In the run up to World War II, popularity for a young person meant going on lots of dates with lots of different people. As one sociologist observed in the 1930s, popularity meant dating success—especially for women. Like many things, notions of popularity were gendered. For men, popularity was connected to material things such as cars and nice clothes. For women, it
depended on building and maintaining a reputation for popularity. They had to be seen with many popular men in the right places, indignantly turn down requests for dates made at the “last minute,” which could be weeks in advance, and cultivate the impression that they were greatly in demand.
Having just the one boy coming to pick you up was fine—if that’s all you could get. But as a 1940 article in the Woman’s Home Companion noted, “The modern girl cultivates not one single suitor, but dates, lots of them…. Her aim is not a too obvious romance but general popularity.”
Dating was more about image and competition than romance. Etiquette books at the time even cautioned against dancing with one partner too long; someone (or even better, lots of someones) needed to cut in to make it seem like you weren’t a social failure.
By 1950, though, things had changed. “Going steady,” or having just one partner, became the “in” thing. This focused approach to dating may have “provided a measure of security from the pressures of the postwar world,” Bailey writes. The war also saw marriage rates increase, in part because of fear that a partner might not return from battle and in part because many had delayed marriage during the Depression; an improving economy finally allowed them to marry. Marriage ages also lowered. In 1939, American women married at an average age of 23.3; by 1959, 47 percent of new brides were married before age nineteen. Dating was just practice for the inevitable marriage.