PETER: From VFH Radio in Charlottesville, Virginia, this is Backstory.
By now, most of us know someone who has met his or her match online, but few realize that the tradition dates all the way back to the 1850s. It was then that Americans were figuring out how much to do in the margins of the media.
PAM EPSTEIN: You know you advertise for a house, you advertise for a servant, you advertise for a job, why not advertise for a wife?
ED: Today on Backstory, three centuries of courtship in America. We'll ask why lonely hearts turned to the classifieds when they did, and ask how young lovers had found each other before that. We'll look at what happened when 20th-century teenagers discovered that money could in fact buy you love.
PAM EPSTEIN: It wasn't only parents who were saying you know, “What's going on? My daughter looks like a prostitute with her short skirt and bobbed hair and makeup.” It was also some young men saying, “I can't afford to keep company with nice girls.”
TONY FIELD: The history of courtship in America. First, this news.
Hi, there. This is Tony Field, producer of the show. Just wanted to butt in here a minute to remind you that Backstory is a production of VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and that we depend on support from listeners like you to keep this podcast coming to you for free.
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PETER: This is Backstory with us, the American History Guys. I'm Peter Onuf, 18th century guy.
ED: [00:02:05] I'm Ed Ayers, 19th century guy.
BRIAN: And I'm Brian Balogh, 20th century history guy.
SPEAKER 6: Matrimonial. A young gentleman of highly-cultivated mind, refined manners, the first respectability and in good circumstances, having sought in vain for a kindred spirit within the circle of his acquaintance has concluded to try the virtue of advertising in order to reach the rest of womankind.
Full description of person. Character, qualifications, accomplishments, et cetera. Indispensable. All answers sacredly confidential. Address Box 5313, Post Office.
ED: Now, 150 years ago, ads like this could be found in the pages of New York's biggest newspapers every day. It was the heyday of the penny press. Papers like the New York Herald, the Tribune, the Sun and the Times had all discovered that they could support themselves through classified advertising. And their readers had discovered that classifieds could be a pretty good way to cut through the loneliness of the big city.
PAM EPSTEIN: I mean, there were a lot of really strict rules of etiquette against men and women talking on the street if they were unacquainted.
ED: That's Pam Epstein, a graduate student at Rutgers University, who is writing her dissertation on these 19th century personal ads.
PAM EPSTEIN: And so you reach a point where you have met every single woman of your acquaintance and you're not in love with any of them and you don't see a future with any of them. And so you have to do this. This is the step that you have to take.
ED: Now, it's not that the ads ever became mainstream. Pam Epstein says they always retained a certain back-alley, whisper-whisper, hush-hush, wink-wink kind of quality. But still, by the 1850s, they were a common sight in newspapers all over the urban North.
PAM EPSTEIN: Why it was the 1850s, I mean, then you can go into the whole issue of, you have more and more of a market-oriented economy, where people are using the market in their daily lives. And so, you advertise for a house, you advertise for a servant, you advertise for a job and why not advertise for a wife.
The newspaper that I've been relying on the most actually started charging more money for matrimonial ads than for any other ad because I think that they saw a real opportunity to take advantage of people who wanted to find a spouse.
ED: Urbanization, alienation, the steady creep of commercialization. All these things sound so big and, well, impersonal. And yet, these very forces were propelling the sudden blossoming of personal ads. Shaping the most intimate parts of American's lives, meeting and getting to know the men who would become their husbands, the women who would become their wives.
PETER: And so for the rest of the hour today on Backstory, we're going to look at some of the other ways courtship conventions have changed over time, and ask what these changes have to do with things like the economy, the media, war and peace, and technology. As always we'll trace the tale from colonial times to the present, in the hopes that we can better understand why things are the way they are today.
BRIAN: But first, we're going to return to Pam Epstein, the graduate student we were hearing from just a moment ago. Ed invited her to share a few of her favorite personal ads from the 19th century and she was happy to oblige.
SPEAKER 7: The gentlemen who followed, and was several times noticed, by the lady dressed in cloth basque. Who called in a street in Nasal Street about half past 4 o'clock on Tuesday afternoon and then proceeded by way of Anne Street to Broadway and got into a 23rd Street stage. Would be delighted to make her acquaintance.
Please address Paul Vincent, Broadway post office.
PAM EPSTEIN: This type of ad was actually really common. You would see these, you know, gentlemen sitting across from the lady in the stage coach, would like to make her acquaintance. This particular one, I think, was a guy who was chasing after this woman and when she notices him several times it's because she's noticing a guy following her.
ED: Yeah, I noticed you said advertised for a wife. Did this tend to be men more than women, running these ads?
PAM EPSTEIN: It did tend to be more men than women, but yeah there actually were a lot of women. The men tended to be a whole lot more eloquent and I think the reason for that is that women had less money. Women didn't have jobs, if they did have jobs they weren't being paid as well, and matrimonial advertisements aren't free. So women needed to be a lot more careful with their words. And so they were very, very direct.
SPEAKER 8: A young widow unencumbered. Would accept friendship of refined, temperament, elderly gentlemen of means. Matrimonially inclined.
