Virgin: The Untouched History (31 page)

Working women worked because they had to earn money to survive. But it would be a mistake to imagine that these women were blind to what it
*
meant that they were breadwinners and had the ability to pay their own way in the world. It would be a bigger error still to imagine that the culture in which this was becoming a more and more common state of affairs could possibly remain unchanged.

Prior to the industrial era, there were only two groups of women who were likely to be self-supporting, the very wealthy whose wealth was inherited and the extremely poor who scraped by on whatever they could earn. Most women married not merely because it was socially expected that they would do so, but because marriage was, as Jane Austen had written nearly a century earlier in
Pride and Prejudice,
the "pleasantest preservative from want." Women were expected to be economically dependent on their husbands, their domestic labor compensated only in kind, not in cash.

Over the course of a century, the wage-earning woman went from being the lower-class exception to being the unexceptional norm. The economic structure of the industrialized West thoroughly incorporated the presence of women's labor. (The same is now true of the global economy as a whole.) This largely unsung revolution of female paid labor provided the economic basis for a great many of the other revolutionary changes in sex and gender roles that took place in the twentieth century.

One of those other changes came under the banner of "human rights." In its simplest form, the philosophy of human rights holds that all human beings are equally deserving of opportunities to thrive and prosper, regardless of their social rank or sex. Progressives made it their business to address not only the horrors of poverty, disease, and various social ills like child labor and prostitution, but also violations of human rights like discrimination against women. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, organized feminism attacked bias against women in multiple arenas, leading to sweeping legal and attitudinal changes that permitted women to own and control their own property, instigate divorce, file lawsuits in their own names, and vote. Forward-thinking activists pushed for more and better public and private educational options for all and were especially vocal in regard to the need for education for girls and women, including sexuality and contraception education.

The working women of the early twentieth century lived in a very different world than their mothers and grandmothers. In many ways they themselves were a different breed: New Women. For these "thoroughly modern Millies," work meant leaving the house to earn a wage and socializing meant "going out." Dance halls, public parks, vaudeville houses, cinemas, restaurants, even beer gardens and nightclubs became the places where young people whose wages were not yet spoken for by spouses and children went to have fun. Music, fashion, art, and public mores all felt the impact of this new, largely young adult money and energy. Women rolled their stockings down and bobbed their long, high-maintenance hair. Skirts got shorter and clothing silhouettes leaner and more boyish. Corsets began to disappear in favor of elasticized girdles that allowed greater freedom of movement.

Perhaps most shocking of all, young women began to let it be known that they were both conscious of, and quite able to manipulate, their own sex appeal. Flappers and vamps visibly flaunted their sexuality on stage, on screen, and in the streets. As the film roles of silent-movie star Clara Bow made clear, being a desirable, sexually successful woman had nothing to do with being a traditionally "good" girl. Bow, also known as "The 'It' Girl," was often cast in the image of her working-class fans as a waitress or salesclerk. Success at love, these films told their audiences, had everything to do with good looks, urbanity, and daring.

A new game was afoot, and women and men alike were still trying to figure out what the rules were. The New Woman of the teens and twenties had not, despite all the enthusiastic press about her liberation, cast off the shackles of her sex and stepped unfettered into a brave new day where everything was possible. Rather, she had loosened a great many ties to old modes of living that no longer fit well, but had not yet established herself securely in something new. Sexuality was a much more visible and overt part of her life, from the films she saw to the clothes she wore to the dates she went on. Whether she personally kissed, necked, or petted or not, she wasn't likely to be ignorant of such practices. Her own feelings and desires only complicated things further. The New Woman's new sexuality was at least as much firewalk as pleasure cruise.

In theory women were still expected not to have sex before marriage. But with changes in gender roles, female independence, the new custom of going out, and new expectations of sexiness as part of female identity, "having sex" had become a realm of many shades of gray. Even gynecology books acknowledged that wedding-night hymens were likely to have already been dilated by probing fingers during hot and heavy petting, but refrained from qualifying such acts as being definitively either "sex" or "not sex." The new economic and social equations of sex and dating also meant that it was less clear what sex—whatever
that was
—was supposed to mean to a relationship. Where exactly virginity fit into all of it was as difficult a question as all the others.

To many people, the new, overt sexiness of New Women promised not so much freedom as havoc. Sexually active women have always been considered troublesome, of course; one function virginity has served over the ages is to control women's sexual activity and make it something that can be policed and regulated. But as sexually self-willed women became more visible through movies, theater, journalism, and novels, more and more people became nervous about what that might mean. People questioned whether the New Women could still be trusted to fulfill their daughterly, wifely, and motherly roles. Seeing to it that they would became the subject of debate, research, and policy.

Part of this process involved the study of a strange new creature. Neither child nor adult, this bizarre being was scarcely recognizable as properly human. In 1904 psychologist G. Stanley Hall assayed a systematic description of this troublesome changeling.
Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations
to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education
was the opening salvo in the ongoing battle of Established Society versus the Young Person.

Through Hall's eyes, the Young Person was a strange, volatile, contrary, and vulnerable creature. When it came to female adolescents, much of that vulnerability was specifically sexual. Anything that hinted at deviation from the expected standards of premarital virginity, early marriage, and postmarital monogamy was a cause for alarm. Not just psychologists but families, parents, schools, friends, and religious organizations all placed their own types of pressure on young women to conform to older, more conservative sexual and behavioral standards—standards that were perceived as being under heavy attack.

