Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America
D'Souza, Dinesh
school texts depict humankind as "fraught with original s i n , " desecrating nature and committing numberless crimes against the "third world" and future generations. There is an effort, the...
...The 49 chapters are not long...
...Terry Eastland College is mentioned only in the context of election results...
...The subsequent short takes include, among other things, numerous quotes and stories about gold and silver...
...In the face of such environmentalist bilge, London strives to remain a gentleman...
...But the publishers of textbooks are a different story...
...And the overzealous: "How intensely do 1 long to see you--to feel you--to put these hands that hold this pen upon you...
...She would be at the mercy of biology...
...And the rest of us could get on with building a world where we could again anticipate our children being better of f than we are...
...The chapters begin with a short essay on the candidates and the issues of the campaign and conclude with various "campaign highlights"--amusing incidents, major developments, dramatic happenings, unusual electioneering methods, and remarkable oratory...
...He repeats the forgotten truths: that it is science which improves the material condition of mankind...
...4. Complete mailing address of known office of publication: The American Spectator, 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, Monroe, IN 47402 5. Complete mailing address of the headquarters of general business offices of the publisher: Same 6. Full names and complete mailing address of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher: Ronald E. Burr, 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, IN 47402 Editor: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, IN 47402 Managing Editor: Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, 102 West Sixth St., I~omington, IN 47402 7. Owner: The American Spectator Educational Foundation, Inc., 102 West Sixth St., Bloomington, IN 47402 8. Known bondholders, mortgagees, and other security holders owning or holding I percent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages, or other securities: l<lone 9. For completion by Nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at special rates: The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal income tax purposes has not changed during preceding 12 months Average No...
...Strictly speaking, this is true, but if marriage has survived, it has survived narrowly...
...There is the utilitarian: "As much as I love you," one gentleman said in 1808, "I cannot think of your ever giving yourself to me, unless you can rationally promise yourself that you shall by such a step increase your own felicity...
...Given the overwhelming dominance of neo-Malthusian thought in public education today, there's wisdom in this moderate agenda...
...Feelings, not rationality, became the official guide for amorous conduct...
...In applying this law, I would go easy on the authors of high-school textbooks...
...that they would need to exercise selfdiscipline and be prepared to make sacrifices...
...and that air and water pollution levels are actually declining in most parts of the United States...
...In offering ideas on how to improve the situation, he asks only for fairness, balance, and perspective: the chance to present the alternative to the dominant doomsday scenario...
...that there was a 4, O00 percent increase in known mineral reserves between 1950 and 1970 alone...
...Yet, when President Reagan made precisely the same point with his "skin tights" joke to a women's business group, he met with groans of "sexism...
...What happened might be called the invention of petting...
...She shows how sex and courtship since the American Revolution have operated in a complex and often enriching tension with religious, social, and economic mores...
...Still, John Adams defended "bundling" because it provided both "independence and protection," while many preachers regarded it as an invitation to debauchery...
...If there is a single sociological principle that emerges from Rothman's broad album of courtship experience, it is that morals develop from the tension between male aggression and carnality, and female modesty and restraint...
...and among intellectuals, it still suffers a certain disrepute...
...Even within marriage, sex was said to be barely safe--lucky for its survival that it helped with the business of reproduction...
...The correspondence of couples during the last two centuries reveals a variety of courtship styles...
...Like children who commit felonies, these writers often don't know any better and can't be held fully responsible for their acts...
...HANDS AND HEARTS: A HISTORY OF COURTSHIP IN AMERICA Ellen K. Rothman/Basic Books/S19.95 Dinesh D'Souza We tend to behave today as if sex were invented by post-World War II America...
...The historical accounts are accurate, marred only by a typographical error or two...
...about boyfriends and room-mates, not suitors and beaux," Rothman writes...
...Children may be considered unwanted and expendable now, but they were seldom viewed with loathing in the past...
...No more posh meals at Four Seasons, Twenty-One, or Sardi's...
...for them, it would be exclusively whole grains...
...Thus, the chapter on the 1844 election contains a brief discussion of territorial expansion in general, the "Texas question" in particular, and also slavery...
...These short chapters are short on analysis...
...Just as thieves have hands chopped off, these felons would be forced to live the ascetic lifestyle they're trying to shame our children into adopting...
...Unlike feminist writing, which views the world through the perspective of a drinking straw, Rothman's work is opulent in detail and synthetic in its historical sweep...
...they commonly read Fortune and the Wall Street Journal and have been exposed to events like oil gluts, the collapse of commodity prices, and the overabundance of food in the world market...
...It involves a world of pure justice, where those who commit moral crimes are actually held accountable for them...
...Indeed, there really is no analysis to speak of...
...Another canard that Rothman helps spread is the notion that a woman in the nineteenth century feared marriage beca'ase "she mrght rose control of her life...
...Unlike the authors, these people actually produce goods in big cities...
...But this changed during the mid nineteenth-century, with the rise of the romantic novel...
