BackStory; Love Me Did: A History of Courtship

this is the back story with us the turkish reconnaissance and future of a fifteenth century ago there's about twentieth century history matrimony are young gentleman of highly cultivated mines refined manner as the first respectability and in good circumstances getting sawed in vain for a kindred spirit within the circle of his acquaintance has concluded to try the virtue of advertising in order to reach the rest of a woman kind of full description of course character qualifications accomplishments etc indispensable all answers secretly confidential address box number five through three post office and fifty years ago has like this can be found in the pages of new york's biggest newspapers every day it was the heyday of the penny press papers like the new york herald tribune the sun and the times had all discovered that they can support themselves through classified advertising and the readers have discovered

and classifies could be a pretty good way to cut through the loneliness of the big city i mean they're like a really strict rules of medicaid against men and women talking on the street if they were i equated the spam epstein a graduate student rutgers university who's writing her dissertation on these nineteenth century personal ads and so you reach a point where you have met every single woman in your acquaintance you're not love with any of them and you don't see a future with any of them and said you have to do this this is the step that you have to take the spot the ads ever became mainstream ben epstein says they always retain a certain back alley whisper whisper hush hush wink wink kind of quality but still by the eighteen fifties they were common sight in newspapers all over the urban north why was the eighteen fifties i mean you can go into the whole issue of you have more more of a market oriented economy where people are using the market in their daily lives and so you know you advertise for a

house you advertise for serving you advertise for a job and why not advertise their life then he's deeper that i didn't know i knew the most actually started charging more money for natural yards than any other ad because i think that they saw a real opportunity to take advantage of people who wanted to find a spouse organization alienation the steady creek of commercialization all these things sound so big and well impersonal and yet these very forces we're propelling the sudden blossoming of person or that's shaping the most intimate parts of american's lives meeting and getting to know the men who would become their husbands the women who become the wives and so for the rest of the hour today on backstory we're going to look at some of the other ways courtship conventions of change over time and ask what these changes have to do with things like the economy the media war and peace and technology as always will trace the tale from in colonial times to the present in the hopes that we can better understand why things are the way they

are today but first we're gonna return to pam epstein the graduate student we were hearing from just a moment ago and invited her to share a few of her favorite personal ads from the nineteenth century and she was happy to oblige the gentleman who followed and was several times noticed by the lady dressed in cloth bags and call in the store and nassau street about half past four o'clock on tuesday afternoon and then preceded by where they inspect a broadway and got into a twenty third street stage would be delighted to make three points please address paul vincent probably post office this idea that was actually really common you would see these you know the gentleman sitting across from the lady in the stagecoach would like to make her acquaintance this particular one i think was a guy who was chasing after this woman and when she notices him several times it's because she's noticing a guy falling average household why

are mormon women tend to be more men than women but yeah there actually were a lot of women the men tended to be a whole lot more eloquent than i think the reason for that is that women have less money women didn't have jobs if they do that job they were being paid as well and much money on advertisement free and so when they needed to be a lot more careful with their words and so they were very very direct gentlemen of means seems to six i actually don't think he was a woman looking for a husband and i think it was a woman's looking for a patron and a patron was i guess that's mr hamm waves they really see is so unusual for her identified herself perhaps the reasons he said that is

so epic i know she's got a job but one that doesn't earn her a lot of money in social ease their friendship of a man to sort of get her through you know help pay their rent matrimonial the world is so full of poetry beauty and glory i have no one to share with me i want to read on my shakespeare and milton to enjoy with the nature are letters society i sit there for my other end better half complement into equal though not like myself a new englander by birth a liberal culture and pursuits of about thirty five years of age gentleman and a christian and my aspirations ladies so minded will please address mr christopher litan box number one for four you start to see these ads a little bit by the eighteen nineties i think there's a lot of different reasons for that but i think one of them is that people start noticing that this is a big deal but lots of people are looking for spouses in this way

