role to play in one's decision to marry, one would not say that one dated a woman only for her looks. Neither could women just come out and say that cold cream was the secret to their “naturally” radiant complexions or confess to the hours spent with their hair tied up in rags in order to achieve those darling caps of nonchalant curls.[
23
] Because of the mythology that held a woman's beauty to be both “natural” and an outward reflection of her inner virtues, all the hours, effort, and money she spent on her appearance had to be, by general agreement, invisible.

Because “the right look” was simultaneously hidden and highly public, the rise of dating was paralleled by an almost unbelievable rise in the production and advertisement of consumer products relating to personal appearance. Many of the modern cosmetics types and brand names we still recognize—tube lipsticks, mascara, Max Factor, Estee Lauder—had their origins in the early twentieth century. The ready-to-wear clothing industry also took off during this time, and periodicals of the era show a sudden explosion of ads for everything from skin creams to stylish shoes. Dating provided a big incentive to buy into a consumer-friendly paradigm of personal attractiveness that just required the right supplies. Ideally effortless and genuine, beauty was supposed to come from within, but at the same time there was a belief that any woman could become attractive “if she tried.” All it took was the right attitude and the right products. The culture of dating was not
the only factor that fueled the rise of the consumer fashion and beauty industries, but it was certainly a strong component in a world where women were constantly told that they could “put him in the mood for matrimony” with Pond's face cream.

This may sound superficial, but looks were nothing if not important to dating culture. The fact that dating was carried out in public spaces meant simultaneously that dating offered a species of lost-in-the-crowd anonymity, and that anyone and everyone could be the audience for a date. Cities offered numerous public venues like theatres and parks that gave considerable privacy. They also offered community in the form of various convenient places—dance halls, cafes, ice-cream parlors, and so on—that would be adopted by particular groups of friends, coworkers, or neighbors.[
24
] As with the case of the longstanding European tradition of leisurely promenades taken as a see-and-be-seen sort of ritual for the whole community, American dating was an opportunity to scope out the options and the competition while simultaneously showing yourself off. It was not just women who stood to gain status and attention if their appearance attracted high-quality dates. Men wanted dates whose appearance reflected well on them when they were seen together.

Particularly prior to World War II, the public nature of dating created a culture of competition that came to characterize the whole proceeding. As historian Beth Bailey writes in her revealing history of twentieth-century dating,
From Front Porch to Back Seat,
“You competed to become popular, and being popular allowed you to continue to compete.
Competition
was the key term in the formula.”[
25
] A particularly blatant system known as “rating and dating” existed on college campuses from the mid-1920s until World War II changed the mood and removed enormous numbers of men from universities. Potential dates were quite literally graded on their worth in the dating scene. A group of University of Michigan women rated men from A for “smooth” to D for “semigoon” and E for “spook.”[
26
] Women were rated every bit as harshly by men, making many women feel desperate to prove that they “rated.”

In all these ways, dating culture was not so much the death knell of traditional mate-finding practices as it was the coroner's report. Courtships no longer mandated larger family involvement, as men
and women physically, economically, and emotionally removed their pursuit of love relationships from the family's reach. Vestiges of the older system lingered, of course. Parents might have protracted fights with children over their children's tastes in date material, emphasizing just how far out of the mate-selection picture parents and extended family had been pushed. Indeed, parents might not meet their children's romantic partners until a relationship was well established. Meeting a date's parents for the first time is still a rite of passage that continues to underscore just how likely it is that a dating couple might come from sufficiently different social circles that they would not already be casually acquainted with one another's families.

As dating became more and more popular, romantic love became something most people at least hoped they would personally experience. Rising industrial affluence and an abundance of employment meant economic survival was not as directly dependent on marriage. Men and women both could increasingly afford to prolong courtship, turning dating into a phase of life that lasted years. Courtship became less serious, at least up to a point, insofar as calling off a dating relationship was nothing like breaking an engagement. Marriage was still the very palpable goal of dating. But the goal was distant and could be approached at leisure. There were plenty of detours where romantic love could be experienced for its own sake, without necessarily ending in marriage.

Critics worried about the popularity of these new romantic dalliances. Would the expectation or the experience of falling in love lead to the development of unrealistic ideas about marriage? Would these crash courses in emotional excitement ruin young people, particularly young women, for the more complex love of a proper marriage? “These nomads of the affections give and take so little as they pass from hand to hand,” Maude Royden wrote in 1922, “that they become cheap and have little left to give at last; nor do they really get what they would take. Men and women claim the right to ‘experience,' but experience of what?”[
27
]