Seamstress. 265 Herald, 23rd Street branch.
PAM EPSTEIN: This ad I actually don't think was a woman looking for a husband. I think it was a woman looking for a patron.
ED: A patron. What's that mean?
PAM EPSTEIN: I guess it's more polite way of saying a sugar daddy, really. I don't know what other term to use.
ED: And it seems a little unusual for her to have identified herself as a seamstress.
PAM EPSTEIN: Perhaps the reason she said that is to let the guy know. She's got a job, but one that doesn't earn her a whole lot of money and so she could use the friendship of a man to sort of get her through. You know, help pay the rent and pay the bills.
SPEAKER 9: Matrimonial. The world is so full of poetry, beauty and glory, and I have no one to share it with me. No one to read with me my Shakespeare and Milton. To enjoy with me nature, art, letters, society. I seek, therefore, my other and better half. My compliment and peer. Equal, though not like. Myself, a New Englander by birth, of liberal culture and pursuits, of about 35 years of age. A gentleman and a Christian in my aspirations.
SPEAKER 9: Ladies so minded will please address Mr. Christopher Lighton. Box number 144, Times office.
PAM EPSTEIN: You start to see these ads fade a little bit by the 1890s. I think there's a lot of different reasons for that, but I think one of them is that people start noticing that this is a big deal, that lots of people are looking for spouses in this way. Why don't we capitalize on that and turn it into a business?
And so you start to see matrimonial agencies, a lot of which turn out to be fraudulent and taking people's money. You know if you'd like to meet a spouse you send money basically to this address. And I think that this makes matrimonial less desirable than they even were before because now they're being associated with something that's kind of sleazy. They definitely never go away. I think that they lose the sort of romance that you see in ads, like the one by Christopher Lighton. They seem to, as a rule, get shorter. And I think that, you know after about 1910 you also see society just being a lot more open to people meeting each other in a much more casual way. And so I think that ads like this become less necessary.
ED: And yet, you have the paradox that we're living in sort of post every kind of revolution now, and people should feel free to connect with people of whatever kinds of backgrounds, or orientation or definition. And yet, now we seem to have more mediated relationships through the internet. It would seem counter-intuitive that in a time when anything goes, we still need these kinds of tools to connect with each other.
PAM EPSTEIN: Yeah, it never goes away. I mean, it's been really fascinating to me to see the way that the language has changed but the sentiment does seem to be pretty much the same.
ED: So love is always hard.
PAM EPSTEIN: Love is always hard.
ED: Pam Epstein is a PhD candidate in history at Rutgers University. You can read more of her explorations in the world of 19th century personal ads on her fascinating blog, advertisingforlove.com. We'll link to it from our own site, backstoryradio.org.
BRIAN: [00:10:07] Ed, it sounds to me like it would have been really pretty tough for people to meet their matches, back in the period that you were talking to Pam about. But I'm curious to know what it would have been like even earlier. Peter, could you give us a sense of how people actually met each other? Met their future husbands and wives back in the 18th century?
PETER: Well Brian, I think the short answer is they were virtually born knowing them because they came out of small village communities. A lot of face to face transactions and you wouldn't want to marry a stranger, you'd want to marry somebody of your own faith, somebody who you could rely on, somebody you had learned was trustworthy over an entire lifetime. So, it's familiarity that makes the kind of courtship that we're talking about in the 19th century, unnecessary.
BRIAN: Yeah, so a totally different world.
PETER: Yeah, it really is. But that doesn't mean that important things weren't happening and changing in the world of courtship precisely because that kind of image I gave you of static, intimate village society, is radically transforming in the late colonial period.
BRIAN: You wouldn't be willing to tell us about that transition, would you Peter?
PETER: I just might. Let me start by talking about pre-marital pregnancy rate.
BRIAN: Pre-marital pregnancy?
PETER: Well the number of women who came to the alter, already pregnant. Now this is scandalizing you, this is not the story we like to tell about the good old family values in old New England.
BRIAN: What were the numbers like?
PETER: Well, if you go from the 1670s, now this is the baseline for you in the puritan period, the hey-day of puritan theocracy if you will. The rate is something like 2%. It's trivial. But those rates have skyrocketed to 30 or 40% by the 1770s.
BRIAN: 40%?
PETER: Yeah, yeah.
ED: This is not the 1960s your talking about? [crosstalk 00:12:01] The 1760s?
PETER: No, I'm talking about the 1760s, believe it or not.
BRIAN: Unbelievable.
ED: Wow.
PETER: But we shouldn't reach the conclusion that this high rate of pre-marital pregnancy meant the end of the family as we know it and lots of children born outside of marriage, because most of these pre-marital impregnation led to legitimate children. The brides were pregnant but they had children within marriage.
BRIAN: They got in under the wire.
PETER: Yeah. But a lot of these pregnancies are a result of parental sanctioned interaction between boys and girls. And by that the custom of bundling.
BRIAN: Bundling?
