Flapper (6 page)

Amusement parks were just the tip of the iceberg. In 1910, Ruth True, an urban sociologist, chronicled the story of Louisa, a typical Irish working girl from the West Side of Manhattan.
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Earning $5 per week from her job at a candy factory, Louisa felt entitled to stay out late at dance halls, often in the company of strange men. “The costume in which she steps out so triumphantly has cost many bitter moments at home,” True observed. Indeed, Louisa’s poor mother was beside herself with grief. “She stands up and answers me back,” she lamented. “An’ she’s comin’ in at 2 o’clock, me not knowin’ where she has been. Folks will talk, you know, an it ain’t right fer a girl.”

Louisa’s mother probably didn’t
want
to know everything that went on at the dance halls her daughter frequented. A high-minded reformer described with horror a scene at a typical venue, where “one of the women [was] smoking cigarettes, most of the younger couples were hugging and kissing, there was a general mingling of men and women at the different tables,” and the customers “kept running around the room and acted like a mob of lunatics.”
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An observer at another dance hall noted with similar disapproval that “one of the girls while in the middle of a dance stopped on [the] floor and went to different tables and kept saying, ‘You didn’t kiss me for New Year’s.’ ”

None of this made any sense to the aging Victorians. Twenty years earlier, when Minnie Sayre was a young woman, American courtship had been a carefully orchestrated affair that allowed mothers and fathers to exercise considerable control over their children. A teenage girl received gentleman callers on the front porch or in the family parlor, all under the vigilant eye of an adult chaperone.

Such was the case for Ina Smith, age eighteen, and John Marean, age twenty-four, who grew up on adjacent farms in New York State’s rural Nanticoke Valley.
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Beginning in 1899, when the young couple started courting, John would visit the Smith homestead a few times a week. With Ina’s parents keeping close watch, they would pass the
hours in conversation, playing tiddlywinks, reading to each other, or making fudge in the kitchen. Sometimes, when the opportunity presented itself, they went out unaccompanied to church socials and musical performances. On rare occasions they even ventured fifteen miles away, to Binghamton, for events like Casino Night or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. “Got home at half past three,” Ina recorded in her diary after one such excursion. “I’ve been awfully sleepy today.”

But this was an exception. Most of the time, Ina and John were under lock and key.

The Victorians were hardly all prudes. In fact, theirs was an intensely romantic culture. Looking back on his boyhood in rural Indiana, the novelist Theodore Dreiser remembered that young men and women were always seen “walking under the trees or rowing on the lakes, holding hands or kissing or whispering sweet nothings.”
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“Fiery tales” abounded of “sweet trysts and doings in unlighted parlors and groves.” Still, those moments were tame by later comparison. For most young lovers in the Victorian era, romance was a closely guarded and circumscribed affair.

All of this came under assault at the turn of the century, even before most American towns went electric. The first sign of trouble came in the 1890s, when Americans fell in love with the bicycle.

For young people like Otto Follin and Laura Grant, who grew up in Illinois, these new contraptions made all the difference.
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“We rode till half past nine,” Otto recorded, “and then we sat down to rest by the lake and were alone and I knew that I could touch her if I wanted to and I did, just a little.…”

It got worse.

Parents who were just coming to terms with the bicycle woke up one day to discover the deleterious effects of the telephone, which came into wider use in the first decades of the new century. Now, lovelorn teenagers like Marian Curtis and Lawrence Gerritson, who lived in the suburbs of Boston, could speak daily by phone, even as they continued to see
and
write each other several times a week.
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Doubtless, their parents came to rue the day when the uniformed agent came over to install the magic black box and handset.

Then came the automobile.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, cars were still viewed as impractical and unsafe. Their tires fell off; they buckled and spun out at the slightest provocation; when it rained, their wheels got mired in the mud and the muck. At best, they were playthings of oil tycoons and bankers’ sons. San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Savannah slapped drivers with a maximum speed limit of eight miles per hour. Vermont required all motorists to hire “persons of mature age” to walk one-eighth of a mile ahead of their cars, waving red warning flags for the benefit of innocent pedestrians.

The technology revolution hit America almost overnight. In the years before World War I, Ransom Olds inaugurated the mass production of automobiles, Henry Leland experimented with interchangeable car parts, and Henry Ford took advantage of both advances to usher in a radical phase in the ongoing transportation revolution. By the late 1920s, the automobile industry was turning out nearly five million cars each year and Americans collectively owned twenty-six million automobiles, which translated to one car for every five persons. To support this new car culture, state and local governments saddled themselves with over $10 billion of debt to construct modern highways, roads, tunnels, and bridges. Florida cut through the everglade swampland to raise the Tamiami Trail; Arizona bisected its vast desert; Utah paved a road over Lake Bonneville; and New York erected the Bronx River Parkway.

The triumph of the mass-produced automobile signaled the end of the Victorian era’s courtship system. Just ask the father of a teenage girl in Muncie, Indiana, who vainly warned his daughter against “going out motoring for the evening with a young blade in a rakish car waiting at the curb.”
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“What on earth
do
you want me to do?” the young woman replied with exasperation. “Just sit around home all evening!”

Parents worried that their kids never spent time with their families anymore. “They always have something else going on,” one mother complained. “In the nineties we were all much more together,” another woman sighed.

A survey of Muncie’s high school students in the 1920s revealed that the five most frequent sources of disagreement between teenagers and
their parents were, in order: (1) “the number of times you go out on school nights during the week”; (2) “the hour you get in at night”; (3) “grades at school”; (4) “your spending money”; and (5) “use of the automobile.”
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It didn’t take a genius to realize that items one, two, and four were all intimately related to item five.

