Abstract
This review critically examines Beth Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat to examine changing paradigms in twentieth-century dating culture. In this book, Bailey successfully describes the impetus behind the transformation of courtship into modern dating. The ascendancy of distinctive youth culture and institutions was a catalyst for changing social dynamics among America’s adolescents. Traditionally, dating relationships were pursued under the aegis of the home and family. The emergence of this distinctive youth culture and the automobile displaced dating relationships from the home to the public sphere. This changing cultural attitude towards relationships created the “dating-rating” complex, in which adolescents gained social clout through high-volume dating. Media, cosmetics, and changing attitudes toward dating created a fiercely competitive dating market. The eruption of the Second World War altered this paradigm, and scarcity created the norm of going steady. While Bailey aptly describes the changing nature of dating in the twentieth century, her perspective is inherently limited by a white middle-class bias due to the socioeconomic location of the subjects surveyed in the book.
Recommended Citation
Gobezie, Gaege
(2026)
"From Courtship to Competition: Dating and Youth Culture in Twentieth-Century America,"
Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History: Vol. 9:
Iss.
1, Article 8.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/ljh/vol9/iss1/8