Engagement takes its place in a wide range of courtship relations. From the early twentieth century to the 1950s, for example, middle — class Americans distinguished a whole series of possible relations between unmarried couples other than engagement, most notably dating and going steady (for eighteenth-century practices, see God — beer 2002). Originating as a working-class practice, among the middle class, dating replaced the older custom of calling (Bailey 1988: 17; see also Modell 1989; Schrum 2004). By the mid-1920s, Beth Bailey tells us in her history of American courtship, “going somewhere”—to restaurants, theater, dance halls—had displaced the earlier system of young men “calling” at a girl’s home or “keeping company” under the watchful eyes of her family.
What defined the date? It meant that when a couple “went out,” the man spent money on their entertainment. Thus, Bailey concludes, “money—men’s money—became the basis of the dating system, and thus, of courtship” (Bailey 1988: 13). Observers watched with frightened fascination the increasingly competitive streak in dating, which Willard Waller, in his 1937 study of Pennsylvania State University, dubbed the “dating and rating” system—the establishment of a strict hierarchy of desirability, hence of prestige, among companions for public occasions such as dances and sports events (Waller 1937; see also Horowitz 1987; Whyte 1990). For the next few decades, dating continued to pivot on the man’s payment for most of the entertainment expenses (see for example Holland and Eisenhart 1990; Illouz 1997: 66-76; Komarovsky 1985: 231-33; McComb 1998).
The new relations of dating thus involved a distinct intimate economy. After World War II, although young people continued to date, they created a new form of relationship halfway between engagement and dating. They called it “going steady,” a more exclusive, longer-term, and often more sexually intimate relationship than dating. Sometimes, going steady subdivided into more than one category. Among University of Kansas college students of the 1950s, for example, Beth Bailey reports: “A whole new set of ‘official’ statuses emerged to designate the seriousness of relationships: going steady, lavaliered, pinned, engaged. Each of these was more serious than the last, and each step allowed greater sexual intimacy. Necking with a ‘steady’ was one thing, necking with a casual date something else entirely” (Bailey 1999: 77). Going steady created its own characteristic matching ofrelations, transactions, and media. In general, the couple involved pooled resources far more than dating couples, typically planning their expenditures to assure their appearance at major social occasions. Among high school students, who rapidly adopted the practice, boys and girls, for instance, exchanged class rings, wore matching “steady jackets,” or boys gave the girl a letter sweater (Bailey 1988: 50-51; see also Palladino 1996: 112).
Thus an elaborate system of courtship with multiple forms of relations prevailed in U. S. schools at the mid-twentieth century. Today, of course, single men still invite single women out for meals or entertainment, pick up the tab, and expect a degree of intimacy to prevail during the encounter. They still sometimes call this arrangement dating. However, since the mid-1950s, a whole new array of courtship relations has evolved in the United States, including such pairings as hooking up, friends with benefits, going out, or hanging out. In a preliminary survey of women on eleven college campuses, for example, Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt (2001) found that college undergraduates divided their heterosexual encounters into five rough categories: first, interactions involving sex without commitment, including “hooking up” or what some of the women called “friends with benefits”; second, rapidly established committed relationships involving sexual activity, sometimes referred to as “joined at the hip”; third, less intense, slower moving,
committed relationships that might or might not involve sexual activity. “Hanging out” was the fourth—and the most common—type of relationship; it means going out or spending time with one or more partners (see also Brooks 2002; Wolfe 2000; for teen-age practices, Schneider and Stevenson 1999: 190-91). Finally, dating in the old sense of the word accounted for only a small minority of those encounters. When it came to men’s payment for shared entertainment, these college women only rarely and ambivalently took part in such arrangements.
Despite the new terminology and practices, some residues of the old system remain. The Fabulous Girl’s Guide to Decorum, touted as the “etiquette guide for the new millennium,” offers the following advice on “proper date behavior” to young women:
Some women feel it’s not a date unless the guy pays the bill.
