This is not to say that every date involved a car (although it was generally agreed that it was far more impressive if it did.) The phenomenon of dating spread far beyond the people who were able to own cars. Just as important as the car itself were the ideas that came with its societal use; a sense of freedom and mobility that extended even to those who were not directly affected by it.
Although movies were among the most popular settings, dates took place in many other places, in as wide a range as they do in the present. Dance clubs and music clubs featured the popular jazz and stride piano music which provided the same function as rock-and-roll does now. Another, perhaps more surprising, rock-and-roll equivalent was modern classical music, which was still popular enough to cause occasional riots at controversial concerts. Its time was beginning to pass (it might have been regarded by many youngsters as their parents' music), but it was hardly the staid, formal structure it has become today. A description of a concert given by a well-regarded classical pianist and composer stated that the musician "first removed his gloves and threw them to the hysterical adoring women in the audience, who were always present at his concerts. He then began to play, energetically enough to break the strings of his instrument. As he played, he began to laugh. Then, he began to cry. Then, suddenly, he fainted. He swiftly recovered, took *another* pair of gloves out of his coat, threw them to another adoring audience member, and began to play again." The parallel is clearly closer to a modern rock concert than a modern symphonic concert.
The theater was also popular, as was the opera, and both could be either extremely formal settings or very informal, depending upon the location. Restaurants, ice-skating, carnivals, staying in the car, and all the other modern choices were also quite open and limited only by the imagination of the daters.
Good Movies, if watching the film is a secondary consideration - Buster Keaton's "Sherlock, Jr." (very funny), "Aelita Queen of Mars" (Russia leads the way in science fiction), "The Eagle" (with sex god Rudolph Valentino), "The Thief of Baghdad" (with sex god Douglas Fairbanks), "The Phantom of the Opera" (with non-sex god Lon Chaney)
Theater - Shaw's "St. Joan" (good socialism and easily the best play of the year), Coward's "Hay Fever" (witty and urbane), Pirandello's "Each In His Own Way" (weird and avant-garde), O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms" (over-rated, but still good), Brecht's "In The Jungle of Cities" (German and kind of pretentious, but historically important), Bulgakov's "The Last Days of the Turbins" (banned in Russia by the Stalinist Zealots - see it before it quietly disappears)
Jazz - Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson (great musicians all)
Modern Classical Music- Stravinsky's "Les Noces" (weird oratorio and ballet about a country wedding), Ravel's "L'enfant et les Sortileges" (opera with libretto by Colette), Shostakovich's "Symphony #1 in F Minor" (the first symphony by an up-and-coming young composer)
Nonstandard sexual relations had of course been occurring even at the height of the Victorian age - the Romantic artists were notorious for all catching syphilis from each other. But there had always been an effort to keep such activity discreetly hidden, at least in theory. In the 1920's, however, a new social movement which actively supported nonmarital sex and multiple lovers began to gain strength; the "free love" movement attracted figures as diverse as Dorothy Parker, Emma Goldman, and H. G. Wells. The movement practiced what it preached, and its devotees took strings of lovers, to the scandal and delight of the populace at large.
There were many reasons for the creation of the new theories (many of these reasons were also in part behind the general change in attitude about petting, dress, and frank talk about sex which were occurring throughout the general younger populace.) The effects of World War I on society at this time cannot possibly be overestimated; it informed every aspect of society. There was a strong belief, both conscious and unconscious, that the devastating, largely pointless war proved that the societies which had led to it were deeply flawed. Politics, art, and conventional morality were all held up for deep questioning, and Victorian attitudes about sex were among the first to be called on the carpet. Once the repression that had held most of the world in its grip for decades was questioned, the floodgates were open.
In addition, changes in politics and laws affected attitudes about sex by changing the condition of women. American women received the vote in 1921; Russian women found laws governing their sexuality greatly relaxed. It is fairly easy to argue that these changes allowed women a greater sense of empowerment which enabled them to take a less passive role in the mating process, from the passive object of courtship to the more active date or sexual partner. (These changes, incidentally, probably horrified most of the older suffragettes. Although there was a small but vocal portion of the suffragette movement which advocated sexual freedom, the majority of the Victorian suffragettes saw themselves as bastions of Victorian morality; they wanted the vote for women so that morality could be instituted in the law - the suffragette and temperance movements were deeply connected. But, unintentionally or not, the changes they effected changed public morality in perhaps the very opposite direction from the one they had anticipated.)
Whatever the reasons for their origin and acceptance, the new theories of sexual morality received serious attention, whether in approval or disapproval, at all levels of society. In fact, it is arguable that the major differences among the dating population - social acceptance of sex in one section of society and of everything but sex in another - had more to do with the availability of birth control than anything else. The changing attitudes, combined with some technical advances, made birth control methods more available, better known, and more effective than they had been in the recent past. Both modern methods (such as condoms) and herbal methods of varying but often reasonably reliable effectiveness (such pennyroyal, cohash, olive oil, and other means largely forgotten to modern medicine) were more familiar in the 1920's than many modern people seem to think they were. You could buy condoms in public stores then. But it is true that they were still oftentimes embarrassing and in some places difficult to obtain (for example, in Connecticut it was illegal to buy a condom without a doctor's prescription until about 1970), with the result that the younger, more inexperienced members of the new set ended up endorsing nonpenetratory sex for fear of getting pregnant, whereas the older of the new set, with more knowledge of what was possible and available, began advocating free love.
The most obvious reason for the break is the Great War. Although, as mentioned before, it caused the entire Western world to question itself, it also caused some more direct changes in the group that directly fought in it and those who came after. For one thing, it exposed many people for the first time to those few Western cultures which had largely managed to escape the grip of the Victorian age - such as France. The young men and women who came to France to fight or drive ambulances or otherwise support the war or escape Tsarist persecution or whatever suddenly found themselves in a country where love affairs were commonplace, mistresses were publicly acknowledged, and sexual aggressiveness was normal. After that experience, many found their own culture somewhat wanting.
Another effect of the war was that, as men were largely the ones who fought in it, men were largely the ones who were killed, resulting in an incredible disproportion between marriageable men and women of a certain age. Suddenly, men found themselves with many options, and often also found themselves wanting to explore possibilities before immediately deciding on a match; women, who found their marriage possibilities suddenly extremely limited, found they liked the odds better if romance was a competitive sport based on their own merits than if their parents tried to find them a random mate from the limited supply. The parents, aware of the realities of the situation, went along with it, at least at first, and suddenly dating was born and there was no reversing the trend even among those who had been too young to fight in the war, and therefore had a more reasonable male-to-female ratio.
Another factor which greatly influenced the new phenomenon was the rise in the co-ed population. Suddenly, there was a class of women who were not going directly from their parents' home to their husband's home. Instead, there was a new group of educated women who were not directly under the eyes of their parents, with free time and, often, money. The desire to experiment before choosing, then as now, was probably irresistible to most.
Pleasant dreams.
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