why we capitalize on that and turn it into a business to see much money on agency you send send money to address and i think that this makes much money is less desirable than they were before because now they're being associated with something that's kind of sleazy i never go away i think that they lose the sort of romance that you see in ads like the one by christopher lane they seem to as will get shorter and i think that he after about nineteen ten you also see society just being a lot more open and to people meeting each other in a much more casual way and so i think that i think it's become less necessary and yet you have the paradox of living in surprised every ton of revolution now and people should feel free to connect with people of whatever kinds of backgrounds are orientation or

are definition and yet now we should have more mediated relationships through the internet it would seem counter intuitive that encounter anything goes we still need these kinds of tools yeah i had never goes away and it's been really fascinating to me to see the way that the language is changed but the sentiment that does seem to be true love was always hard your lover's eyes i am epstein is a phd candidate in history at rutgers university you can read more of her explorations in the world of nineteenth century pursell ads are professing blog advertising for love dot com only two from our own side backstory radio dot org egg it sounds to me like it would have been really pretty tough for people to meet their matches back in the period you're talking a pam about but i'm curious to know what it would've been like even earlier peter

could you give us a sense of how people actually made each other better future husbands and wives back in the eighteenth century all that i think the short answer is they were virtually born knowing them because small village communities a lot of face to face transactions and you are marry a stranger you wanna marry somebody of your own face somebody who you can rely on somebody you had learned was trustworthy over an entire lifetime so its familiarity that makes the kind of courtship that we're talking about the nineteenth century and the sensor yeah so it totally different world yes it really is but that doesn't mean that important things weren't happening and changing in the world of courtship precisely because the image i gave you of static intimate village society is radically transforming the lake only approved if you would be willing to tell us about that transition let me start by talking about premarital pregnancy or it's a korean maritime unit well the

number of women who came to the altar already pregnant novices scandal as hugh this is not the story we like to tell about the good old family values an old new england or the numbers like well if you go from the sixties seventies dallas's the baseline for you in the puritan period the heyday of puritan theocracy and will the rate is something like two percent which is trivial but those rates have skyrocketed to thirty or forty percent by the seventies seventies forty percent out yet it's not the nineteen sixties you're talk the seventies sixties believer or nonbeliever are but we should reach the conclusion that those high rate of pre marital pregnancy meant the end of the family as we know it and lots of flow of children born outside of marriage because most of these pre marital impregnation was a little legitimate

children that is so the brides were pregnant with their children within marriage i got in under the wire but a lot of these images are a result of parental sanctioned interaction between boys and girls and by that i mean the custom of bundling bundling bundling is a traditional custom that comes from england in which the young people who intend to marry eventually will spend the night together in the home lovely young woman in syria is not supposed to involve sexual intercourse because bumbling means that your semi closed and that you're lying there together in some cases there's a little piece a wood between you're in one amusing case they promised to put a bible between them but you get carried away you coltrane far as we would say that's not the end of the world ordinary folk expect this to happen and they think it's a good thing because the important thing is family

formation that's always the goal of courtship so how we going to guarantee that a family will forgive your daughter will be seduced and abandoned that's the great great fear of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seduction and of course the testimony of neighbors and witnesses is crucial if it ever came to court it doesn't go to court very often so peter this is really kind of the first bait and switch that dye thinks it's about not having sex he has sex but that's not what it's really about it's the parents don't mind the fact that the and ways are being produced what is really about this which is keeping that guy there yet exactly right under wraps well remember we wanna hear what you have to say about all this leave us a comment of backstory review dot org are especially interested in hearing your stories by your grandparents and great grandparents met their wives a week of that you'll hear a little more about bundling an alternative centers for it

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you this is back story of a show that looks to the past to explain the world around us today i am peter i'm a fan i represent the eighteenth century and there's not represent the nineteenth century and i'm brian balogh representing the twentieth century today on the show the history of courtship in america when we left off our early america died peter was describing the colonial new england custom of bundling which involved young sweethearts spending the night together in the girl's home it wasn't supposed to be sexual but the pre marital pregnancy rate suggests that it often was and you were saying peter but the basic idea was that hey these kids are going to do it anyway so you might as well documented yeah just in case this guy takes off before the baby comes in we have to take in the court what i'm wondering is this why were parents suddenly so concerned about the guy splitting well that's a great question by and