But… an FG [Fabulous Girl] is a modern woman and does not hold to these old-fashioned principles. Usually. Who picks up the tab on those early dates can be tricky. If your suitor makes it clear that he’d like to take you out to dinner, then you can let him pay for the meal. When a man asks a FG out for an afternoon coffee or cocktails, it is not wrong to assume that he will pay for her. Nonetheless, an FG always carries some cash in case he’s cheap. … If you do not intend to see this guy again, then you should definitely pay for your half of the bill. Of course, you know that paying for a meal doesn’t mean anyone is obliged to offer themselves for dessert later, but he might not. (Izzo and Marsh 2001: 145-46)
Thus, who pays continues to be a crucial question symbolizing the nature of the relationship.
Will the Internet change all that? From the 1990s onward, electronic chat rooms, instant messaging, and computer-mediated dating services certainly introduced new practices into the old world of courtship (Constable 2003). According to a New York Times report, more than 45 million Americans visited dating Web sites in a single month of 2003. The same report projected that in 2003 they would spend about $33 million a month on electronic dating services (Harmon 2003) New combinations of intimacy and economic activity will surely emerge over decades to come. None of them, however, will eliminate the work of matching relations, media, and economic transactions, much less the effort to mark the boundaries between the relations at hand and others with which they might easily and banefully be confused.
These past and current urban middle-class customs do not, of course, exhaust the great variety of courtship that has existed in the United States. Courtship has always differed by ethnicity, race, class, and religion.[20] Among urban working-class Americans who had left school, for example, a new form of relationship called “treating” emerged in the twentieth century. Treating was a popular arrangement by which young working-class women obtained financial help, gifts, and access to entertainment from a fiance or a “steady” but also from casual acquaintances, in exchange for a variety of sexual favors, from flirting to intercourse. Young working women earning low wages and obligated to contribute to their families’ income, had little spending money left over for their own clothes or entertainment. So they relied on men friends to “treat” them to dancing, drinks, theater, or dinner. As Kathy Peiss (1983; 1986) reports, working-class informal etiquette allowed a much broader range of respectable indirect payments to women than did that of the middle class; working girls accepted not only recreation and food from a man but gifts of clothing or even a vacation trip.
People distinguished treating not only from the much more sexually restricted relationship of middle-class dating but also from the sexually explicit bargain of prostitution. They invested considerable effort, indeed, in marking the boundary between acceptable treating and unacceptable whoredom. As long as she did not receive cash payment from men at the time of sexual relations, the treating (or “charity”) girl did not become a prostitute. Surveying the practice of treating in New York City between 1900 and 1932, Elizabeth Clement reports that “the young women exchanged sexual favors for dinner and the night’s expenses, or more tangibly for stockings, shoes, and other consumer goods” (Clement 1998a: 68). These women, she notes, used treating “to gain entry into the expensive world of urban amusements and to distinguish themselves from the prostitutes who lived and worked in the bars alongside them.” In contrast to prostitutes, treating women and their companions established a sort of gift economy. Clement explains: “Not only did they not accept cash, but they did not really exchange services for material goods. Instead, they received presents from their friends” (120).[21]
As in any gift economy, not all presents were equally acceptable. Reporting on the same custom in Chicago, Randy McBee (2000: 108) quotes Rose Kaiser, a young Jewish woman. Kaiser rejected certain gifts from men, such as silk stockings, “because they’d want to put them on [me].” Treating girls and their companions thus worked out a complex round of exchanges far different from the conventions of dating and prostitution.[22] Yet working-class treating paralleled middle-class dating in four important regards. First, it permitted a degree of interpersonal intimacy the parties would not ordinarily engage in outside of the arrangement. Second, it remained temporary: once entered, a treat did not imply either party’s right or obligation to continue the relationship. (Hence many a negotiation over whether a couple were treating.) Third, through known transitions and agreements it could lead into adjacent rela- tionships—certainly prostitution on one side, but even clearly longer-term monogamous commitments on the other. Finally, treating was in itself no more a paid occupation than was dating. Despite the woman’s receipt of valuable gifts and services, treating did not qualify a woman as a sex worker, identify her male companion as her client, or for that matter keep her from gaining her livelihood through nonsexual forms of work.