Labor of Love

by Moira Weigel

  In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin reminisces about how the parents of his first marriage prospect encouraged him to fool around with their daughter. They would invite him over and leave the two of them in the parlor alone. Versions of this wink-winking permissiveness toward serious couples persisted up through the Calling Era.

  By the time urban vice squads were breaking up the first daters, many working-class parents had accepted the fact that their children would have premarital sex with their future spouses. In the 1910s, several fathers in New York State successfully sued men who had slept with, then spurned, their daughters, for “seduction under promise of marriage.” The courts that ruled in favor of these fathers implicitly decreed that sleeping with your fiancé was a reasonable thing to do.

  In the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey had discovered that most of the students he interviewed at the University of Indiana engaged in “heavy petting,” which often included stimulating each other to orgasm. The Kelly Longitudinal Study, a survey of three hundred white couples who started families in the 1950s, found that only 7 to 10 percent of them had only hugged and kissed before marriage. All others had “gone farther.”

  But if premarital sex had become common well before the Steady Era, going steady increased the odds that kids would have pre-premarital sex with partners they did not intend to marry. Studies conducted throughout the 1950s found again and again that teens believed going steady sufficed to make even the heaviest petting respectable, so long as you did not “go the limit.” In 1961, the sociologist Ira Reiss coined a phrase for the new moral code. He called it “petting with affection.”

  It was not all bad. Becoming emotionally intimate with one partner created opportunities to explore that felt safer than casual dates or “petting parties” had. It still does. I remember the long afternoons my high school boyfriend and I spent in the apartment his working parents never came home to before six or seven. Having exhausted the obvious things, we spent hours searching for the body part that could not be made erogenous. Where had we learned that word? The search became a game. We would leave for sports practices and come back saltier. Forced to fumble in the bathroom at some party, I would never have learned the important lesson that basically nothing is not A Thing.

  For young women especially, going steady provided reputation protection. It limited your overall number of partners and let you “neck” with someone who cared about you. The fact that his public image was tied to yours discouraged kissing and telling. Having a boyfriend could also shield you from unwanted advances. In 1963, the girl group the Angels gleefully repeated a steady’s threat to an aggressive admirer: My boyfriend’s back and you’re gonna be in trouble. Any woman who has been hit on hard can relate. Sometimes, telegraphing or even outright stating that you have no interest in a man will not cut it. You have to drop the “B” bomb—bring up a boyfriend real or imagined—to make him back off.

  Still, petting with affection placed a heavy burden on young women. It conscripted them into a kind of police force, tasked with guarding sex. In surveys and studies, teenagers continued to profess that nice girls did not go all the way. Yet they also asserted that most boys would go as far as their girlfriends would let them. The outcome was a setup that subjected girls to constant stress, self-blame, and regret. And the games of brinksmanship that couples played often blew up in their faces.

  In the 1950s, rates of teen pregnancy soared. In 1957, 97 out of every 1,000 girls age fifteen to nineteen gave birth. (In 2013, by contrast, that figure was 26.) Between 1944 and 1955, the number of babies born out of wedlock who were put up for adoption also increased by 80 percent. If a girl got pregnant, the parents often simply handed her and her boyfriend wedding rings. There is no reliable data on African Americans for the decade, but over its course, the proportion of pregnant white brides—brides who gave birth less than nine months after their weddings—more than doubled.

  The 1958 movie Going Steady turned this peril into a source of comedy. In the theme song, the young star Molly Bee breathily conflated going steady with marriage. I will marry the dream that I adore, the boy that I’ve been getting ready for, she murmured. And we’ll be going steady evermore.…

  Bee plays a chipper high school senior who elopes with the classmate she has been dating for all of six weeks, when her parents let her accompany him to an “away” basketball game. The couple finds a justice of the peace, who also happens to own an inn and is willing to marry them after hours. They use a class ring as a token of their vows. Because their marriage looks basically identical to steady dating, they plan to conceal it until after they graduate. Their plot takes an unexpected twist, however, when they realize that their wedding night tryst got her pregnant. He moves into her parents’ house, and both immediately realize how unprepared they are to start a family. Hilarity ensues.

  In real life, however, most young Steadies did not end up going steady forever unless they had to. Instead, they let relationships run their course. Then they did something else that an earlier generation could not have imagined. They broke up.

  * * *

  Steadies invented the Breakup. Going steady was a prerequisite for that specific kind of heartache. In the 1920s and ’30s, a College Man might have stopped calling a Coed for dates without offering any explanation. However, she was likely to have other dates lined up. If he privately felt disappointed when she declined his invitation to a dance, he could seize the first chance to cut in on her sorority sister.

  For Steadies, however, things were different. A Steady was likely to mean more to you than any given person you went out with. And because so much of high school social life revolved around coupling off, a split meant more than losing a boyfriend or girlfriend; it meant getting left out. The first lovers who forgot to remember to forget their exes learned that breaking up is hard to do.