they're all wants answers to have one is that the traditional ways of exercising parental control were losing their effort to see that war as affective of course historically fathers would have plenty of land especially in places like no one on the threat the colonies that they could distribute to their sons but by the mid eighteenth century there's less and less land more and more mobility and that's the key thing you're going to have to move to a new part of the province or even beyond the promised a fine land to make a farm and think of the american revolution this is a new perspective on it maybe has a vast acceleration of a mobile population that has the war takes guys all over at a secret upright and that increases risk for parents and daughters particular that they will be abandonment and maybe and opens up a lot of new land by the well what that seltzer works for economic development board threatens

the family so i get it because these folks are gonna move and they can't be controlled through handing out land they've got a begin to exercise some kind of self restraint that they've got us figure out how on their own got to make babies and split up and so what this bundling is is really kind of a practice session for trying to self restraint but not getting carried away it's all done within the executor family is less effective as a mechanism of control and therefore they onus is on the young woman because of course she's got everything riding on her success in the courtship so one of the things it becomes important is what we might call a relocation of virtue laverdure is classically male things that men are strong and brave and fearless and socialism and well virtuous can you imagine saying that about modern as well in this period it's women who become a

virtuoso what that really means is that women are exercising control over courtship over their own sexual lives and that control that he says translates into a whole new idea of the moral force of female choice and the health of the society that goes not just in terms of restraining their the men in their husbands but educating their children without explain to watch the birth rate declined so rapidly across the nineteenth century as women become sort of the controllers get that right absolutely well under the fast forward button now we've already talked a little bit about what happened when young men and women left the farm and headed for the city and how the new victorian ideas about romance and sentimentality runs smack up against the cold hard reality of a big city was just plain hard to meet members of the opposite sex i wanna pick up the story now and my period by the first couple decades of the twentieth century those big cities had only gotten

bigger but those old fashioned rules of etiquette begun to break down and middle class teenagers were beginning to spend time together in public in ways they never had before it was the dawn of the dating and it's all chronicled in the book from front porch to backseat by historian beth bailey in it she described how the earliest form of dating was essentially a popularity contest it was all about how many days you could get i spoke with best recently and she explained that even the most respectable young women were encouraged to cultivate the image is not the reality of multiple gentleman suitors if you well dancing if you went to a party to dance with your escort the worst thing that could happen is that you dance with your escort you were supposed to as a woman be constantly circulating in write what's attorney is getting stuck or something like that no studies social failure getting stuck and you can not abandon your partner you cannot say thanks for that at some local if you're stuck with her until somebody takes her

off your hand you know you talked about you're a pioneer he's literally stuck so stark city he holds a dollar bill behind his back as ever and circling the dance floor over and over with the same woman and he can't find anyone who's waiting at our bill behind her back hoping he's going to the track's opponent and our discipline has actually enough money to make somebody notice and she sees what's going on in tulsa make it five an alcoholic so that way we should say this is a system in their twenties in their thirties to a certain extent but one of the themes of your book is the matter where you dipped in and history parents would have found this appalling because they had a completely different system for courting so can we just go back a little bit and to remind me what the system before and dating was

a system for dating was calling and calling that anything from world areas where a young man a come over and talk to the girl and sit on her front porch to a very overlap rated upper class practiced that involve calling cards and many a leper rituals that the young woman or her family could invite a young and over to call it would be received today would chat she might play the piano for him and her mother might serve some lemonade it was that practice that took place largely within her own self i'm struck when you describe that earlier system of calling it seems to me that women my tears held the upper hand in that at least in terms of controlling the who they get to say oh man always have the upper hand in the sense that they were the ones who issued the proposal for marriage and were expected to support a wife and family for the rest of their lives but in the sense of courtship women had a lot more power right of initiative at least because women were deciding who was appropriate and i am

