TRICKS

A free lunch is getting harder to come by in business or pleasure. When I ask people how they would define what "a date" is, they usually say that it involves a person inviting another person out to eat or drink something, or to consume some other kind of entertainment. Then they note wistfully how rare this has become. Articles that lament the death of dating frequently cite the absence of such excursions as evidence of the decline of romance. Yet at the dawn of dating, the idea of a man taking a woman somewhere and paying for something for her was shocking.

Previously, looking for love had not involved going out in public or spending money. So around 1900, when the police started to notice that young people were meeting up on city streets and going out together, they became concerned. Many early daters — the female ones, anyway — were arrested for it. In the eyes of the authorities, women who let men buy them food and drinks or gifts and entrance tickets looked like whores, and making a date seemed the same as turning a trick.

The word "date" first appeared in print in the sense that we now use it in 1896. A writer named George Ade dropped it in a weekly column that he wrote for The Chicago Record. The column was called "Stories of the Streets and Town." It promised to give his middle-class readers a glimpse into how the working classes lived.

The protagonist of the column is a young clerk named Artie. When Artie suspects that his girlfriend has been seeing other people, and is losing interest in him, he confronts her. "I s'pose the other boy's fillin' all my dates?"

In an installment published three years later, he gawks at another girl's popularity. "Her Date Book had to be kept on the Double Entry System."

The girls a boy like Artie would have dated were a brand-new type. In Chicago, people called them "women adrift."

Starting in the 1880s, more and more women who had grown up on farms or in small towns began leaving their homes to go look for work in cities. When they arrived, they crashed with distant relatives or found cheap rooms in boardinghouses. Changes in the economy were creating more and more opportunities for them. They could make garments and other light goods in factories. They could become salesgirls in department stores or day servants in the homes of rich families. They could learn shorthand and become office secretaries. Or they could work in the laundries, restaurants, and cabarets.

African American women were even more likely than white women to be looking for work outside their homes. After the Civil War, a huge population of former slaves tried to find jobs. Discrimination kept many black men from earning living wages, and black women in cities often ended up stuck in positions that nobody else wanted. In 1900, 44 percent of them worked in domestic service. Most were desperate to leave it. While in a white household, they remained vulnerable to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Many tried to transition to "day work." Others even opted for heavy labor.

In the 1890s, a stock market crash set off the worst economic crisis that the United States had ever experienced. This sped up the flood of single women into cities. At the same time, a huge wave of immigrants arriving from Italy and Eastern Europe crammed into tenements alongside the Irish who already lived there. The female members of these families joined the job hunt.

In the 1960s, the second-wave feminist movement canonized the appeal that Betty Friedan made in The Feminine Mystique. Friedan told housewives to flee the suburbs and take on paid work. So today it is easy to forget that by 1900, more than half of American women were already working outside their homes. Many of them were unmarried. At work, or on the way to and from work, they crossed paths with men. It is hardly surprising that some of these singles were interested in flirting and pursuing relationships with one another. And it made sense for them to do so in public places. Where else did they have?

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The son of a rabbi, Samuel Chotzinoff came with his family from Vitebsk, Russia, to New York when he was seventeen years old. They lived in a housing project on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Chotzinoff grew up to be a well-known music critic, and in his memoirs he described their home in the Stanton Street Settlement.

"The average apartment consisted of three rooms: a kitchen, a parlor, and a doorless and windowless bedroom between.

"The etiquette of courting was strict," he added.

If a young man came to call on his older sister, the two of them would have to crowd in the kitchen. If his parents were out, they made Samuel stay in to spy on his sister and any suitors who turned up.

"Privacy in the home was practically unknown," the grown-up Chotzinoff recalled. "Privacy could be had only in public."

Of course, traditional parents would have preferred to set up their children through family members or matchmakers. In the Old Country, your family and community had controlled courtship. Many ethnic and religious groups funded political and theatrical clubs in the hopes that their children would meet there. But even strict parents tended to trust their children not to do anything too untoward outside. Many courting couples were allowed to go walking and attend concerts, balls, and plays together. When young Samuel headed out to the park near his home, he saw young men and women everywhere. They strolled hand in hand and squeezed next to each other on benches. They tucked themselves between trees to steal kisses and caresses. English, Russian, and Yiddish drifted through the air.

The girls mostly worked in laundries and textile factories. The boys worked in industrial sweatshops. As soon as they punched out, they met up. As twilight wore on, the streets became like one large party, into the darkening corners of which couples slipped. Someone might see you, but nobody was likely to. The risk you took became part of your bond. It was a secret that you shared.

For people who could afford it, there were a growing number of other date spots. In cities across the country, saloons, restaurants, dance halls, and amusement parks were springing up to cater to new arrivals.

The more daters went out, the more destinations they had to choose from. There were penny arcades packed with games. As films grew in length and quality, the owners of such establishments added projectors and started charging five cents admission. By 1908, there were ten thousand "nickelodeons" across America.

* * *

Earning money gave young women a new degree of freedom to decide where they would go with whom. Still, their wages did not amount to much. Despite the record numbers of women entering the workforce, the belief remained widespread they were working not to support themselves but only to supplement the earnings of fathers or husbands. Employers used this misconception as an excuse to pay women far less than...