PETER: Bundling is a traditional custom, that comes from England, in which young people who intend to marry eventually, will spend the night together. In the home of the young woman. In theory, is not supposed to involve sexual intercourse because bundling means that you're semi-clothed and that you're lying there together, in some cases there's a little piece of wood between you or, in one amusing case, they promised to put a bible between them. But you get carried away, you go too far as we would say. That's not the end of the world. Ordinary folk expect this to happen, and they, in fact, think it's a good thing. Because the important thing is family formation, that's always the goal of courtship. So how are you going to guarantee that a family will form, and that your daughter won't be seduced and abandoned? That's the great great fear of the late 18th and early 19th century, is seduction. And of course the testimony of neighbors and witnesses is crucial if it ever came to court. It doesn't go to court very often.
BRIAN: So Peter, this is really kind of the first bait and switch. The guy thinks it's about not having sex - he has sex. But that's not what it's really about. It's the parents don't mind the fact that families are being produced. What it's really about, the switch is, keeping that guy there.
PETER: Yeah, exactly right.
ED: Under wraps.
Well, remember we want to hear what you have to say about all this. Leave us a comment at backstoryradio.org. We're especially interested in hearing your stories about how your grandparents and great-grandparents met their husbands and wives.
BRIAN: When we come back, we'll hear a little more about bundling and we'll return to the century of drive-in movies and long walks on the beach.
PETER: We'll be back in a minute. Don't go away.
This is Backstory, the show that looks to the past to explain the world around us today. I'm Peter Onuf and I represent the 18th century.
ED: I'm Ed Ayers and I represent the 19th century.
BRIAN: And I'm Brian Balogh representing the 20th century.
Today on the show, the history of courtship in America. When we left off our early America guy, Peter, was describing the colonial New England custom of bundling, which involved young sweethearts spending the night together in the girls' home. It wasn't supposed to be sexual but the pre-marital pregnancy rate suggests that it often was. And you were saying, Peter, that the basic idea was that "Hey, these kids are going to do it anyway so we might as well document the act. Just in this this guy takes off before the baby comes and we have to take him to court."
What I'm wonderings this - why were parents suddenly so concerned about the guy splitting?
PETER: Well that's a great question, Brian. There are lots of answers to it. One is that the traditional ways of exercising parental control were losing their efficacy. They weren't as effective. Of course, historically, fathers would have plenty of land, especially in places like New England, but throughout the colonies, that they could distribute to their sons. But by the mid 18th century there's less and less land, more and more mobility. And that's the key thing, you're going to have to move to a new part of the province or even beyond the province, to find land to make a farm. And think of the American revolution, this is a new perspective on it maybe, as a vast acceleration of a mobile population, that is the war takes guys all over the place.
BRIAN: Yeah, it just speeds it up.
PETER: Right. And that increases risk for parents and daughters, particularly, that they will be abandoned.
BRIAN: And opens up a lot of new land by the way.
PETER: Well that's absolutely right, it works for economic development but it threatens the family.
BRIAN: So I get it. Because these folks are going to move and they can't be controlled through handing out land, they've got to begin to exercise some kind of self-restraint. They've got to figure out how, on their own, not to make babies and split up. And so, what this bundling is, is really kind of a practice session for trying this self-restraint but not getting carried away, it's all done within the home.
PETER: Yeah, exactly right Brian. Family is less effective as a mechanism of control and therefore the onus is on the young woman because of course, she's got everything riding on her success in the courtship game. So one of the things that becomes important is, what we might call a relocation of virtue. Now virtue is classically a male thing. Men are strong and brave and fearless.
BRIAN: And virtuous.
PETER: And well, virtuous. Can you imagine that about modern guys? Well, in this period it's women who become virtuous. And what that really means is that women are exercising control over courtship, over their own sexual lives. And that control they exercise translates into a whole new idea of the moral force of female choice and the health of the society. It goes, not just in terms of restraining their men and their husbands, but educating their children.
ED: So this helps explain too why the birth rate declines so rapidly across the 19th century, as women become sort of the controllers of that right?
PETER: Yeah, yeah that's right. Absolutely.
BRIAN: Well I'm going to hit the fast forward button now. We've already talked a little bit about what happened when young men and women left the farm and headed for the city. And how the new Victorian ideas about romance and sentimentality ran smack up against the cold, hard reality of the big city. Where it was just plain hard to meet members of the opposite sex. I want to pick up the story now in my period.
By the first couple of decades in the 20th century, those big cities had only gotten bigger. But those old fashioned rules of etiquette had begun to break down and middle class teenagers were beginning to spend time together in public in ways they'd never had before. It was the dawn of dating, and it's all chronicled in the book From Front Porch to Back Seat by historian Beth Bailey. In it, she describes how the earliest form of dating was essentially a popularity contest. It was all about how many dates you could get. I spoke with Beth recently and she explained that even the most respectable young women were encouraged to cultivate, if not the reality, of multiple gentlemen suitors.
BETH BAILEY: If you went out dancing, if you went to a party to dance with your escort, the worst thing that could happen is that you danced with your escort. You were supposed to, as a woman, be constantly circulating.
BRIAN: Right, what's the term you used? Getting stuck or something like that?
BETH BAILEY: Getting stuck is social failure. Getting stuck - if you're a man you cannot abandon your partner. You can not say "Thanks for the dance" and walk away. You're stuck with her until somebody takes her off your hands.