issuing invitation to their home once the invitation was to go out it was assumed that any kind of public expense was going to be born imam so what that meant is that the right of initiative shifted so no longer did women invite man men and five women and you what's happening with that shift is young people are also claiming the right to escape from parental supervision and to claim some kind of privacy by going out into the public we tear away from the supervision of family and community and so it flitting control from the internet in some way that is also shifting the meaning of privacy price he takes place in the public not in the private money and of course this is why people who are moving to cities in droves at the end of the nineteenth early twentieth century that they find it liberating yes they feel much freer and emptying actually something thats born from urban working class culture that the practice of culling going to sit in this the parlor doesn't work so well when you have a tenement which dozens of people are

crammed into a small amount of space and so what happens increasingly with the rise of crucial amusements whether its amusement parks are dance halls a restaurant is that young women to go and seek the man to pay for their entertainment and what people don't realize today is that the term date actually comes from prostitution not the other way around people at the time and dating started to be the practice understood very clearly that this was a financial or an economic exchange man's company plus money equals women's company plus what and that doesn't mean sexual intercourse it often it means instead thirteen or you know making in the end few important or whatever but there was always a sense of the equation was unbalanced so was only parents your say you know what's going on my daughter looks like a prostitute with her short skirt folds stockings and bobbed hair and makeup it was also some young men sang it can't afford to keep company with rules i have to purchase gear company this

isn't so good right so parents in the twenties would have been objecting to the fact that all this was going on outside the house and be on their supervision even be on there media communities supervision guys were objecting to having a cough up money for basically access that used to be free and girls were complaining that there was increasingly kind of expectation for something in return for that money is that it doesn't that's a very well let's let's move forward to the fifties because there's another shift and i actually found this you know just mind boggling ii finally kind of get this merry go round system down the more people you dance with the bigger man you are the more popular girl and then all the sudden going steady is the thing now how did that happen it's really complicated to think about how that happened because you did seem to

happen very quickly more or less during world war two and m one way it happened is because at the age of marriage dropped quickly and dramatically young people were getting their younger and younger and younger and so if a half of all brides were under nineteen by nineteen fifty seven the pace of courtship sped up a lot and younger people mean is young is eleven or twelve almost mimicked a young marriage by being with a single person so they could literally get married at age eleven but they were not in the state senate they were emulating right there anyway to undertake really expected this was going to be the next step to marriage people thought there that the state has lots and lots of people over time it was more like what we call serial monogamy god don't tell me that parents object to going steady i mean who who could object to oh you know bringing home a nice guy and he's paid to do and it's gonna beat this sell a merry go round going out with the you know twenty seven different people in order to establish your step up please don't tell me they objected to

that you think would never have made it seem so safe and so wonderful but this is also the period where young people were starting to say that it's ok to have sex with somebody if you love them and goings date in many ways provided a safe loving environment in which people did a whole lot more experimentation than this rapid turnover i've got one day early in the evening another day later in the evening the kind of model so catholic priest said that it was a serious occasion of cinemas people were about to get married and various high schools outlawed going steady yesterday they said he has gotten it and they said the promiscuous go out when lots of people whatever you do don't go study visit the other argument that parents may and it was made in popular magazines and advice book is a young people needed to learn how to compete and that the dating world was one of the best places to hunger skills of competition and put your best foot forward so if you could always count on good old freddie to show up for the

day he didn't have to worry about making yourself beautiful figuring out how to flirt and attract man you would not develop your skills of competition and even worse from that because if they didn't have to struggle for the popular girls they weren't learning how eventual eat to become successes in all spheres of life it sounds like the strangest argument in the world that you know it sounds like milton friedman actually i'm in and running your book is this kind of market model dating i think that threw the twentieth century there was a powerful economic model it dating that was based on notions of scarcity and abundance and and negotiations of a i am one of the things that happened during the sexual revolution it sixties nineteen seventies in part with the rise of feminism in women's claims to economic independence was a realization that sex and love and relationships were not necessarily a scarce resource that had to be

struggled over that instead was a potentially abundant resource that could be shared without consequence for unions love all you need is love elmo visit london time of the one year with an parents were very nervous about that well thank you so much for joining us thank you beth bailey is a history professor at temple university and the author of from the front porch to backseat courtship in twentieth century america her new book is americas army making the all volunteer force you can listen to more of my interview with her including the story of the parents first date back stood at a cycle if you're just tuning in this is back story and we were talking about the history of culture and we've arrived at the point in the show when we've stopped talking just long enough to field a few questions from you our listeners what's going to follow

