Labor of Love Read online

  “If my boyfriend did not take me out,” another woman asked, “how could I ever go out?”

  Packard saw her point. In her case file she noted: “The acceptance on the part of the girl of almost any invitation needs little explanation, when one realizes that she often goes pleasureless unless she accepts ‘free treats.’”

  * * *

  Most middle-class onlookers were less sympathetic. They had their own system of courtship. It was called “calling,” and around 1900, it still followed an elaborate set of rules. When a girl reached a certain age, usually around sixteen, she became eligible to receive suitors. For the first year, her mother would invite men to call on her on one of several afternoons per week that they both spent at home. After that, if she met a man she liked at one of the social gatherings she attended, she could ask him over to the house herself.

  A man might simply show up at the home of a young lady he admired. In this case, however, decorum required him to present his card to the servant who opened the door. Until the beginning of the First World War, it was common for even households with average incomes to employ one servant. She would ask him to wait while she saw whether the young lady was “in.”

  If the girl did not want to see her visitor, she could tell her servant to say she was not there. If she did, he could come into her parlor. There, the pair could talk, or sing and play the pianoforte, chaperoned by her mother and other relatives and friends.

  Today, calling sounds like holding an awkward kind of office hour. But to the people who did it, it offered the comforts of clear conventions and a community to watch over you while you performed them. It also reinforced a set of strong beliefs about the proper places of men and women. The ritual made men into agents in pursuit. It made women the objects of desire.

  Some called it the “doctrine of separate spheres.” It held that women should stay in their homes, tending lovingly to their families. Men, by contrast, should compete with one another to earn money in public. Political conservatives now call these gender roles “traditional” and claim that they have been hardwired into us by evolution. But there is nothing timeless about them. In fact, the idea that men and women were so fundamentally different would have made little sense to people who lived even a few hundred years ago.

  Before the Industrial Revolution, most people in Europe and the United States subsisted by running small farms or businesses with members of their extended families. The men and women assumed different responsibilities. He plowed the fields; she killed the chickens. She churned the butter; he took it to town to sell. But both were clearly engaged in the same endeavor. So were their children. It’s no accident that in English we call childbirth “labor.” After the physical burden of pregnancy and giving birth, there is all the work that follows: feeding and caring for your offspring, teaching them enough to get by and get along with others. You had children because you expected them to help you at work and to care for you during your old age. In this way, the goals of labor and the goals of love dovetailed.

  When masses of people began to leave farms for factories and family businesses for large corporations, the work that women did having and raising children and caring for their husbands continued to create economic value. Women sustained and replenished the workforce. And they drove consumption. As industrialization progressed, and lighter industries began mass-producing items like clothing and food, it became vitally important that there be households—meaning housewives—to buy them. But as working for a salary became standard practice, the reality that housewives contributed to the economy became harder to see. The idea arose that work was what someone else paid you money to do. Not-work was what you were not paid to do. Work was what men did out in public. Not-work was what women did at home.

  According to this theory, women had no desire to be compensated. They did all they did out of instinct. We give our time and energy to others as automatically as a cow grazes or the grass grows. Our caring is a natural resource. It follows, from this worldview, that female labor did not count. Of course women should do their work for free. Many women even came to believe that it was simply in their natures to do anything for love.

  * * *

  The Calling Class had a lot at stake in the idea that women cherished being confined at home, providing attention and affection to the men around them. So they were both repulsed and fascinated by “public women.” Whores went out and demanded to be paid for what wives had to give away for free. Their existence challenged everything that middle-class people believed about female nature.

  Prostitution has been called “the world’s oldest profession.” But, like many professions, it was changing dramatically around the turn of the last century. In the late 1800s, more and more women, struggling to get by in the industrializing economy, took on sex work. Individual prostitutes had once operated like artisans, small-business owners, or housewives who dabbled in freelance consulting. But as cities grew, brothels began to be organized on a corporate basis. Men were the bosses. By the 1890s, several cities had large, well-organized, and officially tolerated red-light districts. In New Orleans, the city government printed brochures listing the names of establishments in its vice quarter, Storyville, the acts they offered, and the going rates for each. The San Francisco Tenderloin included multistory brothels that incorporated light shows.

  Critics who were horrified by these places said there was no way women could be choosing to work in them. The belief became widespread that vulnerable girls were being abducted and sold into “white slavery.” In the summer of 1910, the newly founded Bureau of Investigation (BOI), the precursor to the FBI, launched an investigation into brothels around America. Agents warned women that making dates with strangers could send them down a slippery slope toward disrepute, disease, and death.

  It took a spitfire like the anarchist Emma Goldman to point out that the white slave hysteria seemed a little misplaced. In a scathing article criticizing the popular obsession with prostitution, Goldman quoted the famous British sexologist Havelock Ellis: “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master.”

