Stern’s book The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison “Promiscuous” Women details how the federal government incarcerated thousands of women suspected of being promiscuous, in a misguided effort to safeguard troops from sexually transmitted diseases.Īs such, women had incentive to hide their sexual desires. Women could even be arrested and imprisoned. Women who got pregnant could be kicked out of their homes and out of college pregnant high-schoolers could be sent to homes for unwed mothers, forced to give their babies up for adoption, and to undergo a rehabilitation program before they could go back to school, according to Rachel Devlin, author of Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture and a professor of History at Rutgers University. Abortion was criminalized, and contraception was illegal in most states. Her personal reputation and her family’s reputation was on the line. According to surveys by Alfred Kinsey, author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, one of the best-selling books in America in 1948, about half of men said they wanted to marry a virgin, more than 60% of college-educated men said they disapproved of premarital sex, and about 80% of college-educated women said they had moral objections to it - and yet, about half of women and more than half of men said they had had premarital sex.īut for women who were caught doing so, the consequences could be steep. Within this environment, the contradictions were many. Many wartime couples “thought they might never see each other again” - and many married young, often ending up with the first person they’d lost their virginity to, because it was considered the right thing to do.īut dating as we know it today was still only a few decades old, and the rules and expectations for what would happen on a date were still being worked out.
“People behaved in war in ways they wouldn’t behave in peace time,” says Beth Bailey, author of From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America and the Director of the Center for Military, War, and Society Studies at the University of Kansas. In fact, World War II brought with it a wave of sexual activity.
The 1940s was not exactly a time of extreme chastity. ‘An Important Historical Document’ on Dating In that debate, experts on mid-20th century sexual norms say, lies a lesson about how consent and dating culture in America has evolved.
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