its first of the day we have joining us from switzerland welcome to the show mary i think he's a kilo man we're talking about courtship so let's get right to the fundamental rift i like her but it would have a clock you know and i never realized it

was really an american thing that had been built up over why is how the conflict for the patron saint of this show ok so here's the deal we have in fact lee's son of a jeweler on the panel today of experts who knows all about engagement rings and then we also have editors who knows everything well then i got a ring for you mary are not that i draw my art jewelry expertise since you know they pay me the big bucks to be a historian here not a jewelry i will tell you that's the whole meaning of engagement change significantly the end of the nineteenth century beginning of the twentieth century and it became much more formalized they made announcements they sent out and there are more now so unsympathetically put a lot of pressure on the women especially who now publicly what

kind of connected to these guys it seemed to have all the downside of commitment with not the upside yet what it occurs to me bryan is you're talking about indicating to a public in which nobody knows you but you show your ring and it establishes your stairs where is in the car helper of a what you had was the reading of the bands in short a public announcement in which the intention to marry was indicated it would be read out and i think three successive summers or something and so i'm out of time passes in and so that really is a substitute for common knowledge that people would have an election as you said that's why they wear jewelry stores back in colonial right there were other reasons that you're called that's right

the siesta that's my guess on us to say that's what i know with certainty now what you said which is that this is a product of it global age of commodities in which people could expect to have an ad gm from the other side of the world as a common part of a widespread ceremony and so that vivid accomplishments to a century i think on this record has been to make the diamond seem something we've always had that eternal that's an investment that will always and you're not always been around but in fact like so many things that seem ancient in fact it's quite new so many even within the united states is ever changing animal mary so i'm not surprised that the tradition is really different in different countries thank you so much thank you oh you have enjoyed a half because it's time for another we get that will take more of your calls about the history of questions in america remember your

color our future show visit her website for two top a great backstory revealed that story coming up this week has been it's b it's bleak

as bleak we're back with a backstory of a show that takes a topic from the here and now and explores its historical context and peter a roof at the center is true and then there's the nineteenth century history and i'm brian balogh twentieth century history guys today show we're looking at the history of courtship conventions in america we've been fielding your comments and questions of backstory radio dot org and our producers have invited a few of you who weighed in there to join us on the phone that as recall from jenny from san francisco california jenny welcome to the show how well it's great to have you here and what's on her mind well i met him at our rap an authority who didn't want to see my grandfather's story about our writing the trolley and philadelphia the young man i had to be in the early thirties

and he claimed he thought my grandmother in a shop window and the love affair is that the one that the hammond and all that guy there the one i'm gonna marry and you know i think you hear about all the beautiful story but already hearing i'm a bit how often other people told me almost exactly the thing your eyes ok the movies bad joke about that well you know that's like the whole myth of the self made man roger alger the man who decides by sheer force of will but his memory a particular woman head that epitomizes the whole idea of a modern american male ego couch

i can see where the comfort of common romantic notion of the twentieth and trade you know what about love at first night right that's the idea so i will just begin the answer by saying that the idea of love having any connection in marriage law is and modern invention that's that's you could say it begins it has its origins in the elite classes of the eighteenth century that rich people who began to cultivate notions of sentiment and loaf and than marriages that were in the modern world between people with mutual attraction was love at first sight is just a radical way of saying we didn't get married because anybody told us we should or because it made any sense it's the very senseless less of it that makes it so romantic and romantic is the key word but you don't have that in

traditional early modern societies because there's too much at stake so in some ways we both take marriage so seriously that week we talk about a lot of them we then get all this heavy symbolism amelia we don't take it nearly as seriously as previous generations to yeah i would just add to that jenny i was fascinated by a they're caught him moving trolley car and shop window which is both are very twentieth century and you've got your grandfather emotion in ways it wouldn't have been at least an early nineteenth century maybe late nineteenth century but particularly the grandma of future graham i am the shop window well you know the twentieth century is when women started both working in department stores and also shopping in department stores and what really strikes me is particularly twentieth century is that this is