BRIAN: Now you talked about, you know, a guy. I mean he's literally stuck, so stuck that he holds a dollar bill behind his back, is that right?
BETH BAILEY: Yeah, circling the dance floor over and over with the same woman and he can't find anyone whose going to cut in. He starts waving a dollar bill behind her back hoping he's going to attract someone. And a dollar at this point is actually enough money to make somebody notice. And she sees what's going on and tells him, "make it five and I'll go home."
BRIAN: That's a great story! Now we should say, this is the system in the 20s and the 30s to certain extent. But one of the themes of your book is, no matter where you dip in in history, parents would have found this appalling, because they had a completely different system for courting. So can we just go back a little bit and could you remind me what the system before dating was?
BETH BAILEY: The system before dating was calling. And calling meant anything from, you know, rural areas where a young man would come over and talk to the girl and sit on her front porch, to a very over-elaborated upper-class practice that involved calling cards and many elaborate rituals. But the young woman, or her family, could invite a young man over to call. He would be received, they would chat. She might play the piano for him, her mother might serve some lemonade, you know it was a practice that took place largely within the home.
BRIAN: So, I'm struck when you describe that earlier system of calling, it seems to me that women might have held the upper hand. And that at least in terms of controlling who they get to see.
BETH BAILEY: Well men always had the upper hand in the sense that they were the ones who issues the proposal for marriage and were expected to support a wife and family for the rest of their lives. But in the sense of courtship, women had a lot more right of initiative at least because women were deciding who was appropriate and issuing invitation to their home. Once the invitation was to go out it was assumed that any kind of public expense was going to be borne by the man. So, what that meant is that the right of initiative shifted. So no longer did women invite men, men invited women. And you know what's happening with this shift is young people are also claiming the right to escape from parental supervision, and to claim some kind of privacy by going out into the public where they're away from the supervision of family and community. And so it's flipping control from women to men in some way but it's also shifting the meaning of privacy. Privacy takes place in the public, not in the private realm anymore.
BRIAN: And of course, this is why people who are moving to cities in droves at the end of the 19th, early 20th century, they find it liberating.
BETH BAILEY: Yes, they feel much freer. And dating actually is something that's born from urban working class culture. The practice of calling and going to sit in the parlor doesn't work so well when you have a tenement in which dozens of people are crammed into a small amount of space. And so what happens increasingly with the rise of commercial amusements, whether it's amusement parks or dance halls or restaurants, is that young women go and seek men to pay for their entertainment. And what people don't realize today, is that the date actually comes from prostitution, not the other way around.
People at the time, as dating started to be the practice, understood very clearly that this was a financial or an economic exchange. Men's company + money = women's company + what? And that doesn't mean sexual intercourse often, it means instead flirting or making the man feel important or whatever. But there was always a sense that the equation was unbalanced. So it wasn't only parents who were saying "what's going on? My daughter looks like a prostitute with her short skirt and rolled stockings and bobbed hair and makeup", it was also some young men saying "I can't afford to keep company with nice girls."
BRIAN: Right.
BETH BAILEY: I have to purchase their company. And this isn't so good.
BRIAN: Right. So parents in the 20s would have been objecting to the fact that all this was going on outside of the house and beyond their supervision and even beyond their immediate communities' supervision. Guys were objecting to having to cough up money for basically access that used to be free, and girls were complaining that there was increasingly a kind of expectation for something in return for that money.
BETH BAILEY: Yeah, that's a very good summary.
BRIAN: Well let's move forward to the 50s because there's another shift. And I actually found this, you know just mind boggling. I finally kind of get this merry-go-round system down. The more people you dance with the bigger man you are, or the more popular girl. And the all of a sudden going steady is the thing. Now, how did that happen?
BETH BAILEY: It's really complicated to think about how that happened because it did seem to happen very quickly, more or less during World War II. And one way it happened is because the age of marriage dropped quickly and dramatically. Young people were getting married younger and younger and younger. And so if half of all brides were under 19 by 1957, the pace of courtship sped up a lot. Younger people, I mean as young as 11 or 12, almost mimicked young marriage by being with a single person.
BRIAN: Right. So they couldn't literally get married at age 11 but they were -
BETH BAILEY: Not in most states anyway!
BRIAN: They were emulating it, right?
BETH BAILEY: They were emulating it. But they didn't really expect that this was going to be the next step to marriage. People thought they were going to go steady with lots and lots of people over time, it was more like what we'd call serial monogamy.
BRIAN: Now don't tell me that parents objected to going steady. I mean, who could object to, you know bringing home a nice guy and he's pinned you and it's got to beat this merry-go-round, going out with 27 different people in order to establish your set. Please don't tell me they objected to that?
BETH BAILEY: You'd think, wouldn't you? I mean it seems so safe and so wonderful. But this is also the period where young people were starting to say that it's okay to have sex with somebody if you love them. And going steady, in many ways, provided a safe, loving environment in which people did a whole lot more experimentation than this rapid turnover, I've got one date early and another date later in the evening kind of model. So you know a catholic priest said it was a serious occasion of sin unless people were about to get married and various high schools outlawed going steady.