It wasn’t just the erosion of family spirit that bothered parents. The car was “an incredible engine of escape,” as Dorothy Bromley and Florence Britten observed in their 1938 tract,
Youth and Sex.
It meant that young couples could be “off and away, out of reach of parental control.
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A youth now … has a refuge … complete privacy. He has taken full advantage of it, not only as a means of going places, but as a place to go where he can take a girl and hold hands, neck, pet, or if it’s that kind of affair, go the limit.” Not that teenage boys were the only ones titillated by automotive possibilities. A Rhode Island woman remarked, “You can be so nice and all alone in a machine, just a little one that you can go on crazy roads in and be miles away from anyone but each other.”

By 1925, when the husband-and-wife sociologist team of Robert and Helen Lynd arrived in Muncie to conduct their famous study of an ordinary American town, the destructive effects of the automobile were pretty well established.
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Between September 1923 and September 1924, thirty young women were hauled into the Muncie courthouse and charged with “sex crimes.” Of that total, nineteen had been apprehended in parked cars.

The Lynds observed a Sunday school teacher ask his students to list temptations that “we have today that Jesus didn’t have.” To this challenge, a quick-witted boy replied, “Speed!”

All of this boded poorly for the old order.
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As late as 1907,
Harper’s Bazaar
could still find a captive audience for articles like “Etiquette for Men,” which considered in minute detail the protocols of Victorian courtship. But the swift breakdown of the “calling system” gave rise to a new romantic lexicon by the early 1910s. Now, boys and girls were going out on “dates,” a term that appeared as early as 1896 in George Ade’s columns for the
Chicago Record
but that most prewar writers continued to place safely between quotation marks so as to impart the experimental and faddish quality of the emerging system.

The new dating culture lent itself to greater sexual experimentation and frankness on the part of young people like Katherine Dummer, a typical middle-class teenager from Chicago. In the summer of 1915, Katherine’s family took her on a camping trip out west. Writing to her fiancé, a law student named Walter Fisher, Katherine spoke of her “starvation” for physical intimacy. “I’ll be patient, dear,” she assured him, “but I’m awfully hungry.… 
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 If this hideous restless feeling keeps up I don’t know what I’ll do.”

As the summer wore on, Katherine’s notes grew edgier. “If I get much hungrier,” she told Walter, “I’m awfully afraid I’ll start something.”
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She must have been unusually relentless, because by mid-July Mr. and Mrs. Dummer agreed to have Walter join the family in California for the last leg of the trip. “If I only see you for two weeks in September, with nothing particular to do & the thought of separation again the uppermost thing,” Katherine confided, “we may have more or less a debauch, we’ll be a lot more likely to do crazy things.”

Clearly, Zelda Sayre wasn’t the only girl in America who liked to do “crazy things.” Young women growing up right before the Jazz Age were equal partners in pioneering a new set of customs governing romance and sexuality.

This new system wasn’t necessarily stacked in a girl’s favor, though.
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Working women faced rampant wage and employment discrimination that sharply curtailed their spending power. A study conducted in Chicago found that the average female factory worker or clerk in the 1920s earned not much more than $22 per week, yet
bare minimum
living costs ranged between $20 and $25 a week. At best, if she had a boyfriend who treated her to the occasional dinner or lunch, the working girl could keep her head above water; at worst, she fell below the poverty line. This was the case for Cora, a typical twenty-five-year-old laundress whose sixty-hour work week afforded her little more than a dark, grimy room in a boardinghouse and solitary meals of stew, potatoes, and apple pie at a cheap neighborhood cafeteria.

Even when working women lived with their families, they faced a crude double standard: They were expected to hand over all of their
weekly pay to their parents—a practice with which most women wage earners in New York complied.
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By comparison, their brothers normally retained at least half their earnings for personal expenses.

On their own, working-class women could scarcely afford to indulge themselves with fancy clothes, movie tickets, or a thrilling afternoon at Coney Island. For them, city life held out the promise of social freedom, but not always the reality. The same could also be true for many middle-class teenagers like Zelda Sayre and Katherine Dummer, who grew up in considerably greater comfort but were still dependent on their parents for money.

This was where men came into the picture.

A central component of the new dating system came to be known as “treating,” whereby men paid cash for dinners, theater tickets, and amusement park admissions and women carefully estimated how much physical and romantic attention they needed to provide in turn. “If they didn’t take me,” a young department store clerk explained, “how could I ever go out?”
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More to the point, a young waitress offered, “If I did not have a man, I could not get along on my wages.”
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This was an entirely new dynamic. In the old days, courting took place at home. There simply wasn’t anywhere else to go. In effect, the Victorian system of romance, centered as it was around the front parlor or porch, put women in the driver’s seat: They did the inviting, they set the hour and day of the visit, and they called the limits. Dating was something completely different. It revolved around a new public leisure culture that cost money; it therefore placed men, who
had
more money, in greater control. The result was a complex interplay among commerce, sexuality, and love.

Sometimes the dating system could be purely mercenary. “Most of the girls quite frankly admit making ‘dates’ with strange men,” a Consumer’s League report found in the early 1910s.
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“These ‘dates’ are made with no thought on the part of the girl beyond getting a good time which she cannot afford herself.”

Many men resented this commercialization of romance, as was fully evident in a 1919 article that appeared in the
Chicago Tribune
under the headline
MAN GETTING $18 A WEEK DARES NOT FALL IN LOVE.
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The young man in question was a returning World War I veteran whose meager wages “could not even buy a young lady an ice cream cone,” let alone an expensive night out on the town.