entirely about the public sphere and there's nothing about homemaking here there's nothing about cooking there's nothing about retiring to the house this is all about kind of the merger of an intimate relationship eventually and the public sphere that unity ticket then my great actor and ninety nine year old now have made that story about a man at a public pool oh yeah but you know what strikes me is that looking at and either brian was brilliant about moving by and then looking at the window and capturing his image and moving image so i think the movies will provide the framework are shirtless because what he doesn't know is anything about her camera wherever he first saw her it was within an idealized framework

and literally frame yeah literally for and that i had the window does that and it wasn't stuff as well and we knew the truth now add not dangerously we love the only one let me ask you today are you married and so how did you meet your future has been massive rollback to kind of more than the us a call we have a call from a marine served in lafayette louisiana marissa welcome to the show well well not actually and buy buy but then i read a little golf cart airplane are banging the record animal at an intimate way in the ryan lizza has an excellent movie

and he actually worked the manly thing thinking can fly and they exchanged letters that eventually she goes pam and they wind up getting married so you know how effective kind of creepy that somebody would actually go and make it fun when that they had never even met before i knew nothing about what they wrote the millennium but i found out that it actually really that occurred the mail order bride so my question is you know what motivated people to actually participate in the future right little bit shocking to our sensibilities that people would make these arrangements such long distances without love it not for a site you might say or off peter doesn't this have a long history that even into your antiquated near of

imperial yeah absolutely i mean it seems to me that was not mail order certainly was buying wives and i think they can by the boatload of virginia and associate century yeah well because of course the first settlers and virginia were a bunch of very greedy and selfish guys we are virginia which say this and the problem of course was an absence of women and therefore the possibility of passing property on the irony of this one wonderful story of virginia is that women were brought over in great numbers and i developed a real important role in passing on property and in a kind of nature he developed his real guys would die in women would become key players in the economy and would marry syria lead as we imagine men doing in their fantasies bicep but you you wanted to know specifically from a woman's perspective why why they would do this that ed peter at any clues what i think it has a lot to do historically with demographic imbalances and that's in places like

the frontier like kansas there just weren't a lot of political women or conversely in new england particularly some surplus population of spinsters so is that because there were no eligible men are and that they'd all gone out west where they are you know total says militias to double the french traveler he goes to michigan which was the middle of nowhere in leaking thirties and he finds people are rustic cabin in the middle of the wilderness reading newspapers and i think that's key to your question because that is an incredibly important mode of communication what's clear obviously it takes two to have this relationship so it requires a real shortage of women in one place and a perceived surplus of women in another right so sometimes it happens because of war are americans a war one reason the new england after the civil war was so for women is that this may in a minute you know the same is true in the american south as well but i think it

just requires real imbalance economic wherewithal you have to be pretty desperate i think to agree to marry a man you've never laid eyes on and so i think that what you find is that a lot of these people were immigrants in the nineteenth century and they would be placed marked by great gender imbalance because the man had left and any prospect of having a family or having a livelihood involved going to where men were because of the way the laws are structured with a proper structure the chances of people had so all this of course is a derivative of the fact that women were subordinate to men and they needed men as a vehicle to provide for them and to be able to be answered india called upper mobility set its own nothing of the game i would've chosen to give it was an adaptation to add this a collaborator either in the nation or more often i think brought that i think it's a corrective to the usual view of sentimental romance their crimes somewhere in the middle classes in the

nineteenth century marriage is still about family making and family and it's a household system of production reduced consumption you know what you're getting when you get your mail order bride somebody you really need some of them make the butter summit and make the babies somebody who's gonna make the home we're close to matching astrological sign or nighttime and i'm not i mean really talking about stars aligning in that tennis of where we're talking about making the family so we see it through the prism of romance and sexuality in the country says we make in our sense of our personal dignity and integrity and that's really neither her there i think for a lot of people in crunch time comes and it's a business relationship yes exactly what we really know how to take the fun out of balance is this