  After a breakup, most people I know make a point of trying to stay friends. When they run into someone who knows an ex, they say, Oh, X was one of my best friends in college! And yet when she calls out of the blue and asks whether you will meet her for dinner, because she is having family problems that only you will understand, you have to admit that dinner is awkward. If he writes, years after you moved out of a place you shared into two tiny, separate places, to ask whether there’s any chance you ended up with his college diploma, you say Sure, of course he can come over to search the boxes in your basement storage unit. You two grew up together. Yet when my first love does this, I cannot help wondering what he still has of mine.

  I don’t mean boxes. Looking over faces of which we once had every inch memorized, we realize that our exes must have stashed the selves we were with them somewhere. “Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives,” the young poet James Merrill wrote, heartbroken, in the 1940s. To pick through memories of old love can feel like wandering through a ruin whose intact image haunts your dreams. Scenes from our past lives drift around the Internet.

  In the weeks after a breakup, you reread old messages and emails. Cringe fondly at the first overthought flirtations. Follow the banalities that show you becoming comfortable to the vanishing point of intimacy where your tracks disappear. Keep scrolling, and soon a fight pops up. Then comes a long apology and counterapology, and so the end begins.

  Detagging your old photos, you cannot be sure whether you are protecting a past or making room for a future. You become a stranger to yourself. Who was that, at that party, on my vacation? Delete, delete until you, as you are now, are all that you have left.

  * * *

  Given the risks, it was difficult for onlookers to understand how dating culture had changed so much so quickly. The man shortage that World War II created clearly had something to do with it. On the college dance floors where Coeds had been swarmed by stags trying to cut in on them, there had been far more men than women. When American troops deployed, however, the gender ratios reversed.

  “Army or Navy or just plain civvies!—there aren’t enough men around to date,” Newsday e
xclaimed in 1945.

  When the “Roving Reporter” who wrote the story approached a young personnel worker on her lunch break and asked her about the problem, she interrupted him: “Did you say civilian? Where can I find one?”

  In this environment, a Popular Daughter could not hope to establish her status by dating many different boys. Instead, women competed to lock down a partner. The romance of your beloved being shipped out, and the desire to be there for him as a pen pal, also encouraged women to stay faithful to soldiers overseas. Even naysayers of going steady allowed that it would be unkind not to keep responding to letters you received from European battlefields or the South Pacific.

  This explanation made some sense, and historians have since repeated it. But it was incomplete. It had to be, because the practice of going steady did not end with V-day. On the contrary, it was only after our boys came home that going steady really started to take off among a younger set. The course it took demonstrated that this dating style was not fundamentally about the scarcity of men. Rather, it had to do with previously unimaginable forms of abundance.

  * * *

  The end of World War II ushered in a period of prosperity unlike anything that our country has seen before or since. During the war, the United States had rapidly recovered from the Great Depression, but there had been nothing to buy. When peace arrived, people had money they were eager to spend. At the same time, the government was enacting a number of laws that encouraged upward mobility—for white people, anyway. The GI Bill covered college tuition for veterans and provided housing loans at low interest rates. Between 1945 and 1960, per capita income increased by 35 percent. In the 1920s, only 31 percent of the country had been middle class. By the 1950s, the proportion doubled.

  The economic boom that dramatically expanded the white middle class did far less for everyone else. The idylls that the 1950s created of itself were so whitewashed that the gardener on Father Knows Best, played by the (clearly Latino) character actor Natividad Vacío, was called “Frank Smith.” The millions of people who came to the United States from Mexico and Puerto Rico between 1945 and 1960 gained little from the growth of national GDP, and the economic position of native-born blacks actually worsened.

  In the North, black families were systematically shut out of the suburbs that were becoming symbols of the American dream and a cornerstone of wealth accumulation in the form of real estate. In the South, in addition to legal segregation, they faced rampant violence.

  In August 1955, the farmer and civil rights activist Lamar Smith was shot dead in broad daylight, outside the county courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, where he had been registering black voters. Ten days later, in the nearby town of Money, two white men heard rumors that a fourteen-year-old boy visiting from Chicago had made a pass at a local white woman. They dragged Emmett Till from his bed in the middle of the night, beat and tortured him for hours, finally shot him in the head, tied a seventy-four-pound cotton gin fan to his leg, and threw him in the Tallahatchie River. When the child’s body was found, it was so badly disfigured that the uncle who had been hosting Emmett could identify him only by a ring that he recognized on one of his fingers.

  Till’s was just one of an untold number of murders of black men supposedly based on white fears of miscegenation. Though popular culture was encouraging children to start pursuing romance younger and younger, an innocent crush—real, imagined, or maliciously invented—could prove deadly for a black teen in the South. But like their parents, white teenagers were flush, and the images of dating that we have inherited from that era focus on them.

  * * *

  By 1956, there were thirteen million teens with an average income of $10.55 per week. Fifteen years earlier, that amount would have represented the total disposable income of an average family, and children who worked outside their homes would have been expected to hand over their earnings to their parents. But kids who came of age during the Eisenhower presidency had no memory of the Great Depression and little inclination to save. Together, they spent more than $7 billion per year.

