The Girls Who Went Away (6 page)

In 1924, for example, when the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd conducted extensive interviews with the residents of Muncie, Indiana, the young people there were already having petting parties, going to the movies on their own, and parking.
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As more and more families owned cars, they afforded young people increasing independence and provided the privacy that allowed them to engage in sexual activity. Henry Ford, it seems, may have been at least partly to blame for the sexual revolution.

Over the decades cars have, of course, continued to play a significant role in dating life, and that was certainly true in the postwar years. Not only were they safe havens, they also served—as they continue to—as a measure of a young man’s status.

We were middle-class folks; I had a pretty normal childhood. I was in my senior year of high school, still kind of quiet and shy, not one of the popular cheerleader girls, but I had my own little clique of friends. And there was a guy who had moved to town that all the girls just thought was so cute, and so cool, and we talked and whispered, “Weren’t his blue eyes so pretty,” and all this kind of stuff.

He drove a really hot car, which was real important at the time. I think it was a pumped-up Super Sport Chevelle—big tires, big engine, souped up, beautiful, fast, noisy because noisy was important,
with a stick shift, which was also very important. And for some reason he decided to ask me out. It wasn’t my first date or anything, it wasn’t even my first sexual experience, but he was very cool and I was cool because I was going out with him.

—Barbara

The economic boom that followed World War II increased young people’s independence from their parents and escalated the revolution in sexual behavior. An increasing number of nonmarried coeds left home to attend college and joined the nearly six million returning veterans whose education was funded by the GI Bill.
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This younger generation became a cultural force to be reckoned with and much of the new energy seemed to be sexual. As early as 1952, panty raids were being conducted on campuses all across the country. Gangs of nice college boys were breaking windows and entering women’s dorms just to get hold of girls’ underpants.
⁷

More overt expressions of sexuality not only became common among single people in their twenties but trickled down into high-school age youth culture as well. Young people took their cues from older teens and mass media, decidedly not from their parents. For girls, magazines like
Seventeen
were looked to as the fonts of wisdom about what was popular and sexy. Increasing one’s sex appeal, of course, required a whole host of products that mothers thought their girls were too young to buy or wear. I remember the many battles over skirt length, lipstick, and blusher—which my mother insisted on calling rouge—that raged routinely in my house and I’m sure in households across America. The first-floor girls’ restroom in my high school was packed every morning with young women rolling the waistbands of their skirts so as to raise their hemline to the maximum distance above the knee permitted by school law. A considerable amount of elbowing was required to make it up to the mirror and apply makeup, which was promptly removed after seventh period.

Interestingly, as young people expanded the boundaries of permissible sexual activity a movement toward forming steady relationships took hold. Sociologists in the early fifties noted a significant new trend among young people to get into serious relationships rather than date around,
⁸
which had been more popular in previous decades. This new emphasis on commitment might well
have been due to the fact that it provided something of a safety net for preserving a girl’s reputation, as more and more young people engaged in sexual intercourse. During the postwar decades, the question that the youth grappled with became not so much
if
as
when
premarital sex was considered permissible. Permissible by their peers, that is, because sexual activity was still not discussed, or even acknowledged, by most parents.

And though the rules about who could have sex without risking reputational suicide surely varied from group to group, town to town, and region to region, they followed a general progression over the years. At first, sex was permissible only for couples who were engaged; later for those who were pinned or going steady; then for those in love; and finally widening all the way to include those who were simply attracted to one other.

If you got pregnant outside of marriage you were a whore, a slut, whatever. You had no morals, therefore you deserved this. But if you didn’t get caught you were smart. When you got a fraternity pin on your boob, that meant you were allowed to have sex. That meant you were engaged to be engaged or whatever. I never understood all that, but that’s the way it was.

—Nancy III

In the early fifties, many women engaged in heavy petting but refrained from sexual intercourse until a promise of marriage was forthcoming, and the majority waited until their wedding night. But as the years progressed not only did more young couples begin having sex before marriage, but they had it at younger and younger ages. Comparing white, unmarried women who turned eighteen between 1956 and 1958 with those who did so between 1971 and 1973, the percentage who had their first premarital sexual intercourse at age fifteen quadrupled, from 1.3 percent to 5.6 percent. Those in the same cohort who had premarital sex before age twenty jumped from 33.3 percent to 65.5 percent.
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And though eventually a commitment was no longer required, what sexual intercourse signified in a relationship often varied quite a bit among partners. Plenty of young women, and some young men, presumed sex would solidify a commitment where one was never intended.

In some cases, young women who did not feel ready to have sex did so anyway because of continual pressure from a boyfriend and the lack of assertiveness required to put a stop to the steady progression of sexual advances. More recent studies have shown that sexual coercion from partners still plays a powerful role in the timing of a young woman’s sexual debut. In a survey from the 1990s, 25 percent of women indicated that they did not want to have sex the first time they did so.
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Sometimes sexual aggressiveness went beyond coercion and women were date-raped, though neither the concept nor the terminology was well understood or defined at the time. About 7 percent of the women I interviewed became pregnant as a result of rape—not by the violent sex criminals who have become the staple of television dramas but by
nice
young men.

I think it was in about February, and a friend’s brother was home on break from his school and called me up and said, “All my friends are having this party at the summer house that we’re opening up. I don’t have anybody to go with. Would you go with me?” I said, “Sure, I’ll go.” And we went off to the party, and I really remember very little about that night.

I remembered standing in a kitchen, talking to this fellow about calculus and all these Latin things, and somebody handed me a drink, and the next thing I know everything was spinning. I felt desperately sick and I said, “I’m going to get sick. I’ve got to go lie down.” I remember walking and trying to find someplace to lie down. That’s the last of my memory.

