Labor of Love (10 page)

A period where one had all the freedoms of an adult with none of the responsibilities lent itself to satire. A character in the popular 1912 campus novel
Stover at Yale
delightedly trills the chorus of a popular song: “Oh, father and mother pay all the bills, And we have all the fun!”

Yet to go to college was not just a frivolous self-indulgence. As the United States transitioned from an industrial economy to one based on consumption and services, college offered a new phase of necessary training. Shopgirls and waitresses had to figure out how to conduct themselves in the workplace in order to maximize their chances of success. In the 1920s and '30s, a more privileged group of young people went to school to practice the same skills.

The rise of college and the spread of coeducation in the twentieth century also shaped the history of dating. Young people who moved to four-year institutions and enrolled in classes together started meeting and mixing in new ways. And they started thinking about courtship differently, as a kind of learning process.

Today, friends reassure us that even the most soporific date or apocalyptic breakup teaches us something. Now that many women and men have shaken the stigma formerly attached to premarital sex, we can generally “go the limit” with partners we will not marry without risking arrest or censure. There are few lines you might not cross in order to learn.

For young people lucky enough to spend four years at a residential college, this is especially true during their years on campus. From the outside, campus courtship may look like chaos. It has, to most onlookers, for as long as students at four-year colleges have dated. In fact it is an extension of the education that such schools offer. The most important learning, the brochures say, takes place outside the classroom. Many students act as if “going out” is the point of going to college.

They are right to sense that going out in college is different from how they will be able to at any other age, or in any other context. The selection process whereby a school chooses students and the relatively homogeneous and predictable environments in which they live and study suggest the opposite of a speakeasy or a wide-open bar. It seems to promise safety, even if that safety is illusory. (According to the most recent statistics, one in four women will be sexually assaulted while attending college.)

Memories of their former dissolution may later console professionals through years of boring desk jobs.
You had to choose adulthood
, they think wistfully.
Your wild youth was too wild to last.
But the most apparently anarchic college courtship rituals in fact train students to follow highly specific scripts. The point of mastering them has less to do with romance than with what might make them successful thereafter. Shopgirls and waitresses had to learn the flirting skills that gave them a chance at professional success on the job. More privileged students can take the time to master them on the quad or at the frat.

*   *   *

The turn of the millennium was not the first time that the American media had been transfixed by young people partying right up to the brink of economic crisis. In the 1920s, national newspapers and magazines reported extensively on the sexual escapades of high school and college students. Before hooking up, there was “petting,” and everyone was doing it.

In the 1940s and '50s, Alfred Kinsey defined petting as “deliberately touching body parts above or below the waist” (thus distinguishing it from “necking,” or general body contact sustained while making out). In terms of the baseball metaphor, petting covered everything between first base and home plate.

“Mothers Complain That Modern Girls ‘Vamp' Their Sons at Petting Parties,”
The New York Times
proclaimed in 1922.
The Atlantic
and
The New Republic
, the most prestigious magazines in America, regularly included features on “These Wild Young People” written by “one of them.”

At least one audience was guaranteed to take an interest: the petters' parents. Between 1900 and 1930, a dramatic demographic shift changed family dynamics across the United States. Birthrates had been falling since 1800. By 1900, the average American woman was having only half as many children as she would have three generations earlier. Thanks to increased access to birth control, couples in the professional and managerial classes were stopping after their second or third kid. These parents did not have to exercise the kind of severe discipline that had been needed to keep order in households of nine or ten.

Parents lavished affection on children and sought to help them flourish by discovering and developing their interests. The proliferation of advice literature about the new “emotional” family offers evidence of their commitment to this project. By the mid-1930s, 80 percent of women in professional families and nearly 70 percent of women in managerial families read at least one book on child rearing every year. The largest proportion read five. Fathers, too, began buying these books and attending events like teacher conferences.

These were the original helicopter parents. They sent their children to school longer and allowed them a great deal more leisure than they themselves had enjoyed. Ironically, the more they gave their children, the less influence they exerted over them. That role was taken over by their peers. As young people started spending less time with their families and more time with one another, they created their own culture. Petting was part of it, and helped prepare kids for a world that was changing faster than their parents could keep up with.

*   *   *

The process began in high school. By the 1920s, more than three-quarters of American teens attended. A study on child welfare commissioned by the White House in the early 1930s found that outside school activities, the average urban teen spent four nights per week engaging in unsupervised recreation with his or her friends. Their activities included dating—going to watch vaudeville shows or movies, going for ice cream or Coca-Colas (“coking”), going to dances organized by schools or thrown, impromptu, in a classmate's basement, and simply piling into a car together and cruising around.

Parents and schools tried to impose guidelines on these activities. My grandfather, who was a young dater in the 1930s, recalls a schoolteacher admonishing him and his classmates that if they let girls sit in their laps while “joyriding,” they had to be sure “to keep at least a magazine between them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald warned that “none of the Victorian mothers … had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed.” A quick glance at the tables of contents of various editions of Emily Post's
Etiquette
books captures how quickly the shift happened. The 1922 edition contained a chapter on “The Chaperon and Other Conventions”; by 1927 it had been retitled “The Vanishing Chaperone and Other New Conventions”; and by 1937, “The Vanished Chaperone and Other Lost Conventions.”

That certain conventions had disappeared did not mean that courtship had devolved into a free-for-all. Rather, having been brought together in schools, young people were developing their own codes. Peer pressure replaced parental discipline.