BRIAN: They outlawed going steady?
BETH BAILEY: Yes! You could get kicked out of high school for going steady.
BRIAN: They said be promiscuous. Go out with lots of people. Whatever you do don't go steady! That's wild.
BETH BAILEY: Don't do it! Don't do it! They other argument that parents made, and it was made in popular magazines and advice books, is that young people needed to learn how to compete. And that the dating world was one of the best places to hone your skills of competition and put your best foot forward. So if you could always count on good old Freddy to show up for the date, and you didn't have to worry about making yourself beautiful and figuring out how to flirt and attract men, you would not develop your skills of competition. And even worse for men, because if they didn't have to go out and struggle for the popular girls they weren't learning how, eventually, to become successes in all spheres of life. It sounds like the strangest argument in the world, but it was absolutely everywhere.
BRIAN: No, it sounds like Milton-Friedman actually. I mean, and running throughout your book is this kind of market model of dating.
BETH BAILEY: I think that through the 20th century there was a powerful economic model of dating that was based on notions of scarcity and abundance and negotiations of value. And one of the things that happened during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, in part with the rise of feminism and women's claims to economic independence, was a realization that sex and love and relationships were not necessarily a scarce resource that had to be struggled over but instead, was a potentially abundant resource that could be shared without consequence.
BRIAN: All you need is love.
BETH BAILEY: All you need is love! And love is abundant and love the one you're with. And a lot of parents were very nervous about that.
BRIAN: Well thank you so much for joining us today Beth.
BETH BAILEY: Thank you, I really enjoyed it.
BRIAN: Beth Bailey is a history professor at Temple University and the author of From Front Porch to Backseat: Courtship in 20th Century America. Her new book is America's Army: Making the All Volunteer Force. You can listen to more of my interview with her, including the story of her parent's first date, at backstoryradio.org.
BRIAN: If you're just tuning in this is Backstory and we're the American History Guys. We're talking about the history of courtship and we've arrived at the point in the show when we stop talking just long enough to field a few questions from you, our listeners. Let's go to the phones.
PETER: First up today we have Mary, joining us all the way from Zug, Switzerland. Welcome to the show, Mary.
MARY: Hi Professor Onuf, Professor Ayers and Professor Balogh.
ED: Terrific. Hello Mary.
PETER: We're talking about courtship, so let's get right to the heart of the matter. What's on your mind?
MARY: I've been with my husband now for 8 years and we got married 2 years ago. I kept asking him over the years, I want a ring, I want a ring, I want a ring. And then he kept giving me rings from wherever, from Vinoxmart, what do you call them, business markets or whatever. Even one from Tiffany's, but it wasn't one of the big rock things. I was so confused because I really thought the engagement ring, at least in western culture, was normal. And he told me in Switzerland they don't do that and I had never realized it. And that's why I thought oh gosh, maybe this is really an American thing that has been built up over, I don't know why or how long. Would Laura Ingalls Wilder have written one?
BRIAN: The patron saint of this show.
PETER: Okay so, here's the deal. We have in fact the son of a jeweler on the panel today of experts, who knows all about engagement rings. And then we also have Ed Ayers who knows everything.
ED: Let's begin with the jeweler!
BRIAN: Well have I got a ring for you Mary. I'm not going to draw on my jewelry expertise since they pay me the big bucks to be a historian here, not a jeweler. I will tell you that the whole meaning of engagement changed significantly at the end of the 19th century, the beginning of the 20th century. It became much more formalized. They made announcements, they sent out formal announcements and it actually put a lot of pressure on the women especially, who now publicly were kind of connected to these guys. So it seemed to have all the downside of commitment with not the upside yet.
PETER: What occurs to be Brian is your talking about indicating to a public, in which nobody knows you, but you show your ring that establishes your status. Whereas, in the colonial period, what you had was the reading of the bands in church. A public announcement in which the intention to marry was indicated, it would be read out on, I think, three successive Sundays or something and a certain amount of time passes. And so a ring is the substitute for common knowledge that people would have in villages[crosstalk 00:33:37].
BRIAN: That's amazing. So that's why there weren't jewelry stores back in colonial America.
PETER: Right, there were other reasons too Brian.
BRIAN: Exactly.
MARY: Can I ask a question quickly?
PETER: Yeah, it's your call.
MARY: From what I've understood is that De Beers really starting pushing a marketing campaign in the beginning of the 20th century. Of the diamond.
ED: See that's my guess. Let's just say that's what I know with certainty now that you've said it, which is that this is a product of a global age of commodities. In which people could expect to have a gem from the other side of the world as a common part of a wide spread ceremony. And so the great accomplishment of the 20th century I think on this regard, has been to make the diamond seem something we've always had, that's eternal, that's an investment that will always endure, and that's always been around. But in fact, like so many things that seem ancient, in fact it's quite new.
BRIAN: Engagement even within the United States is kind of a changing animal, Mary. So I'm not surprised that the tradition is really different in different countries.
PETER: Well thank you so much for the call. We have enjoyed talking with you.
MARY: Thank you so much. Bye bye.