just tuning in the suspects including american history guys with tech courtship in america were also feeling your comments at our web site backstory radio are at war with their time for one more call today and it's going to be from our hometown of charlottesville virginia gets bleak bleak welcome to the show so what's on your mind is really interested in a column about and i made a woman homeowner the queens ambassador i want to do that yates says well certainly the case for me generations even unto the

presenter haitians and had quite a few southerners would not for the idea calls minor family marrying a yankee if they could help him and probably four some more recent loss of just for jews or general principle in which is sort of a cultural reasons but the irony is that novelists and short story writers instead focused on this is one the sec for tropes nineties and for american literature the marriage of the former union soldier in the southern belle as the sort of symbol of the reunification of the country and this began in the very first novel published after the civil war to still injured the president his rattles conversion from secession to union which that's quite the gifted sexy title forget but the point being is that they're in like the country as a whole and his rival have been a staunch secessionist falls in love with a union soldier and thereby find her way back into the union and that became one of the most common

story lines of literature after the civil war so even the same time that a lot of people would never cotton to the idea of marrying the yankee it became quite they're prominent in popular culture and how much or how much do you think that the gender differences almost immediate gate the military differences i'm thinking of course about the twentieth century in war brides americans go over and you know baring germans are marrying vietnamese in the case of the enemy's war its almost as if the men thought man and you can make it all ok through these reunions with when what you're suggesting is that after the civil war it became very clear to people that's why some women were the least reconstructed living as part because they can afford to be yeah they get a waiver saying things that really going to put a man in prison because there are still this idea during reconstruction that you know still you know these women don't really matter for one thing and so

their menfolk actually got put them up to it now to go ahead and can resist the scientists say finning and that yeah there's light at the same time they were often very sincere and just despised movies yankee man who would come down so it is like what i'm saying is that you inherited and rich tradition and gendered yankee hating to have but i think it would've been unusual for and northern young woman to marry a sudden and that's not the way the story has often been betrayed did you read a lot of literal for you decide to do it but i think it's a it's part of love romantic literature lover you got a meet cute there's going to be an obstacle was gonna be something to overcome a story at fifty seven a full on love what's the story of that so the fact that there is there are these cultural gaffes and i i think we can trivialize it would laugh about it but the marriage choices that

americans making indicate their sense of what the greater american families really like and deep down inside you nor there are some sellers you the same people right now but a real banbury now is an expansion of the mating game so speakers across racial boundaries and i think we've all experienced of world of a lot of this in our lifetimes of how those boundaries have been perceptibly changing and i think the romantic stories about crossing boundaries or one of the ways in which we can find this in our popular culture like a band i'd say it's along sectional lines same sex marriage racial boundaries as that forbidden line to cross so you were a pioneer in your time many years ago and we applaud you for pushing the frontier and they have been part of this forgery in the mix is all a big and i could tell that long island city accent is not rubbed off on you break

or is the goal of women well we're always willing to cross boundaries here back story but the one boundary we can't cross is the end of the hour but it's always the conversation continues online dropped into her backstory rated dot org and leave us a comment a question of love them whatever we'd love to hear from you and why their son of our podcast enjoy some facebook and tells what topics you'd like to see his take on the future the address again his backstory radio dot org don't be a stranger back first produced by tony feel without catherine moore to mom over master the show got the ultra runner fame and special thanks today that emma jacobs center of the turkey backstory digs at the producers and ruined them major support for backstory is provided by the university of richmond offering a combination of the liberal arts law business leadership studies and continuing education more information that

you can major support also comes from the colonial williamsburg foundation committed to the idea that the future they'll turn from the past to support also comes today harrison president's initiatives have diversity gender you gaze or center for public affairs national endowment for the humanities carried out epstein about the old lines brown ginger charles foundation james madison's what do your marks and are weinstein's tricia david crow church j m weinberg and an anonymous donor is the thomas jefferson memorial foundation professor of history at the university of virginia brian balogh is a professor of history at the university of virginia and ubs miller center of public affairs editors as president and professor of history at the university of richmond backstory was created by andrew wender of the updates radio at the virginia foundation for the humanities