...The idealistic: "No other state but that of happy and joyous sex relations can keep this world moving and progressing," as a manual advised in 1912...
...Mercy survives in my fantasy, I hasten to add...
...There is an effort, the author notes, to shame children into being "virtuous" and narrowly doctrinaire about the future, to adopt a new "demonology" in which students are asked to feel guilty, to suffer, and to sacrifice...
...Our children's textbooks are now engaged in those "educational" acts...
...the practice became controversial when many a fiancee was discovered in the morning with her nightdress inside out...
...Then she writes, "Even at a time when record numbers of Americans are delaying marriage, remaining single, or filing for divorce, marriage continues to represent the ideal expression of romantic love and sexual fidelity...
...This is not to say that women have feebler instincts, only that they have the moral strength to overcome them...
...Contrary to conventional opinion, the sexual regulations imposed by parents, church, or society were never all that strict...
...Rothman blames this on what she calls "the prevailing stereotypes of men and women...
...Now we talk about relationships, not courtships...
...its relationship to principles of representation and federalism goes unexplored...
...A l l of this noted, it must be said that a book does not have to be weighty to be worthy...
...The novel, by creating heroines like Clarissa and Madame Bovary, encouraged women to luxuriate in their emotions and turn them into pretentious prose...
...concise accounts of the nominations of Polk and Clay and their campaigns...
...Dinesh D'Souza is the author of Falwell: Before the Millennium (Regnery-Gateway...
...Candidate Reagan, in 1980, has "ultra-rightist" views, but Candidate McGovern, in 1972, is defended as having "more moderate" views than many of the Democratic delegates who supported him at the Miami Beach convention...
...More specifically, there's a law in this visionary world making it a crime to force neo-Maithusiasn moonshine down the throats of children...
...Furthermore, opinion polls, a fact of campaign life for more than a half century, are cited, but there is no effort made to evaluate opinion polls or, more importantly, to understand the nature of public opinion, what it is and how it is changed...
...Indeed, they take only 368 pages, excluding footnotes...
...their electricity from a windmill...
...Rothman .finds an unusual lack of parental surveillance over children's courtship conduct...
...copies: 45,217 45,100 B. Paid circulation: I. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter sales 2,309 2,195 2. Mail subscription 35,321 35,397 C. Total paid circulation: 37,630 37,592 D. Free distribution by mail carrier or other means samples, complimentary, and other free copies: 1,090 1,277 E. Total distribution: 38,720 38,869 F. Copies not distributed: I. Office use, left over, unaccounted, spoiled after printing 4,756 4,574 2. Return from News Agents 1,741 1,657 G. Total: 45,217 45,100 I1...
...They have no excuses...
...In the chapter on the 1896 election, the introductory essay emphasizes the "money question" that dominated the campaign before moving on to describe the conventions of that year and to discuss the campaign between McKinley and Bryan and its outcome...
...What I learned best from this book is that socie.ty functions most harmoniously when single women perform the role for which they've been most derided-to generate sexual desire and, simultaneously, to frustrate it...
...But no chagrin is necessary for neglecting the experience of blacks, immigrants, and the mentally handicapped...
...The question of whether being engaged entitles men and women to marital prerogatives has always been hotly debated in the culture...
...intermediate forms of affection came to embody premarital affection...
...They are, after all, mostly "social scientists" who apparently learned their economics in the rarefied atmospheres of faculty lounges...
...The most serious flaw in Presidential Campaigns occurs when Boiler attempts to place some recent presidential candidates in the context of their political beliefs...
...Similarly, political parties simply appear in this book...
...that scarcity-not abundance--is the natural condition of humankind, a condition only overcome in this century through the wonders of science and industrialization...
...Boiler could just as easily have written that Candidate Reagan had "more moderate" views than many of his supporters and that Candidate McGovern was an "ultra-leftist...
...Nor can one equate the isolated quirks of the bohemians or the eighteenthcentury pornographers with the license, infidelity, and abortions that have become mainstream in our culture...
...relatively few of their number kept diaries and notes and, as Rothman herself points out, those who did were such a small minority that they could not possibly be used as the basis for historical generalization...
...Their heat would come from solar panels...
...This aside, Presidential Campaigns accomplishes' its announced goal of showing that our quadrennial political exercises have not only their serious but also their silly and scurrilous sides...
...In other words, sexual intercourse was seen as an expression of a marital, not merely romantic, relationship...
...No more penthouses or suburban estates...
...During this time, Rothman reports, "Americans were beginning to make love between men and women a necessary rather than a desirable precondition for marriage...
...Thus, they are able to temper the basically nomadic sexual tendencies of men...
...Nonetheless, a fantasy lurks in the back of my head...
...Justice would triumph...
...Women's role was to embody rather than articulate the sentimental ideal...
...But, more likely, theirs is a much broader anxiety about the dramatic change in lifestyle and life status that they are about to enter into...
...Rothman's study is based on the diaries of 350 men and women who do not seem to have been at all laconic about their emotions...