PETER: Bye bye.
BRIAN: It's time for another short break. When we get back we'll take more of your calls about the history of courtship in America.
ED: Remember, if you'd like to be a caller on a future show visit our website to see the topics we're working on. We're at backstoryradio.org.
PETER: More Backstory coming up in a minute.
We're back with Backstory, the show that takes a topic from the here and now and explores it's historical context. I'm Peter Onuf, 18th century history guy.
ED: I'm Ed Ayers, the 19th century history guy.
BRIAN: And I'm Brian Balogh, 20th century history guy.
Today on the show we're looking at the history of courtship conventions in America. We've been fielding your comments and questions at backstoryradio.org and our producers have invited a few of you who weighed in there to join us on the phone.
PETER: Hey guys, we got a call from Jenny from San Francisco, California. Jenny, welcome to the show.
JENNY: Hi, thanks for having me.
PETER: Well, it's great to have you here. And what's on your mind?
JENNY: Well I have a question that's wrapped in a story.
PETER: Whoah.
JENNY: Ready?
PETER: Yep. Okay, shoot.
JENNY: My grandfather used to tell a story about riding the trolley in Philadelphia as a young man. This would be the early 30s. And he claimed he saw my grandmother in a shop window and fell in love with her and elbowed the fellow next to him and told that guy "There's the woman I'm going marry".
PETER: Wow.
JENNY: And, you know, as a youngster I thought, well this is a beautiful story, but over the years I was amazed at how often other people almost exactly the same story.
BRIAN: Your grandmother must have been quite a looker!
JENNY: Yeah, right? But I've even seen movies that sort of joke about this. It seems almost common.
PETER: Well you know, that's like the whole myth of the self-made man, Horatio Alger.
JENNY: Sure.
PETER: The man who decides, by sheer force of will, that he's going to marry a particular woman. That epitomizes the whole idea of the modern American male ego.
JENNY: So you don't think women hung out in shop windows just so they could get noticed?
PETER: That's not a mannequin, that's a woman!
JENNY: So my real question, was this some sort of common romantic notion of the 20th century? You know, what's this about love at first sight?
PETER: Right, that's the idea. I will just begin the answer by saying that the idea of love having any connection with marriage at all is a modern invention. You could say it begins and has it origins in the elite classes of the 18th century, there's rich people who began to cultivate notions of sentiment and love and the marriages that were in the modern mode between people with mutual attraction.
Of course love at first sight is just a radical way of saying we didn't get married because anybody told us we should, or because it made any sense. Hence the very senselessness of it that makes it so romantic. And romantic is the key word. But you don't have that in traditional early modern societies because there's too much at stake. So, in some ways, we both take marriage so seriously that we talk about love and we then get all this heavy symbolism. On the other hand we don't take it nearly as seriously as previous generations did.
BRIAN: Yeah, I would just add to that Jenny. I was fascinated by the kind of moving trolley car and shop window, which both are very 20th century. And you've got your grandfather in motion, in ways that he wouldn't have been at least in the early 19th century, maybe late 19th century. But particularly grandma, or future grandma, in the shop window. Well, you know, the 20th century is when women started both working in department stores and also shopping in department stores. And what really strikes me as particularly 20th century is that this is entirely about the public sphere and there's nothing about homemaking here, there's nothing bout cooking, there's nothing about retiring to the house. This is all about kind of the merger of an intimate relationship, eventually, and the public sphere.
JENNY: You might be interested then in my great-aunt. Her sister, whose 99 years old now, tells me that this story is complete bunko. They met at the public pool. Which I also think is a very interesting place for a couple to have met because I guess I really hadn't thought of folks in the 30s at the public pool, checking each other out.[crosstalk 00:40:41].
PETER: Of course they would! But you know what strikes me is that looking, and I thought Brian was brilliant about talking about moving by and then looking at the window and capturing this image, a moving image. I think the movies really provide the framework for this.
BRIAN: For sure.
PETER: Because what he doesn't know is anything about her.
BRIAN: Right.
PETER: I mean wherever he first saw her. It was within an idealized framework and -
BRIAN: And literally framed.
PETER: Yeah, literally framed. And I think the window does that.
ED: Wow, that's good stuff guys.
JENNY: That's good. Wow.
BRIAN: Hey, if only we knew the truth now, we'd be dangerous.
PETER: We love this call. We want to marry it.
BRIAN: Let me ask you Jenny, are you married?
JENNY: I am. I am married.
BRIAN: And so how did you meet your future husband?
JENNY: We were set up.
BRIAN: Ah, a throwback to a kind of, more of a 19th century[crosstalk 00:41:33].
PETER: Dynastic marriage, huh?
JENNY: Practically arranged!
PETER: Jenny, thanks for the call.
JENNY: Oh no, thank you!
BRIAN: Thanks so much.
ED: Bye bye.
JENNY: Bye.
PETER: We have a call from Marissa in Lafayette, Louisiana. Marissa, welcome to the show.
MARISSA: Thanks for having me.
PETER: Well, pop a question.
MARISSA: Well, my question's actually inspired by a book as a little girl called Sarah Plain and Tall. It's a book that's set in the late 1800's in the Midwest.