In 1925, Benjamin Lindsey attempted to explain the changes in attitude that he saw taking place. A judge from Denver, Lindsey had spent decades working in the juvenile justice system. Many of the cases that he describes in
The Revolt of Modern Youth
start with a date gone awry. Take, for instance, fifteen-year-old Helen, who had made plans for a friend of a friend to pick her up at school one afternoon and give her a ride in his new automobile. Though she explicitly stated that she would not let him “make love to” her, she had agreed to give him a kiss.

“That's a fair price,” she testified. When Helen's high school principal intercepted her date plans, she had the young man with the car charged with attempted white slave trafficking. But Judge Lindsey marveled at the “strenuous, strict, and self-denying conventions of the strange Flapper-Flipper world she lived in.”

Countless cases showed him that Helen was in the new mainstream. “Of all the youth who go to parties, attend dances, and ride together in automobiles, more than 90 percent indulge in hugging and kissing,” Lindsey reported. “This does not mean that every girl lets
any
boy hug and kiss her, but that she
is
hugged and kissed.”

Lindsey concluded that by the end of high school, 15 to 25 percent of those “who begin with the hugging and kissing eventually ‘go the limit.'” The rate among boys was roughly the same as it had been in the late nineteenth century. But whereas previously most middle-class young men said they had their first sexual experiences in the red-light districts, now they petted their female peers on dates. Even if they refused to go “all the way,” “nice girls” were no longer insulted by being asked.

In light of these facts, Lindsey argued that it was imperative that parents and educators discard their “wet dishrag morality” and speak openly with children. However, the real revelation was that school, in itself, constituted a kind of sex education. The ways the boys and girls mingled on school premises, and the dating culture that they developed after class, became a key part of what they went there to learn. In the relatively sheltered atmosphere that the school provided, students were willing to take the kinds of risks that only Charity Girls had ventured in dive bars or on boardwalks. When students left for college, they moved into the world of peers and immersed themselves in their rituals full-time.

*   *   *

The rise of coed college education drove the rise of dating. Between 1890 and 1920, the number of students attending college in the United States tripled. By 1927, a majority of colleges had also become coed. Higher education had long interested Americans, because of their belief in self-improvement; coeducation added a dash of sex appeal. In the 1920s and '30s, the growth of the national mass media and entertainment industries fueled a college craze. The new advertising industries used images of well-heeled students to promote new goods. New clothing lines marketed popular articles of clothing as “college style.” An army of writers of both fiction and nonfiction told a broader public how to imitate college courtship patterns. They created two archetypal characters: the College Man and the Coed.

Some disciplinarians tried to hold the College Man and the Coed to old standards. Campus YMCAs, YWCAs, and churches offered regular “mixers.” Deans exhorted young men to call on the female classmates they met at such events in the parlors of their dormitories or to take them for a stroll. Yet even stubborn traditionalists had to recognize that they were fighting a losing battle.

The College Man and Coed mixed freely. The opening pages of the 1922 short story collection
Town and Gown
show the provincial Peter Warshaw arriving at the unnamed state school where he will study. Peter is frankly overwhelmed.

“The passing and repassing of students was dizzying. Fur-coated co-eds with rouged cheeks; men wearing horn-rimmed glasses; an instructor or two hurrying by with green bags in hand; Chinese students in groups; two colored girls, hesitant and self-effacing; couples who sauntered, gayly glancing about for acquaintances.”

The provincial student thrown into this environment had to become accustomed to interacting with far more classmates than he had at home. He also had to master a new, strange language.

The terms that College Men and Coeds tossed around changed fast. Varsity novels devoted a lot of space to slang, dropping terms in scare quotes. In his bestselling debut,
This Side of Paradise
, the young F. Scott Fitzgerald constantly offered definitions. A chapter devoted to “petting” spent less time on love and sex than on how kids gossiped about it.

A riff on the “Popular Daughter” or “P.D.” sets a chain of definitions falling like dominoes. “The ‘belle' had become the ‘flirt,'” Fitzgerald wrote, “the ‘flirt' had become the ‘baby vamp.'” In the male “fusser,” these girls met their match.

Even if you arrived at school sexually experienced, learning to talk the talk constituted a key part of your higher education. The star of
Town and Gown
, Andy Protheroe, was “the champion fusser of a State University that made all of its activities competitive.” “Andy kissed a girl when he was fourteen; by sixteen he could ‘love em up.'” But during his first year at State University he develops a “new ‘line.'” “He learned to use the term ‘pet' instead of ‘lovin up' and to ‘fuss' instead of ‘stall.'” He learns to dress the part, too, with “a tiny moustache, shell-rimmed spectacles, tight-fitting, gray coat, and silk gloves.”

“Greetings, and all that old rot,” he sighs, like he is bored already, when he says hello. Over the course of
Town and Gown
, we see him use this same line on multiple Coeds.

Andy is a “Greek”—a fraternity member. Any College Man worth dating was. A pretty Coed could hope to climb the social ladder on the basis of her looks. But the “barb”—short for “barbarian,” or non-Greek—faced steeper odds.

In the 1920s, fraternities were at the center of campus life. For several decades, they had been expanding rapidly. In 1883, there were 505 fraternity chapters and 16 sorority chapters nationwide. In 1912, there were 1,560; by 1930, that number had climbed to 3,900, and 35 percent of all undergraduates were Greeks. Fraternities and sororities became ground zero of college dating.

If the life of the College Man centered on Fraternity Row, the life of the Coed centered on the College Men who lived there. At least it was supposed to, according to the books that College Men wrote about her after graduation. In this, she was very different from her predecessors. The first generation of American women who attended universities in the 1870s and 1880s had inspired an outpouring from experts arguing that education would desex them. (The psychologist G. Stanley Hall, for instance, warned that earning a BA would leave a woman “functionally castrated.”)