Mitchell: How do sexual scripts interact with demographic patterns?
Escoffier: For example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the courtship scripts of the white middle class changed significantly. The social conditions that had sustained the courtship system of the post-Civil War era were changing. That system, the “calling system,” required a man being invited by a woman’s family, so they had to be in a relatively small community. The man was invited by the family to come and visit the young woman. They had to have a sitting room where the young people could sit and talk while chaperoned. There also had to be enough control over the young woman – she couldn’t leave the house by herself – and there was no reason why the man would take her out of the house.
That system begins to break down toward the very end of the nineteenth century, when more and more native-born Americans and immigrants moved to cities and urban working-class families didn’t have that kind of setup. They often didn’t have a front room for talking like that. Also, upper- and upper middle-class men began to have cars so they could take upper-class girls out on dates – and then the men payed for a meal or entertainment. Each of these modifications to the courtship script created a new set of conditions for the sexual interactions of young people. The courtship system was a key piece of the story, but that also depended on material conditions, such as the existence of movies and the automobile, the residential environment as well as demographic circumstances.
Mitchell: The 1920s were the peak of the Great Migration and of immigration to the United States before the 1924 law that dramatically limited immigration from Africa, Asia, and Eastern and Southern Europe. What kinds of roles do ethnicity, race, and class play in this model of sexual revolution?
Escoffier: Between 1890 and the 1920s immigration and urbanization play an incredibly important role because each of those social groups had/has very different demographic conditions and normative conventions. For example, look at the contrast between Jewish and Italian immigrants in that period. Italian immigrants had a significant pattern of circular migration with men coming here, working here, and then going back to Italy, where they often had families. At some point, women joined their families and communities in the U.S. But those communities had a much more uneven sex ratio, male/female ratio, than, say, the bulk of the Jewish community. Many Jews who were expelled from Eastern Europe came here in extended family units, and so you had a more balanced ratio. Thus, you find more bars in Italian neighborhoods in which men predominate and where sex between men was often negotiated. I think these examples illustrate the process by which demographic patterns influence sexual behavior.