ED: I saw the movie, right?
MARISSA: Yes, yes![crosstalk 00:42:07]
PETER: There's a movie?
ED: Yeah, there's an excellent movie.
BRIAN: I played the video game.
PETER: All right Marissa.
MARISSA: Well anyway in the book, and the movie, the main character's this woman Sarah and she actually responds to a newspaper ad that this man living, I think in Kansas had placed for a wife. And they exchange letters and eventually she goes to live with him and they wind up getting married. So you know, as I read the book it always struck me as kind of crazy that somebody would actually go and marry someone that they had never even met before and knew nothing about, beyond what they wrote in the letters. But I found out that this actually really did occur, these mail order brides. So my question is, what motivated people to actually participate in these marriages?
PETER: Right, it's a little bit shocking to our sensibilities that people would make these arrangements at such long distance without love at not first sight you might say or not love.
ED: Peter, doesn't this have a long history, back even into your antiquated and irrelevant period?
PETER: Yeah, absolutely.
ED: It seems to me, even though it was not mail order, it certainly was buying wives.
PETER: Oh they came by the boatload to Virginia in 17th century.
ED: Well tell us about that.
PETER: Well because of course the first settlers in Virgina were a bunch of very greedy and selfish guys. We are in Virginia, we shouldn't say this. And the problem of course was an absence of women and therefore the impossibility of passing property on. The irony of this, the wonderful story of Virginia, is that women were brought over in great numbers and developed an important role in passing on property, and a kind of matriarchy developed as a result. Guy would die and women would become key players in the economy and would marry serially ,as we imagine men doing in their fantasies.
BRIAN: Marissa, but you wanted to know specifically from a woman's perspective, why they would do this. Ed, Peter, any clues?
PETER: Well I think it has a lot to do, historically, with demographic imbalances. And that's in places like the frontier, like Kansas. There just weren't a lot of eligible women. Conversely, in New England particularly, there was a surplus population of spinsters.
BRIAN: So is that because there were on eligible men around or?
PETER: Yeah, yeah.
BRIAN: Got it.
ED: They'd all gone out west where they then -
BRIAN: Where they needed brides.
ED: Exactly! Really it's true.
PETER: Where you know Tocqueville says, Alexis de Tocqueville the french traveler, he goes to Michigan which was the middle of nowhere in the 1830s and he finds people in a rustic cabin in the middle of the wilderness reading newspapers. And I think that's key to your question because that is an incredibly important mode of communication.
ED: What's clear, obviously, is that is takes two to have this relationship. So it requires a real shortage of women in one place and a perceived surplus of women in another, right? So sometimes this happpens because of war. The American Civil War, one reason the New England after the civil war was so full of women is that many of the men had been killed and the same thing is true in the American south as well.
But I think it also requires a real imbalance of economic wherewithal. You have to be pretty desperate, I think, to agree to marry a man you've never laid eyes on. And so I think that what you find is that a lot of these people were immigrants in the 19th century. They would be in a place marked by great gender imbalance because the men had left and any prospect of having a family or having a livelihood involved going to where men were because of the way that laws were structured, the way property was structured, the chances that people had. So all of this of course, is a derivative of the fact that women were subordinate to men. And they needed men as vehicle to provide for them and to be able to be a sort of vehicle of upward mobility. So, it's not something I don't think anyone would have chosen. I think it was an adaptation to a dis-equilibrium. Either in the nation, or more often I think, aboard.
PETER: But Ed, I think it's a corrective to the usual view of sentimental romance that triumphs in the middle classes in the 19th century. Marriage is still about family making and family - it's a household system of production or at least consumption. You know what your getting when you get your mail order bride. Somebody who you really need. Somebody whose going to make the butter, somebody whose going to make the babies. Somebody whose going to make the home work.
ED: As opposed to matching astrological signs.
PETER: Yeah, we're not talking about stars aligning and that kind of stuff. We're talking about making a family. So we see it through the prism of romance and sexuality and the kind of choices we make and the sense of our personal dignity and integrity and that's really neither here nor there I think for a lot of people when crunch time comes.
ED: This is a business relationship.
PETER: Yes, exactly.
BRIAN: Boy, we really know how to take the fun out of Valentine's Day don't we Marissa?
PETER: All right Marissa, thanks for calling.
BRIAN: Thank you very much.
MARISSA: Thank you.
ED: Thanks a lot. Bye bye.
PETER: Bye.
BRIAN: If you're just tuning in this is Backstory, and we're the American History Guys. We're taking your calls about the history of courtship in America. We're also fielding your comments at our website, backstoryradio.org.
PETER: We've got time for one more call today, and it's going to be from our hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. It's Blake.
Blake, welcome to the show.
BLAKE: Glad to be able to be on.
PETER: So what's on your mind?
BLAKE: Well I was very interested in this particular topic. My family's' been in Virginia for a few generations and I married a woman from Long Island City, Queens. And had a little bit of a tense time for a couple of years, getting my 100 year old grandmother used to that fact.
PETER: Oh, you married out of state!
BLAKE: Well I married above the Mason-Dixon line.