...Rothman apologizes for her skewed sample, which entirely consists of white, middle-to-upper class Americans...
...Their Mercedes would be turned in for pockets full of bus tokens...
...Ellen Rothman is amused by these stereotypes, and at the same time dismissive of them...
...Yes, on your bosom--that soft, delicious b o s o m . . . I shall tear you to pieces !" Ironically, between the years 1770 and 1830, men tended to be more prolix and self-conscious in their correspondence while women's replies tended to be curt, even impersonal in tone...
...Previously, the term "romance" had a negative odor: It suggested indiscretion, rashness, vulgarity...
...Rothman reads accounts of women being "apprehensive" and "trembling" on their wedding night and infers that they dread being shackled to kids...
...STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION 1. Title of publication: The American Spectator B. Publication no : 01488414 2. Date of filing: September 19, 1984 3. Frequency of issue: Monthly A. No...
...Indeed, the book teems with examples of both...
...of issues published annually: 12 B. Annual subscription price: $21.00...
...It covers such diverse topics as contraceptive technology, the art of approaching parents for their daughter's hand, designing homes after marriage, wedding gifts and gowns, and baptismal liturgies...
...Even Puritan families, when they did exercise control, influenced "more the matter of when than of whom their children would marry...
...Their washer-dryers would be traded for washboards...
...Presidential Campaigns is a book of small ambition, but what it aspires to it does well, or at least well enough to merit consideration...
...The Electoral Terry Eastland is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator...
...Copies Each Actual no...
...that nature uncontrolled is not benign...
...Rothman quotes the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison: 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 "Men would be much better if they acted always as if women were looking at them...
...The rationale for "bundling" was that it entitled aspiring life partners to get to know each other, but not physically...
...In my fantasy, those convicted of neo-Malthusian crimes against children would face pure Koranic justice, where the punishment is tailored to the crime...
...These indulgences notwithstanding, Rothman's book stays admirably clear of feminist harangue, which it certainly doesn't need...
...they know other people really engaged in productive activity...
...Also, the book duly comments that the 1948 Republican Convention was the first to be televised, but it does not attempt to analyze the enormous impact of television since 1948 on the political parties, the candidates, and the campaigns, including the primaries...
...Burr Publisher THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 45...
...I do not agree with Rothman's suggestion that promiscuity today is not substantively different from a century ago...
...I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete RonaldE...
...But it is more complex than that...
...Extent and nature of circulation: A. Total no...
...that the world-wide per capita consumption of food has actually increased over the last thirty years...
...copies of single issue during preceding issue published nearest to 12 months filing date 10...
...In fact, in all areas of behavior, because of male expectations of female standards, women have a civilizing effect on men...
...The highlights that follow this essay include the stories of a toast Andrew Jackson made to Polk's health and of the grief-stricken reaction to Clay's defeat among some of his long-time followers...
...essentially, most wanted to certify that the man was employable and not still dependent on his parents...
...These highlights seek to lend to the essay approximately what the "color," in a sports broadcast, intends to lend to the play-by-play: texture, flavoring, quick illumination...
...The writing is lively, and Paul F. Boiler, Jr., a professor of history at Texas Christian University, has the good sense to call dull a campaign that was in fact dull (such as the campaign of 1880) and move on to the next one...
...As Prentice-HaU's The United States: Combined Edition (1982), referring to modern Americans, puts it: "Raised on the gospel of progress, few wanted to be t o l d . . , that they must lower their expectations and aspirations...
...Each chapter--each campaign--thus receives on average seven-plus pages, with the shortest chapter some two pages, the longest sixteen...
...He couldn't resist one punch below-the-belt, though, noting that "authors and publishers who take delight in a future world of diminished expectations may be helping to create a world without a textbook market too...
...PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS Paul F. Boiler, Jr./Oxford University Press/S16.95 T h i s book has 49 chapters--one for each of the 49 presidential campaigns conducted from 1789 (the only oddyear campaign) through 1980...
...She vividly re-creates such cultural quirks as the bohemian lifestyle, which developed before World War I when several thousand urban iconoclasts moved to Greenwich Village in New York to manufacture costly art and free love...
...So does virginity: hence the message to American virgins inscribed on college T-shirts--"Thanks for nothing...
...Between 1750 and 1780 one custom that became widespread was "bundling," which allowed engaged couples to sleep together without being undressed...
...This reflects the consensus of sexologists that, before the 1940s, the human libido lacked any vitality or spontaneity, simply saluting the official customs of the day...
...The reason there wasn't much premarital intercourse despite sexual autonomy among adolescents, Rothman discovers, is that "couples defined romantic love so that it included sexual attraction and gratification but excluded coitus...
...it is funny enough...
...our ancestors did not have the self-centered view of pleasure and convenience that we do...
...rather small apartments with no more than one room per person would be assigned...
...there is no explanation for the development of these institutions, which the Constitution did not contemplate and which many American founders did not want...
...and a wrap-up of the election results...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
