Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (7 page)

Underlying these new approaches to virginity loss were the growing consensus that marital love ought to be erotic and that women were sex- ual by nature. The socioeconomic changes of the late 1800s had, along with the suffragist and social-purity movements, greatly expanded edu- cation opportunities for women of all social classes and brought White middle-class women into the paid labor force in record numbers. At the same time (and not unrelated), fertility among native-born Whites plum- meted, aided by the popularization of birth control.
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Perceiving the White American family to be in crisis, many turn-of-the-century social critics recommended a new type of marriage, emphasizing personal ful- fillment over family formation and perpetuated by bonds of companion- ship and erotic affection.
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Positing “a satisfying sex life” as “essential for” rather than antithetical to “a satisfying marital union” would not, in turn, have been possible if middle-class Americans had not begun to em- brace the new theories of sexuality, advanced by the likes of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, which proposed that all humans were inher- ently sexual and that sexual repression of either gender caused more harm than good.
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In this context of growing gender equality and recognition of women’s sexuality, many young White middle-class women saw cultivating sexy, feminine personas as a means of demonstrating their independence and modernity (a practice encouraged by the burgeoning mass media and ad- vertising industries).
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The dawn of “sex appeal” did not, however, dis- rupt the prevailing belief that women’s virginity represented a gift ideally given at marriage. The “typical” White college woman interviewed by journalists Dorothy Bromley and Florence Britten “did not intend to go the limit with any boy because she believed in ‘giving her whole self when she married’ ”; and advice manuals noted regretfully that some girls, “when in love,” believed that virginity “is the only thing they have to give.”
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However, some young women (primarily the highly educated) were be- ginning to interpret virginity loss as a
rite of passage,
or step in the process of growing up, a potentially egalitarian view popularized in the late 1920s by Margaret Mead and other anthropologists.
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In Bromley and Britten’s estimation, such women were “in almost as great a hurry to cast aside their virginity as their grandmothers were to let down their skirts and put up their hair.”
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A few young women even seemed to feel stigmatized by their virginity, like the Midwestern girl who said of her

own first lover, “I felt apologetic about being a virgin, and thought that the man was doing me a favor.”
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For their part, many men clearly still wished to be their wife’s first and only sexual partner. “I realize how selfish it is on my part,” wrote one of Bromley and Britten’s respondents, “but I feel that 90 per cent of men will demand the same.”
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However, many also expressed willingness “to forgo virginity in a wife who has been sincere in her past love.”
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The increas- ing acceptability of nonvirginity in women derived in large part from cul- tural ideals linking love, marriage, and sexuality; for if sexual intercourse was to be seen as an appropriate expression of committed love, then pre- marital virginity loss could be forgiven when inspired by an “all-consum- ing love” (especially if a couple were engaged).
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Still, a woman’s social class and race often determined whether she received the benefit of the doubt. Expert and popular literature of the 1920s and 1930s perpetuated the image of working-class women and women of color as uniquely prone to using their sexuality for material gain and losing their virginity “with- out reflection and without motive, in an almost animalistic manner.”
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For White middle-class men, the chief effect of the new theories of sex- uality was that injunctions to repress their sexuality were replaced by warnings that, in the words of Freud, “complete abstinence in youth is often not the best preparation for marriage. . . . Women sense this, and prefer among their suitors those who have already proved their mas- culinity with other women.”
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Although outright rejection of the Chris- tian ideal of male premarital chastity placed a man “just beyond the bound of respectability,” Bromley and Britten reported that many a man who remained a virgin in college felt “inclined to think I am something of a sissy.”
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“Decent” young men, epitomized by Hugh Carver, were ex- pected to prefer sex with love over sex for its own sake. By the mid-1930s, many young women claimed to prefer sexually experienced husbands.

