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The 1920s in America

Marriage and dating

by Emily Alward

Marriage remained an important and enduring feature of American society, but the advent of dating during the 1920s replaced chaperoned “calling” at home or at community events as the major activity of courtship. In tandem with the rise of the automobile, mass communication, and youth culture, dating weakened the influence of a couple’s parents and helped change the traditional model of marriage into one based on personal fulfillment rather than social duty.

The late Victorian era, which shaped the ideas of the parents of 1920s youth and teenagers, had idealized marriage and family and promoted a sharp distinction between domestic life and the outside world. The former was the realm of women’s interests, the latter the arena in which men were to carry out their responsibilities as breadwinners. Although marital love was valued, other interpersonal ties, such as same-sex friendship or the mother-child bond, frequently claimed marriage partners’ most intense emotional ties.

Dating and Courtship

By 1920, the United States had undergone enormous social, political, and economic changes. Young men had served overseas in World War I and widened their horizons. The first generation of young women with an undisputed right to vote had just come of age. Leisure time increased as the economy boomed. A great variety of amusements sprang up, automobiles became a more affordable means of independent transportation, and the concept of “dating,” first mentioned in 1914, quickly took hold.

Besides movies, amusement parks, restaurants, and other commercial activities, college life included sporting events and on-campus parties and dances. These were glamorized in magazines and newspaper accounts, and high school students and out-of-school youths imitated these attractive parts of campus life. The iconic image of the 1920s short-skirted flapper kicking up her heels with a similarly exuberant dancing partner expresses how compelling dating was to the young and unattached, and how sexually provocative it appeared to older generations.

Social historians claim that, unlike the pairing-off practices of previous decades, dating in the 1920s was not necessarily part of courtship but done primarily to boost a young person’s popularity. The material goods associated with dating, particularly automobiles and money, helped confer popularity on the young men who possessed them. The more popular men a young woman could be seen with, the more popular she would become. Women who had the most dates also tended to marry younger, so dating certainly played some role in courtship.

By this time, premarital “petting”—physical exploration short of sexual intercourse—became socially acceptable among the young, even inspiring “petting parties” in colleges, and as many as half of young women are believed to have had intercourse with their future marriage partners.

The New Marriage

By the 1920s, the idea of marriage demanding extraordinary self-sacrifice on the wife’s part was falling into disrepute. As in earlier periods of American history, marriage was envisioned as a partnership, but during the 1920s, both partners explicitly expected to attain personal and sexual happiness from their marriage. Increasingly widespread understanding of birth control methods and Freudian psychology made these goals seem attainable.

The average age at marriage dropped during the decade, and a greater percentage of the population married than in the late nineteenth century. Middle-class men tended to marry younger, with one-third marrying before age twenty-four, and fewer than 20 percent of young women had to choose between a college education and marriage. Even so, after marriage, few middle-class women worked outside the home; the general prosperity of the decade made stay-at-home mothering possible for the majority of American families.

Married partners tended to replay the dating pattern by socializing together as a couple more than their parents had done. Although married men and women might continue to participate in same-sex social groups, it was generally assumed that their emotional center was firmly in the family.

Divorce became more common as the expectations of marriage changed and its realities did not always keep pace. In contrast to the economic considerations or abuses that were the historical grounds for divorce, those petitioning for divorce during the 1920s often cited emotional or sexual dissatisfaction.

Impact

The 1920s saw more frank discussion of sexual and interpersonal issues than ever before. Paradoxically, this seems to have led both to happier marriages and to more conscious dissatisfaction with the realities of marriage. Numerous doomsayers predicted that marriage would disappear, interpreting the rapid changes in social mores as a fatal assault on the institution. Rather, marriage continued to be central in most people’s lives, but with a stronger emphasis on the couple bond.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Alward, Emily. "Marriage And Dating." The 1920s in America, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=1920_0402.

APA 7th

Alward, E. (2012). Marriage and dating. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), The 1920s in America. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Alward, Emily. "Marriage And Dating." Edited by Carl Rollyson. The 1920s in America. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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