Dating Customs

Beth L. Bailey’s From Front Porch To Back Seat illustrates the changing modes of gender-relations structures over time. We see how dating has evolved from “a gracious ritual, with clearly defined roles for man and woman” to “a system of exchange best understood through economic analogies” (Bailey 28; 35). Involved in the dating process traditionally were men, women and parents before dating moved from the private to the public sphere. However, we see that as calling evolved into dating the conventional roles of men and women and parents altered dramatically in the courtship process. Using Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat and David Blankenhorn’s I Do?, this analysis will review the changing socioeconomic gender-relations structures involved in courtship.

Prior to the early 1900s, dating as it is now known was known as calling. The process of calling, as we shall see in the process of dating, manifested various power structures among men, women and their parents of women, particularly the mother. Courtship in this era occurred in the private sphere, typically the home of the female. Calling was a social interaction under close parental supervision of a male and female. The social interaction had a firm set of guidelines and established codes of conduct. The female in this era had control of the courtship process because the social domain was controlled by females. Women controlled the days they w

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pted to the new conditions much more directly” (Bailey 31). Slowly but surely the dating process began to emerge into the public sphere. Dance halls, movie theaters, soda shops and other venues became legitimate and respectable for dating. However, by moving the process of courtship into the public sphere, two other highly significant changes occurred in the socioeconomic structure of gender-relations. The first was that dating became an economic phenomenon. This is because instead of free refreshments and an evening of polite social discourse as in the calling era, men now took women out into the public sphere and were expected to pay to show the date a good time. This economization of the courtship process had a twofold effect. On the one hand, men who had little money to spend often failed to have access to the dating process because they could not afford to treat a date to a good time in the public sphere. On the other hand, this economization of the courtship process moved the locus of power and control to the female and her mother to the male. Thus, courtship became a public phenomenon where little parental supervision or control played a role. This twofold process completely changed the conventional process of c
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Approximate Word count = 1405
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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