The majority of the women in Bromley and Britten’s survey

discounted their future husband’s virginity. Those who intended to wait for marriage argued that they would want to be initiated into the great and rather terrifying adventure by a man who had got beyond the fum- bling stage. They would prefer that he had not been initiated by a prosti- tute, but they would draw the line only at a man who was diseased.
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Alongside these prevailing perspectives, the belief that virginity loss represented a rite of passage gained currency even faster among young

men than among their female counterparts.
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Many held that, in the words of sexologist Albert Ellis, a man who does not “seek out sex satis- factions prior to marriage . . . is not smart . . . not really a man.”
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The net result of these developments was the narrowing, but by no means the disappearance, of the sexual double standard.

These “modern” understandings of virginity emerged in concert with the development of a middle-class youth culture in which dating played a prominent role.
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The expansion of secondary education after about 1900 and the contemporaneous recognition of adolescence as a distinct and precarious life stage effectively isolated youth from adult society and encouraged them to defer adult responsibilities like marriage.
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In addi- tion to its inherent pleasures, dating represented a welcome emblem of generational difference; and the postponement of adulthood allowed young people to emphasize sociability over spouse-seeking. Dating was further popularized through the increasingly national mass media and fa- cilitated by new technologies like the telephone and automobile.
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African Americans experienced the social trends that changed under- standings of virginity among Whites in a context of persistent racism and restricted economic prospects. In the early 1900s, serial monogamy and semipermanent cohabitation were the norm among urban working-class and poor Blacks, largely because they were unable to achieve the eco- nomic stability that facilitated marriage.
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Under such circumstances, ex- tolling premarital virginity made little sense. Between 1916 and 1930, over 500,000 African Americans migrated from the rural South to the in- dustrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest, greatly expanding the Black working class and fostering a vibrant urban entertainment culture.
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Working-class youth took advantage of the resultant opportunities to date, pet, and lose their virginity before marriage (granted, premarital vir- ginity had not previously been stressed among working-class Blacks, es- pecially men), while leaders of the middle-class “Talented Tenth” re- newed their calls for premarital sexual propriety and enjoined their daughters
and sons
to think of their virginity as a gift.
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Young middle- class Black men, for their part, appear to have voiced strong support for the conservative standards with which they were raised, even as they had sex before marriage at higher rates than any group of their peers.
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Yet, it was not long before dating became the norm among middle-class urban African American youth.
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(In the rural South, where Jim Crow laws, poverty, and geographic isolation denied Black youth access to the venues of formal dating, they continued to court at picnics, church, and work.)

As middle-class youth adopted dating, their relationships grew more intimate sexually. They had been raised to view love as erotic and women as sexual; and the private nature of dates allowed for greater sexual free- dom than had calling. Hand-holding and kissing, which had become con- ventional parts of White middle-class courtship by the First World War, were joined by the mid-1920s by necking and petting.
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Even in small cities like Muncie, Indiana, half of high school boys and one third of girls had participated in “petting parties,” according to wife-and-husband re- searchers Helen and Robert Lynd.
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Intimate sexual activity began to occur at earlier stages of courtship among middle-class African Ameri- cans as well. Comparing youth of late 1800s to their 1930s counterparts, one former slave said, “They courted then just like they do now. Only they wasn’t fast like they are now.”
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Many unmarried youth felt that they could pet to a point just short of vaginal sex (but often to orgasm) without compromising their virginity. Indeed, doing so became so common in the 1920s that it garnered its own appellation:
technical virginity.
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For example, Ben Hecht’s 1921 novel,
Erik Dorn,
describes pretty flapper Mary James as “technically a virgin.