  * * *

  Our culture remains fascinated by the myth of the all-giving wife and mother and her twin, the prostitute. Trashy pleasures like The Real Housewives franchise appeal to viewers precisely because they play on cherished convictions saying that love and money should not mix, while also winking at the fact that they often, obviously, do.

  On an episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills that became notorious, one of the housewives, Yolanda, hosted a group of friends in her recently remodeled kitchen. Over white wine, she delivered some real talk on the importance of keeping sexual passion alive in marriage.

  “Let’s get it straight,” Yolanda said. “Men love beautiful women and beautiful women love rich men. They will fuck your husband for a Chanel bag.” This, she seemed to be saying, was why it is imperative to fuck your husband first.

  “If you have found your true love, it should be easy.”

  According to Yolanda, “true love” is what you share with a man who finds you as sexy as you find him rich. It makes that exchange—of sex for financial security, consumer pleasure, and social status—easy. Not like work at all.

  The irony of course is that all of the housewives who appear on Real Housewives thereby become professional housewives. Impersonating themselves, they gain credentials that let them leverage their stay-at-home identities into lucrative careers as consultants and businesswomen. In that capacity, they sell products to enrich the housewife experience, like Skinny Girl Margaritas.

  No wonder the Real Housewives are so beloved. We live in an era that tells people to do what they love and let their passion take care of their profession. Yolanda is a heroine for an age that believes in getting rich by turning your feelings into assets.

  * * *

  The old-fashioned practices of c
haperoned courtship and calling had drawn clear lines between the worlds of men and women. Dating undid them. It took courtship out of the private sphere and into public places. It transferred control over the process from the older generation to the younger generation, from the group to the individual, and from women to men.

  It all seemed highly suspicious to the authorities. In the early 1900s, vice commissions across the country sent police and undercover investigators to check out spots where people went to make dates. As early as 1905, private investigators hired by a group of Progressive do-gooders in New York City were taking notes on what we can now recognize as the dating avant-garde.

  At the Strand Hotel, in Midtown, an agent named Charlie Briggs saw many women who did not seem to be prostitutes, exactly, but who definitely seemed shady. The majority were “store employees, telephone girls, stenographers, etc.”

  “Their morals are loose,” he wrote, “and there is no question that they are on terms of sexual intimacy with their male companions.”

  When a female investigator named Natalie Sonnichsen and her male colleague T. W. Veness went to an uptown dive called the Harlem River Casino several months later, they deemed the floor to be too small and “much too crowded for decent dancing.” Sonnichsen was appalled by how the women were dressed.

  “Two girls [wore] very tight knickers,” she noted. Another had “a very décolleté costume with practically no sleeves, tights, with very short and skimpy knickers.”

  The idea that young women might want to go out and enjoy themselves—and, maybe, even enjoy sex—was a lot for the Calling Class to process.

  In the 1910s, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the son of the Standard Oil founder, funded investigations into the commercialized vice industries of more than a dozen American cities. The reports that they produced are full of anecdotes about young people making dates.

  The Chicago committee found that many young girls often used their charms as a ticket to a day’s entertainment at boardwalks and amusement parks: “Some young girls go regularly to these parks. They come with the price of admission and carfare, and as they have no money for amusements, seek a good time at some one’s expense.”

  The write-up on New York described a cruise that took place in August 1912, between New York and New Haven. Two girls, accompanied by a woman who seemed to be their mother, rented a stateroom on the boat, where they stayed all day and were visited by different men. At some point on the trip, “the girl became friendly and offered to make a ‘date’ with the investigator.” The report does not mention whether he said yes.

  * * *

  Early dating slang stressed that what was taking place was some kind of transaction. “Picking up” made a date sound like a casual purchase. Other terms romanticized dating as an exchange of gifts. Take “treating,” for instance. The word “treat” was commonly used as both noun and verb to describe a date or the action of taking someone on one. When a woman accepted “a man’s treat,” she could later brag to her girlfriends that “he treated.”

  Women who did this were called Charity Girls. A 1916 Sexual Dictionary included “Charity cunt, n. Woman who distributes her favors without a price.” Meaning for only the price of a date. By the 1920s, the prostitutes at New York’s Strand Hotel complained that Charity Girls were putting them out of business.

  The key fact that distinguished a Charity Girl from a prostitute—and still legally distinguishes an escort from one—was that she did not take cash. Undercover investigators in bars and dance halls reported that many women refused to discuss money with them. Instead, they would bring up things they wanted.

  When one investigator in New York started to negotiate the terms of leaving a bar with a woman late at night, she demanded that he buy her a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey. And while he was at it, could he come with her to the butcher to pay an outstanding bill? (It never seems to occur to the investigators that the women they write up might have recognized them for what they were, and decided to mess around.)

