Tracing the life course of American teenagers in the mid-twentieth century, Into One's Own presents a compelling historical portrait of growing up.

Into One's Own

From Youth to Adulthood in the United States 1920-1975By John Modell

University of California Press

Copyright © 1989 John Modell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520076419
1
Defining One's Own Sylvia's Choice

At sixteen, Sylvia rejected the hand of the boy next door. Her mother made the decision easy, reminding her that she was too young to know what love was. When Sylvia was eighteen, her mother prompted her to reject the suit of a poor but ambitious young man with whom Sylvia thought she really was in love. At nineteen, Sylvia considered but finally rejected the proposal of a young man of wealth and family, whom she did not love. "When Sylvia was twenty-five she was much lovelier than she had been at nineteen. At least, so her mother said. . . . Somehow, the men she met [now] were not so eager for matrimony. Most of them were earning smallish incomes, most of them had someone dependent upon them, most of them, when they did consider marriage, looked for a girl who had some earning power."1 For a period, Sylvia rejected the logic of this proposition but eventually acceded. Her rebellion was episodic and individual.

This story in The Ladies' Home Journal in 1941 presenting the workings of the marriage market was typical of the genre that was a staple of the monthly woman's fiction mill. Marriage at some age, Americans held and still hold, is clearly too young; love at sixteen is either impossible or empirically unrecognizable. The winnowing process of courtship, however, rapidly reduces the pool of eligibles to those with special demands or disqualifications. The corrosion of age on woman's physical allure begins its cruel work; and the great, if lessening, social disadvantages of the single female allow even the bachelor dregs to demand not only beauty but economic resources. In this account, the events leading to marriage are presented as essentially a learning process. The literary token of the accomplish-

ment of this process was a recognizable expression of true love, and marriage was the melodramatic climax or humorous resolution toward which the action tended. The protagonist's uncertainty about marriage was followed by a declaration of intention to marry, after a learning process in which both sexuality and some kind of nonsexual "rightness" were discovered to unite the couple. This learning process was formally analogous to the "search" phase of the "marriage market" as abstracted by economistic model builders.2

In 1941, Sylvia knew that her mother knew the rules of the game all too well. But in more recent decades, the path has become obscuredindeed, contestedand in many of its particulars. Most obviously, it has become an embarrassment to present marriage itself as a happy ending, not so much because marriage is not a happy event but because so often it is no longer an ending. The impact of divorce and serial marriage on parenthood, on children, indeed on the kinship system as a whole, is under wide debate today.3 The search for "the" husband in women's fiction today has dissolved into a variety of quests with less-determinate patterns: for physical gratification, for love, for self, for security, for "fulfillment." These may take longer to find; and both men and women may gain the capacity to contribute to them only slowly and, indeed, may develop them only rather late.

At the same time, entry into marriage in American society, no less than earlier in the century, is still said to depend on love, which in our culture is understood to be spontaneous. But love ordinarily has an explicitly age-graded aspect: "puppy" love is different from "mature" love. "If you've never been kissed, you've never been ardently loved, before you are twenty-six, then beware! Love, at eighteen may be just a lark, a game, but at twenty-six, the starved senses, suddenly aroused, whirl with a giddiness that blinds clear thinking."4 A second culturally defined dimension of marital love, roughly distinguishing "fleshly" from what might be called "obligational" love, has also usually been thought to be influenced by the chronological ages of the lovers and their ages relative to one another.5 Thus have age norms of marriage been intertwined, as in Sylvia's case,

with the ways people are supposed to feel toward each other and the forms these feelings are encouraged to take.

Two decades after the exposition of the conventions by which Sylvia finally learned to live, two best-selling books roundly condemned contemporary patterns of early marriage as a special bane to American middle-class women. Debate over the shape of the way young people should approach marriage had moved from the personal to the political. Today we view Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl as a period piece and honor Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique as the opening (or reopening) gun in a heroic battle to realign the genders. Both books offered arresting arguments that women's personal fulfillment was sabotaged by early pursuit of marriage and parenthood. But their prescriptions differed radically.6

I think a single woman's biggest problem is coping with the people who are trying to marry her off! . . . Finding him is all she can think about or talk about when . . . her years as a single women can be too rewarding to rush out of. . . . I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life. During your best years you don't need a husband. You do need a man of course every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more fun by the dozen.7

The problem that has no namewhich is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacitiesis taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease. . . . If we continue to produce millions of young mothers who stop their growth and education short of identity. . . . we are committing, quite simply, genocide, starting with the mass burial of American women. . . . We need a drastic reshaping of the cultural image of femininity to reach maturity, identity, completeness of self, without conflict with sexual fulfillment, . . . to stop the early-marriage movement, stop girls from growing up wanting to be 'just a housewife.'8

At the time these tracts appeared, the age at which women were marrying had already been moving upward for half a decade. What is important is not demographic precision, however, but the passion with which the authors spoke to and as women, yet

from startlingly different perspectives and with such contrasting tone: one recalling the coyness of such Hollywood confections as the Tony Curtis-Natalie Wood Sex and the Single Girl , the other foreshadowing changes we even now are assimilating. Women who faced the world quite differently sensed that there was something wrong with young women's life course and that as women they had a stake in rectifying it.

Brown took on herself the major task of promoting an open and enthusiastic recognition of female sexuality, so that in its various guises it is seen as suffusing the life of the "mature" single woman. "Theoretically a 'nice' single woman has no sex life," she remarks. "What nonsense! She has a better sex life than most of her married friends. . . . Since for a female getting there is at least half the fun, a single woman has reason to prize the luxury of taking long, gossamer, attenuated, pulsating trips before finally arriving in bed. A married woman...