Dating is hell. But how much worse would it be if the very act of it landed you in jail?
According to “Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a sprawling new history by Moira Weigel, the first female daters faced exactly that — mistaken, in their quest for love, for prostitutes.
As with concepts like the “teenager” and “middle-class,” dating is an historically recent invention, spurred by an influx of women into the big cities seeking work around the turn of the 20th Century.
The word “date” was coined — inadvertently, it seems — by George Ade, a columnist for the Chicago Record, in 1896. In a column about “working class lives,” he told of a clerk named Artie whose girlfriend was losing interest in him and beginning to see other men socially. When Artie confronts his fading love, he says, “I s’pose the other boy’s fillin’ all my dates?”
But when these single women, stripped from their dependency on fathers and husbands, began to be courted in public, police, politicians, and civic leaders were alarmed.
“In the eyes of the authorities,” Weigel writes, “women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.”
After centuries of women’s fortunes being dictated by the men around them, the notion of women on their own gave much of society pause. In Chicago, single women were known as “women adrift.”
The charity girl
These circumstances gave birth to dating rituals and other unfortunate traditions that still remain — or, at least, still cause confusion as mores change — today.
When women first hit the workforce, writes Weigel, “the belief remained widespread they were working not to support themselves but only to supplement the earnings of fathers or husbands.”
As such, “employers used this misconception as an excuse to pay women far less than they paid men. In 1900, the average female worker earned less than half of what a man would earn in the same position.”
If you’ve ever wondered how it developed that men were expected to treat their dates, that’s how.
“‘If I had to buy all my meals I’d never get along,’ a young woman living in a boardinghouse in Hell’s Kitchen told a social worker in 1915.”
But as these women were courted in public, efforts were undertaken to curb what authorities viewed as a potential public menace.
‘Women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.’
- Moira Weigel
“In the early 1900s, vice commissions across the country sent police and undercover investigators to check out spots where people went to make dates,” Weigel writes. “As early as 1905, private investigators hired by a group of Progressive do-gooders in New York City were taking notes on what we can now recognize as the dating avant-garde.”
She recalls the report of one such special agent, staked out at the Strand Hotel in Midtown, who noted that the women he was spying on did not seem like prostitutes, per se, but were concerning nonetheless.
Of the “store employees, telephone girls, stenographers, etc.,” he noted that “their morals are loose, and there is no question that they are on terms of sexual intimacy with their male companions.”
So heavy was the concern that these loose, immoral women might harm society that, “in the 1910s, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the Standard Oil founder, funded investigations into the commercialized vice industries of more than a dozen American cities.”
By the mid-1910s, women on dates came to be known as “Charity Girls” — as in, since they took no money for their “favors,” they were perceived to be giving it away as charity — and by the 1920s, “the prostitutes at New York’s Strand Hotel complained that Charity Girls were putting them out of business.”
It sounds like a joke, until you learn that some women were thrown in jail for this horrible crime.
“At Bedford Reformatory, an institution founded to rehabilitate female delinquents in upstate New York, an Irish woman told her jailers again and again that she had ‘never taken money from men,’ ” Weigel writes. “Instead, men took her ‘to Coney Island to dances and Picture Shows.’ ”
In time, the authorities gave up, overtaken by reality.
“As the years passed, the vice squad had to accept it,” she writes. “Daters did not see these exchanges as tawdry. They saw them as romantic.”
The shopgirl
While dating finally became acceptable, it wasn’t exactly liberating for women. If the American Dream for men was to work hard and become a success, the equivalent for women was to get a good job and marry your rich boss.
“Frances Donovan, a University of Chicago–trained sociologist who taught at Calumet High School on the city’s South Side in the 1920s, interviewed senior girls about their plans after graduation,” Weigel writes.
“‘I would like to be a stenographer,’ one announced. ‘I’m going to be an executive secretary and marry the boss.’ ”
The other alternative was for women to take jobs in high-class department stores where rich men were likely to shop. These women became known as “Shopgirls.”
Donovan spent two summers working at a department store to research a book, and later reported she knew of “several marriages and heard of a great many more where the husband was far above the wife as measured by the economic scale.”
Magazines began running articles such as, “How Shopgirls win Rich Husbands.” An in-house newsletter for Macy’s employees in New York even included a gossip column that tracked these courtships.
“Have you noticed a gentleman wearing spats stopping at Miss Holahan’s counter every day, leaving a spray of lily of the valley?” read one such entry. “Best of luck, Ide!”
In order to attract rich men, these Shopgirls were caught by the irony of needing to buy the expensive items they sold.
In an odd way, this consumerism marked a form of progress.
“In an earlier era, a girl from humble origins could not hope to look like the wife or daughter of a millionaire,” Weigel writes. “But a job in a department store or a laundry gave anyone opportunities to become well versed in the signs of wealth.”
To that end Shopgirls studied their well-to-do female customers seeking to imitate their look, which led the business world to pounce on this new type of consumer who sought little but to impress.
“The cosmetics industry exploded in the 1920s,” Weigel writes. “Previously, only prostitutes and actresses ‘painted.’ Victorians had viewed ‘natural’ outer beauty as a sign of clean living. But around 1900, more and more women were starting to apply cosmetics. By 1912, the Baltimore Sun reported that even respectable society women ‘are seen on our streets and fashionable promenade with painted faces.’ ”
To counter society’s negative association with painted faces, “the cosmetics industry invented a new term: makeup.
“Not only was ‘making yourself up’ permissible; advertisers were soon claiming it was positively virtuous,” Weigel writes. “By making herself up, a woman showed that she valued her femininity and was willing to spend time and money on her appearance.”
The ‘It’ Girl
Two other now-familiar concepts also sprung up around this time. Previously, people sought to be known by traits that emphasized morality, such as “character” and “virtue.”
The concept of “personality” — which places emphasis on surface traits — had been regarded in the negative, referenced in terms of “personality disorders.”
“Starting around 1920, however,” Weigel writes, “experts began to grant that healthy individuals had personalities, too.”
The concept began popping up in romance literature and articles about dating, in the sense that, “personality was like ‘painting’ — a way a woman could make herself up in order to appeal to men.”
“In the context of dating, to have a ‘good personality’ or to simply ‘have personality’ meant to have charisma,” Weigel writes. “This was an asset whether you were selling handkerchiefs or selling yourself.”
Elinor Glyn, writing for Cosmopolitan in 1926, referred to personality simply as “It,” which was, according to Weigel, “a mysterious kind of animal magnetism.”
“With ‘It,’ ” Glyn wrote, “you win all men if you are a woman — and all women if you are a man.”
Glyn’s article was adapted for a movie starring Clara Bow as “a shopgirl who has ‘it,’ ” and the concept of the It Girl was born. Bow’s It Girl, of course, sought to marry the boss — in this case, the son of the store’s owner.
The notion that “it” can be developed led to the origin of another phenomena — the dating-advice book.
Weigel tells of a 1915 New York Times article on a lecture by author Susanna Cocroft, who seized on the trend by writing books like “What to Eat and When,” and this now-remarkable title, “Beauty a Duty.”
“‘Beauty is no longer vanity; it is use,” Cocroft said. “A waitress or a shopgirl could be fired at any time simply because someone her boss found prettier showed up and asked for her position.”
As dating rituals changed, moral authorities panicked at every turn. After “petting” came into vogue in the 1920s, for example, Weigel cites a Times article from 1922 with the title, “Mothers Complain That Modern Girls ‘Vamp’ Their Sons at Petting Parties.”
Those evil, evil modern girls.