  “I told her all butcher shops were closed now,” he wrote, “and I didn’t care to travel around from store to store, she got sore at me and called me a piker and told me to beat it.”

  To be treated to food or drinks or even articles of clothing was one thing. But when offered money for their services, many women balked. Who did he think she was?

  In the 1910s, many women arrested for dating protested that they had been wrongly accused.

  At Bedford Reformatory, an institution founded to rehabilitate female delinquents in upstate New York, an Irish woman told her jailers again and again that she had “never taken money from men.” Instead men took her “to Coney Island to dances and Picture Shows.”

  An African American inmate admitted to having had “sexual intercourse with three different friends” but swore she had “never taken money from any of them.” Instead, she said, they “sent her presents and have taken her out to dinner and the theater often.”

  As the years passed, the vice squad had to accept it. Daters did not see these exchanges as tawdry. They saw them as romantic.

  * * *

  Dating still suffers from a kind of prostitution complex. I have heard many debates about whether you “owe” someone “something”—meaning some act of physical intimacy—in return for an evening out. The people who say these things do not usually seem to think that they are negotiating a price for their time or access to their bodies. But it would be difficult to pinpoint what exactly makes sleeping with someone because he bought you dinner different from sleeping with someone because he paid you what that dinner cost. At the same time, the very ambiguity that is supposed to make a date different from a sex-for-money transaction makes people nervous. Who has not wondered: Does he like me? Is she just using me? What is the other person really in this for?

  American English still has a huge store of slang that describes dating as transactional. Expressions like “damaged goods” no longer fly in polite company, and few people I know wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get all the milk he wants for free.” But we do say that both men and women should shop around. If you really like someone, you should play hard to get. If you let a partner get some for nothing, you risk selling yourself short. He or she may just want to seal the deal. Friends with benefits offer a sense of security. But they come with trade-offs. Wait too long and you may have to settle. If you’re on the market, it’s wiser to invest in a relationship.

  This is before we even get into all the increasingly common ways of talking about dating that self-consciously borrow concepts from economics. People conduct “cost-benefit analyses” of their relationships, and cite the “low risk and low investment costs” of casual sex. They try to “position themselves” to “optimize” their romantic options.

  A large sector of the advice industry encourages people to approach their love lives equipped with a business strategy. In 2003, a dating coach named Rachel Greenwald published a “15-step action program”: Find a Husband After 35 (Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School). Greenwald promises to teach daters of a certain age “to see the problem of finding a husband through the eyes of a marketer.” Blogs about online dating obsess about ROI, short for “return on investment.”

  There is one other rich set of metaphors used to describe dating. These imply that dating is like playing a sport. It is not just the bases. We take long shots. Losers aim too high and strike out. Don’t hate the player, hate the game! If you ask a friend to be your wingman, or to run interference, that friend must take one for the team. Friends do not let friends get cock blocked. They help them score.

  People may use these expressions half-jokingly. But the fact that so many of them remain current shows that our culture still sees dating as a transaction that takes place on uncertain terrain between work and play. It also tells us something about the gender roles that many daters still feel pressured to perform.

  Theoretically, these two sets of metaphors are equal opport
unity. In many social circles, a young woman can now call herself a “baller” and assume she will be understood. A young man can joke about playing “hard to get” and expect the same. But the cows and milk and allusions to testes make clear that we still associate these opposing attitudes toward love and sex more “naturally” with one gender or the other. A female “player,” like a “man slut,” adopts a kind of drag by professing to be so.

  In other words, our slang suggests that we still think dating is work for women and recreation for men.

  * * *

  Over the past few decades, it has become commonplace to observe how dramatically the Digital Revolution is disrupting dating. Yet many of the disruptions that new sites and apps have brought about recall the changes that brought dating into being in the first place. I have seen a sandwich board outside a bar joke that they had “3-D Tinder.” It took me a minute to realize that by saying that they served the “3-D” version of a popular dating app, all the owners meant was that there were people inside.

  Like Tinder, the first dive bars and dance halls that the working classes created when they flooded into cities were forms of social media. A bar is still a dating technology. It brings strangers together and enables them to connect. It also structures the possible ways that they can interact. The streets around the overcrowded tenements where the first daters lived were platforms, as the Internet is a platform.

  In their unruliness, they resembled the early World Wide Web. In the 1990s, marketplaces like Craigslist’s “adult services” and Backpage became notorious for making it easy for those looking to buy sex to find people selling it. Law enforcement eventually shut these pages down. But new digital technologies continue to create new kinds of erotic transactions. Many sex workers who engage in them still refer to meetings with clients, and clients themselves, as “dates.”

  The year I got my first job out of college, in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the trend that I heard people giggling about the most was “findoms.” Through webcams, men who called themselves “pay pigs” were hiring women to “financially dominate” them for a fee. Mostly they seemed to want to be verbally abused and told to offer gifts.