From Front Porch to Back Seat: A History of the Date

One day, the 1920s story goes, a young man came to call upon a city girl. When he arrived, she had her hat on. The punch line is completely lost on twenty-first-century readers, but people at the time would have gotten it. He came on a "call," expecting to sit in her parlor, be served some refreshments, perhaps listen to her play the piano. She expected to go out on a date. He, it is fairly safe to surmise, ended up spending a fair amount of money fulfilling her expectations (1). In fact, the unfortunate young man really should have known better. By 1924, when this story was current, "dating" had almost completely replaced "call ing" in middle-class American culture. The term appeared in The La dies' Home Journal, a bas tion of middle-class respectability, several times in 1914?set off by quotation marks, but with no explanation of its mean ing. One article, written in the then-exotic voice of a