... She guarded [her chastity] with a precocious skill, parading it through conversation, hinting slyly of it. . . . She had learned the trick of exciting men with her virginity.”
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The same factors that made petting more prevalent, along with minor challenges to the ideal of premarital virginity, led to a dramatic increase in the number of young Americans losing their virginity before marriage. Although premarital virginity loss had not been uncommon among any group of men since the late 1800s, it now became more the rule than the exception.
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Rates of sex before marriage remained lower among women, but climbed steeply—from about 14 percent of White women born before 1900 to about 40 percent of those born later.
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(Changes among Black middle-class women were probably less pronounced, given continuing pressure to uphold the code of “chastity and model woman- hood.”)
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Most women who lost their virginity before marriage did so discreetly, with the men they intended to marry. Their “conservatism” was no doubt fueled by the higher social value placed on women’s vir- ginity, as well as by laws and customs impeding unmarried women’s ac- cess to contraception.
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Even so, the changes in women’s behavior were so substantial that many middle-class men who came of age after the 1910s began their sexual careers with “respectable” women, whereas

young men of previous generations had by and large limited their con- quests to prostitutes or women of lower status than their own.
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The increasingly erotic nature of love and the growing tendency to de- fine individuals in terms of their sexuality helped give rise to the under- standing of homosexuality as referring to a type of person, “encompass- ing emotions, dress, mannerisms, [and] behavior”—albeit a psychologi- cally troubled person—rather than “a discrete, punishable offense.”
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Labeling and repression of homosexual men and women increased in the short run—many states criminalized consensual sodomy, for instance— but also fostered the group consciousness that ultimately inspired the gay rights movement.
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The blossoming of homosexual subcultures in urban centers in the 1920s and the increasing appearance of homosexual themes in popular culture—plays like
The Captive
(1926), novels like
Well of Loneliness
(1928), and Harlem songs like “Bull Dagger Woman” — helped more young gays and lesbians to recognize their desires and real- ize that they were not alone.
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At the time, it was believed that having only same-sex affairs would guarantee virginity at marriage.
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But the gradual increase in the visibility and acceptability of homosexuality that began in this era was crucial to the emergence of present-day ideas about same-sex virginity loss.

Toward the Brink of Sexual Revolution, 1945–1965

American sexual culture took a conservative turn in the late 1940s and 1950s, thanks to a prosperous economy and widespread longing for se- curity after the deprivation and uncertainty of the Great Depression and Second World War. In the 1930s, many young Americans had seen mar- riage as a somewhat distant goal, not least because they could ill afford to assume responsibility for families of their own. The rapid expansion of white- and blue-collar employment opportunities after the Allied victory greatly reduced economic disincentives to marriage. Between 1939 and 1951, the average age at first marriage fell from 23 to 20 for women and from 27 to 23 for men. By 1959, 47 percent of U.S. women were marry- ing before their nineteenth birthday.
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Changes in the timing of marriage affected the timing and nature of dating. In the 1920s and 1930s, young people didn’t begin dating until late adolescence and most dated as widely as possible, reserving exclusive relationships until they were seriously

contemplating engagement.
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But as ages at marriage crept downward, many youth felt compelled to start searching for Mr. or Miss Right at age 12 or 13. “Going steady” with a single partner replaced sociability as dat- ing’s chief aim.

Postwar parents worried, not without reason, that going steady would lead to sex before marriage. Steady couples paired up for months or years and typically saw themselves as more committed than those who were merely dating, often adopting many of the trappings of betrothal — monogamy, endless hours together, and exchanging visible tokens such as rings—even though the arrangement was understood to be temporary.
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Steadies therefore enjoyed ample incentives and opportunities to engage in escalating sexual intimacies. Secluded “Inspiration Points” — sites where couples could “make out” (the new term for petting) in parked cars—sprang up across the nation.
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“Good girls” were expected to re- strict petting to committed love relationships and to preserve their vir- ginity until marriage. As one young woman told a Gallup pollster, “Vir- ginity is one of the greatest things a woman can give to her husband.”
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Young men, in contrast, were tacitly encouraged to “sow their wild oats.”
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Adult authorities sought to curb teens’ sexual activities by tight- ening curfews and rules, especially on women—measures that tended to enhance the appeal of early marriage, given the sexual liberty it al- lowed.
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Many experts argued that couples who felt “ready for sexual intercourse . . .
should
marry” and even berated reluctant-to-marry cou- ples for “moral cowardice.”
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