The next morning I thought, “Oh my God, what has gone on?” I was still feeling so out of it that I wasn’t really quite sure, but I started to suspect what may have happened. Back then date rape was not a term, but apparently that’s what it was. So I don’t know the birth father at all. I have no visual memory of him. My reaction was “I don’t ever want to think about this again. Whatever happened, happened. I don’t want any part of this.”

When I went home for Easter break, I started feeling really sick and I thought, “Oh gosh, I have the flu.” Well, when it didn’t go
away I thought, “Could I have become pregnant?” Two months later, I thought, “This is not right.” I went to the library, and I started reading all these books about pregnancy to try and figure it out. I had no idea what the symptoms were. I don’t know when I really figured it out, but I knew I absolutely could not tell anybody because I would be expelled from college. It was just automatic expulsion, no questions asked, and I was halfway through my senior year. I knew I had to hide it in order to get out of school.

I was so devastated that this happened to me, because it was the antithesis of everything I was and how I was brought up. It really just shattered every sense of self I had, and I went into denial. By denying it, I could be who I really was, and not what I had become, or at least what I thought I had become.

—Carol II

One might expect that with premarital intercourse becoming more frequent among the youth, a loosening of the stigma associated with engaging in sex would have followed. But one of the great ironies of this time period was that the social policing of youth by their peers was intense, and could be psychologically brutal. The girls bore the brunt of this social condemnation as the sexual revolution evolved. For young men, being known as sexually active was a badge of honor among their peers, whereas for young women sexual activity had to be kept secret, and if word got out, their reputations could be devastated. Throughout the fifties and sixties, women had to be highly discreet about their sexual behavior; a reputation lost was almost impossible to regain. An unattached girl thought to be “putting out” was a threat to the social order of the peer community. More specifically, she was a threat to other young women who were following the rules and feared losing their boyfriends to someone more sexually adventuresome.

There was this business then that girls are only two types, you were either a Madonna or a whore, and not the singer Madonna, the virgin Madonna. You were good or bad. Between the culture of the family and the culture of the religion, you were very bad if you had sex. So you couldn’t really
plan
to have sex; it had to just
happen.

We had been petting and you get all the, “Oh, we have to go further, we have to go further.” I said, “I don’t want to get pregnant, don’t get me pregnant.” He said, “Oh, don’t worry, I won’t.”

—Diane IV

In my Midwest high school even in the late 1960s, women did not admit having sexual intercourse even to their closest friends. There was very little talk about sex apart from boys’ locker-room talk, which often stretched the truth but could make or break a girl’s reputation. Being well liked and popular among one’s female and male friends, and being sexually active behind closed doors, required a set of advanced social skills. There were very definite and complicated rules about what was and was not permissible, and under what conditions. Careful calculations had to be made about the number of dates and the number of bases that a boy was allowed to reach. The sum of these calculations then had to be weighed against the seriousness of the commitment and how others perceived the relationship. Going steady was the pinnacle of commitment in my school and held a kind of false promise of a future together. It was, for all intents and purposes, a practice engagement. Often young people practiced quite a bit and had one “steady” after another, ostensibly in search of the ideal mate.

Once a young woman was going steady, she removed herself from the competitive dating scene and her sexual behavior fell off her classmates’ radar screen. Having sex with a steady did not presume a promise of eternal bliss, but at least if a young woman had sex with her steady she would not be labeled promiscuous. Everyone silently agreed on a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when it came to the activities of committed couples.

If a young woman had not gotten to the going-steady stage before having sex, her reputation was more vulnerable. There were always a few young women who were either unfamiliar with the rules, unfairly targeted, or more sexually adventurous, all of whom were labeled “sluts.” Those of us who escaped being the target of rumors did not, to our shame, befriend these girls because we feared guilt by association. After all, our status was tenuous and could be preserved only by keeping our distance and maintaining our hypocritical stance through steadfast denial.

The deep and damaging irony of the “bad girl” myth is that those who
became pregnant were assumed to be less moral—to be transgressors—by others who were engaging in the very same behavior. A young woman’s pregnancy was thought to result from her “badness.” The scorn and blame heaped on these women seem to have been partly a mechanism of denial: by focusing attention on women whose sexual behavior was evident, others could continue to deny their own.

You were shunned if you were pregnant. That’s the way they reacted to girls who were pregnant in high school. The girls who didn’t get pregnant were all virgins. We swore up and down we were virgins. If you fooled around, nobody else knew about it. It was never a thing where you could say to a friend of yours that you went to bed with somebody—that was just taboo.

You were all supposed to be virgins and the ones that got pregnant it was like…oh, she was no good, she was promiscuous. Guys were supposed to be that way. They have their oats to sow. So that’s the way it was. Girls weren’t supposed to do it, and guys were always trying to do it with them.

—Carol I

There were good girls and there were bad girls and I played a good girl, but I was really a bad girl. A lot of people didn’t know that I was sexually active. There was such shame associated with being pregnant and unmarried at that time. When I was in high school, there was a girl who became pregnant. She had PE with us and then she was gone. I remember being in the locker room and the girls were snickering and making jokes. She was such a nice person and a good athlete, and they turned their back on her. They could at least have said, “It’s okay, we still like you.”

—Joyce I

I was a sorority girl and I was going into my junior year at the University of Minnesota. I conceived on September 20, 1968, in the Gopher Motel. I was from a small town, so I didn’t tell anybody because in 1968 you were considered trash if you were pregnant.
The symbol of being a good, white, middle class family was a lily–white daughter.