The print media also had a large role to play in attempts to regulate the sex lives of young people. A wide variety of articles and advice columns appeared in magazines like
Mademoiselle, Nash 's,
and
Women's Own.
Young people turned to these publications not only to see what their peers were wearing, seeing, and dancing to but also what they were thinking and how they were conducting their dating lives. The magazines attempted to strike a balance between the old and the new, simultaneously acknowledging the desirability of a certain amount of sexual freedom and insisting that it have strict limits. While dating was considered normative and kissing understood to be enjoyable, young women were also cautioned that "kisses, like other good things in life, are valued in proportion to their scarcity." Emily Post described the phenomenon in 1937 as "the same cheapening effect as that produced on merchandise which has through constant handling become faded and rumpled, smudged, or frayed and thrown out on the bargain counter in a marked-down lot." Peer pressure, enhanced by the messages disseminated in popular magazines, was another mode for ferocious grassroots enforcement of sexual expectations and limits.

Over the past century and a half, those expectations and limits have often been directly correlated to romance, emotional intensity, and perceived commitment to a relationship. Beginning around the mid-18oos, a particularly sentimental version of romantic love was held up as a relationship ideal for women. It was, as Joan Jacobs Brumberg points out, "a singularly important source of female identity," so much so that Stanley Hall enshrines it in his textbook on adolescence, adding the imprimatur of science to the notion that experience of romantic love was part and parcel of the adolescent female self. The presence of romantic love rapidly became a key factor in the equations that determined sexual boundaries for young women.

A promise of marriage has, across history, frequently been the price of admission for sexual access to a woman. But with the increased centrality of romantic emotion, the coin of the realm gradually became "true love." Established as the pinnacle of emotional experience—and often in a way that contrasted it negatively against marriage—being "in love" assumed extraordinary pride of place. Emotional intensity in a love relationship took on a marriagelike function in terms of representing commitment and the strength of a bond between two people, and it is still perceived in that light today. Currently, surveys show that about 80 to 90 percent of people who marry have some premarital sexual experience, and that well over half of them profess the belief that premarital sex is acceptable as long as it is in the context of a "committed" love relationship.

Just how many women had intercourse prior to marriage, during the early years of the twentieth century, is difficult to pinpoint. Sex-behavior studies dealing with that period are relatively few and far between, and their sample populations were often numerically limited, demographically skewed, or both, but the data we do have about women's premarital sex lives from the 1920s until the 1953 release of Kinsey's
Sexual Response in the Human Female
demonstrate a decided rising trend.

Katherine Bement Davis's 1929
Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty Two Hundred
Women
reported that only 8 percent of the women she surveyed who were married before World War I had had intercourse prior to marriage; a similar level, 12 percent, was noted in Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman's
Psychological Factors in Marital Unhappiness
(1938) for those marrying prior to 1912. Contrast this with what Terman claimed for the women who married during and immediately after World War I: their premarital intercourse rate had, it seemed, jumped to 26 percent. New York physician G. V. Hamilton's
A Research in Marriage,
based on interviews with one hundred men and one hundred women conducted in 1928, showed a premarital sex rate of 35 percent. Dorothy Dunbar Bromley and Florence Haxton Britten's 1938
Youth
and Sex
looked at undergraduate university women and determined that somewhere between a quarter and a third of them had "indulged in the sex act."

Viewed in light of this upward trend, Kinsey's post—World War II revelations that of his female respondents, nearly 50 percent of those who married by age twenty-five and as many as
66
percent of those who married between the ages of twenty-six and thirty had lost their virginity before they married comes as no surprise at all. Premarital intercourse had been on the rise since the beginning of the century, and as the century progressed, it became increasingly obvious to the general public that for a rising plurality of women, virginity loss and marriage had become two separate events.

Progress in a Pill

People often refer to the period from the early 1960s through the early 1970s as "the sexual revolution," but as we have seen, this "revolution" did not appear out of nowhere. In truth, what historian of sexuality Hera Cook has characterized as "the long sexual revolution" began not with the Summer of Love but far earlier, and as Barbara Ehrenreich, Dierdre English, and other commentators have long noted, the revolution was primarily about women's sexuality, not men's.

A largely silent, but truly massive, part of this revolution consisted in the destabilization of the value placed on virginity. The development and availability of effective contraception has been and continues to be a major contributor to this destabilization.

Historically, women have been at the mercy of fate when it came to the question of whether and how often they would become pregnant, how many children they would bear, and even whether they would survive childbirth at all. The desperation and fear that even many married women felt in regard to sexual intercourse was a direct result of their inability to know whether or not a given episode of intercourse would mean another risky pregnancy. For unmarried women, of course, the prospect of pregnancy was all the more fraught. Although romantic and even sexual dating had become quite commonplace by the start of the World War II, sexual intercourse was still often reserved for an engagement or for marriage itself for the simple reason that women were justifiably terrified of ending up unwed mothers.

This was part of what lay behind the trend toward very youthful marriage during World War II and immediately after it. Youthful dating, with all its sexual intrigue, had become the norm, but the expectation that women would not become pregnant until they were married remained in full force. Although there were other forces in play as well, not least the emotional and demographic turmoil of a protracted world war, the upshot was that that brides were younger than they had been in some decades. Between 1940 and 1959, the percentage of women aged fourteen to seventeen who married had jumped by 33 percent in the United States, and by 1959 a quarter of first-time brides went to the altar prior to their nineteenth birthday. In the United Kingdom, a similar though less dramatic drop took place: between 1926 and 1930, most first-time brides were close to twenty-six years of age, but after that point the age went steadily down to hover at around twenty-three years of age by i960. That marriage was taking place earlier by no means indicates that young people were marrying
instead
of having premarital sex—one British national survey revealed that 46 percent of women marrying in the 1950s did not marry as virgins—but rather that those who did have premarital. sex were likely to marry soon after. This resurgence of early marriage led some people to believe that Jazz Age excesses had given way to a return to a more "traditional" prioritization of marriage and family, an interpretation that was extended as well to the 1950s' valorization of the happy space-age housewife. Such assumptions, however, proved premature.