  Companies fell over themselves to cater to their tastes. Novelties like mass-market paperbacks, 45 rpm record singles, and cheap transistor radios allowed teens to live increasingly on their own wavelength. In order to continue growing, companies created products targeting younger and younger buyers. Take the training bra. Through the 1940s, young girls had usually worn undershirts until their breasts were developed enough to warrant a brassiere. But at the end of the decade, Maidenform and other lingerie companies began marketing “bralettes” or “Bobbie bras” to girls as young as nine or ten. Experts reassured parents that going steady was simply like wearing a training relationship.

  If the privileged students of the 1920s and ’30s had made dating a respectable activity, it was the Steadies of the 1950s who made it middle class. In their world, dating no longer involved the competition of a selling floor or stag line. It was based on a promise of mass production and mass consumption in which everyone was supposed to be able to partake. The wealthy Fussers and Popular Daughters of the 1920s and ’30s had vied with one another to rate as many dates as they could. However, by the 1950s, many more young people could afford to go out dancing, or for burgers, or to the movies. And so the battle for survival of the fittest that had dominated fraternity dance floors gave way to a kind of romantic full employment.

  Democratized dating was one of the many fruits of the booming economy. If everyone was going to enjoy it, six boys could not fight to cut in on each single girl. They had to pair off.

  * * *

  We can see how closely steady dating was tied to the new culture of consumerism by how often authorities compared dating to shopping. By the 1950s, shopping had become the go-to metaphor to explain courtship.

  In his popular textbook Modern Courtship and Marriage, the family expert E. E. LeMasters wrote that “random dating can best be compared to American shopping practices.” He likened the casual dating of the College Man and Coed era to window-shopping. “The couple take a superficial look at each other with no obligation to buy.”

  In 1968, the psychologist Tom McGinnis argued in his popular book A Girl’s Guide to Dating and Going Steady that going steady could be a good way to try on partners, too. “Deciding what kind of marriage you want is something like choosing a dress in a store,” McGinnis wrote. “The fact that only one dress seems right for you out of perhaps a hundred that you look at does not mean that the ninety-nine others are poorly made or in horrible taste. They just are not for you.”

  Few Americans are likely to remember LeMasters or McGinnis now. But I bet you know the advice that Smokey Robinson handed down from his mother: You better shop around.

  Shop, the Miracles chirp behind him. Shop around!

  When I think about it, every single one of the Motown hits that have been etched into my memory since childhood is about serial monogamy. They all evoke the ecstasy of falling hard for someone, the agony of losing him or her, and the excitement of starting the process all over again. The Temptations topped the charts with “My Girl,” and the Four Tops did the same with “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch.” Both songs open with swells of infectious celebration. Diana Ross and the Supremes tended to sing about the sad parts. Where did our love go? they plead in their song of that title. “Stop in the Name of Love” forgives a faithless man and says that he should stay. “Baby Love” laments the pain of breaking up. But even when mourning, Motown hits sounded joyful. “Same Old Song” evokes the sense of disorienting emptiness that follows losing a lover in a doggedly bright key. The soaring scales of the Jackson 5 made being desperate to get back an ex sound irrepressibly fun.

  No wonder these became the anthems of the Steady Era. They were like advertisements for that dating pattern. Motown hits captured the power of exclusive passion followed by a healthy breakup. For the millions of teens who heard them, their rhymes and rhythms must have reinforced the sense that breaking up and then making up was just the way things
went.

  With their cheap radios and phonographs and the money to buy records, teens developed listening patterns that followed the same cadence. You went out and bought your favorite single and then listened to it to death. Once you got sick of it, you went out and bought another. You fell in love with purchases, spent time with them, and then parted ways. Later you recalled them fondly.

  This model of cyclical consumption is a very particular kind of shopping around, and in the 1950s it was new. It, too, was invented in Detroit.

  * * *

  It is not clear who coined the phrase “dynamic obsolescence.” In The Fifties, the journalist David Halberstam cited Harley Earl, a flamboyant designer from Hollywood, who had built a career custom-making cars for Hollywood celebrities, before the GM CEO Alfred P. Sloan hired him to start an Art and Color department. Other sources credit Sloan himself. In any case, the problem that GM had on their hands in the Era of the Steady was clear: The market for cars was saturated. How can you get people to keep buying new versions of a product that they already have? Dynamic obsolescence was the solution that Sloan and Earl came up with.

  Before the war, there had been a joke that anyone could afford to buy a Ford in any color that he wanted—as long as it was black. After the war, however, GM started making cars in many colors, releasing new versions of the popular models with minor changes to their sizes, shapes, and outlines every year. Some colleagues and competitors denounced this strategy. “Planned obsolescence,” they sneered. But it worked. Hype around the GM cars created the idea that a man’s ride was a key sign of his character. The look of your car was supposed to signal your personality and aspirations.

  For the Steady who tried on relationships, dating performed a similar function. The shopping around that it involved no longer meant looking for one night’s entertainment. Instead, dating became a bigger investment in someone who would define you over a longer period. You could buy into a relationship even if you ultimately intended to trade it for a newer and better one.