PETER: Whoah.
BLAKE: In any case, I thought, having been kind of an amateur historian of the Civil War, how difficult it must have been during the Civil War, as well as after the Civil War, for young lovers to overcome the differences. Both religious and sectional between North and South.
ED: It certainly was the case for many generations, even into the present generation. That quite a few southerners would not tolerate the idea at all of somebody in their family marrying a Yankee if they could help it. And partly for Civil War reasons but also just for sort of general principle. Just sort of cultural reasons. But the irony is that novelist and short story writers instead focused on this as one of the central tropes of 19th century American literature. The marriage of the former union solider and the southern belle as the sort of symbol of the reunification of the country. And this began in the very first novel published after the Civil War, to still endure to the present day, Mrs. Ravenel's Conversion From Secession to Union. Which has quite the, you have to admit, the sexy title.
BRIAN: Yeah, sure!
ED: But the point being is that, like the country as a whole, Mrs. Ravenel who'd been a staunch secessionist falls in love with a union solider and thereby finds her way back into the union. And that became one of the most common storylines of literature after the civil war. So even at the same time that a lot of people would never cotton to the idea of marrying a Yankee, it became quite prominent in popular culture.
BRIAN: Ed, how much do you think that the gender differences almost mitigate the military differences? I'm thinking of course about the 20th century and war brides. Americans go over and you know, marrying Germans or marrying Vietnamese, in the case of the Vietnamese War. It's almost as if the men fought men and you can make it all okay through these reunions with women.
ED: Well you know what's interest is that after the Civil War it became very clear to people that white southern women were the least reconstructed of anybody. And it's partly because they could afford to be. They could get away with the same things that really would have put men in prison. Because there was still this idea during reconstruction that still, these women don't really matter for one thing. And so their men folk actually put them up to it, to go ahead and resist.
BRIAN: They were kind of safe in that way.
ED: Yeah, they're safe. At the same time they were often very sincere and just despised these Yankee men who would come down. So, I guess Blake, what I'm saying is that you inherited a rich tradition of gendered Yankee hating. But I think of what would've been unusual for a northern young woman to marry a southern man. That's not the way the story has often been portrayed. Did you read a lot of literature before you decided to get married?
BLAKE: No, it was oral literature on several occasions.
PETER: But I think it's part of the romantic literature. You got to meet-cute, there's got to be an obstacle, there's got to be something to overcome of you don't have a story. If you just have people falling in love, what's the story to that? So the fact that there are these cultural gaps, and I think we can trivialize it, we can laugh about it, but the marriage choices that Americans make indicate there sense of what the greater American family is really like. And deep down inside you northerners and southerners, you're the same people right?
PETER: Now the real boundary now, in the expansion of the mating game so to speak, is across racial boundaries. And I think we've all experienced, if we're old enough, a lot of this in our lifetimes. Of how those boundaries have been perceptibly changing. And I think romantic stories about crossing boundaries are one of the ways in which we quantify this in our popular culture.
BRIAN: Well I'd go beyond. I'd say it's along sexual lines.
PETER: Yeah.
BRIAN: Same sex marriage has trumped even racial as that forbidden line to cross.
PETER: So you were a pioneer in your time many years ago and we applaud you for pushing the frontier and being part of this larger reunion that makes us all a big, happy American family.
BRIAN: And I can tell that Long Island City accent has not rubbed off on you Blake.
BLAKE: No, I fight that. I fight that.
BRIAN: There you go!
ED: All right.
BRIAN: Thanks Blake.
PETER: Thanks for calling.
BRIAN: Bye bye.
Well we're always willing to cross boundaries here at Backstory, but the one boundary we can't cross is the end of the hour. But, as always, the conversation continues online. Drop in at backstoryradio.org and leave us a comment, a question, a love note, whatever. We'd love to hear from you.
ED: And while you're there, sign up for our podcast and join us on Facebook. And tell us what topics you'd like to see us take on in the future.
PETER: The address again is backstoryradio.org. Don't be a stranger!
ED: Backstory is produced by Tony Field, with help from Katherine Moore. Jamal Mill mastered the show, [inaudible 00:53:41] wrote our theme and special thanks today to Emma Jacobson and Eric Vacurky.
Backstory's executive producer is Andrew Windem.
PETER: Major support for Backstory is provided by the University of Richmond. Offering a combination of the liberal arts with law, business, leadership studies and continuing education. More information at richmond.edu. Major support also comes from the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, committed to the idea that the future may learn from the past.
BRIAN: Support also comes from the Day to Day Harrison Fund for the President's initiatives at the University of Virginia, UVA's Mueller Center for public affairs, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Carrie Brown Epstein and the WL Lion's Brown Junior Charitable Foundation, James Madison's[inaudible 00:54:24], Marcus and Carol Weinstein, Trish and David Crowe, Randy and Lucy Church, JM Weinberg and an anonymous donor.
SPEAKER 16: Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
Brian Balogh is a Professor of History at the University of Virginia and UVA's Miller Center of Public Affairs.
Ed Ayers is President and Professor of History at the University of Richmond.
Backstory was created by Andrew Windem for VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
