Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences by Laura Carpenter

before marriage. 77 Class differences in courtship customs suggest that this increase in premarital sex was concentrated among working-class youth, who had more opportunities to indulge and fewer disincentives not to.
    Worried that dating and the permissive sexual practices of working- class youth and new immigrants would contaminate their own offspring, White and African American community leaders launched a series of cru- sades to shore up the sexual standards they held dear. 78 White activists’ various efforts—to establish homes for “wayward” girls, raise the age of sexual consent, and curtail the circulation of “obscene” literature—coa- lesced into a national, broad-based social-purity movement, with mostly female leaders and a critique of men’s sexual privilege at its core. 79 Suf- fragists and organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union roundly criticized men’s social and economic power over women, dis- missed the popular view of men as innately lustful, and demanded ad- herence to a single sexual standard reflecting contemporary expectations for women. Yet, their pet strategy for enhancing women’s sexual auton- omy backfired. The campaign for “voluntary motherhood”—the right of married women to refuse sex in order to avoid pregnancy—ultimately en- couraged ordinary men and women to think of sex as separate from re- production and to accept artificial birth control, two preconditions for women to lose their virginity before marriage with impunity. 80 Black leaders likewise struggled to curb sexual “immorality” and to promote a single, conservative sexual standard, but their critique centered more on Whites’ power over Blacks than men’s power over women, with the aim of achieving “racial uplift,” counteracting racist stereotypes, and stem- ming racist violence. 81

    Public support for a single sexual standard did in fact increase among the White and Black middle classes in the 1890s; but, in practice, the double standard reigned as before. Women were still expected to marry as sexually inexperienced virgins, while young men enjoyed considerably more latitude. 82 In fact, as the consumer-oriented economy and rise of bureaucratic corporations made self-control less crucial for men’s pro- fessional success, sexual prowess—demonstrable through virginity loss
    — began to replace sexual continence as “essential to the worth” of White middle-class men. 83 Black middle-class men, by contrast, were still expected to exercise sexual restraint; but they were probably also more likely to have sex before marriage than Black middle-class women. 84
    Same-sex relationships were also affected by shifting social circum- stances. As small numbers of middle-class White women began to gain economic independence through higher education, some of them rejected marriage to men in favor of committed live-in relationships with other women. At least some of these “Boston marriages” were explicitly erotic. 85 Urbanization facilitated the development of close, potentially erotic relationships among men, who could and did live together in city boarding houses, away from community scrutiny. 86

    Extending the “New” Sexual Culture, 1900–1945
    In the popular imagination, 1920s America is inhabited by the sexy flap- pers and reluctant-to-settle-down new men immortalized in the fiction of
    F. Scott Fitzgerald and by the proudly sexual women and unorthodox men described by Black blues singers like Bessie Smith. 87
    Although less celebrated than Fitzgerald, Percy Marks created an ex- ceptionally detailed account of the changing sexual customs of White col- lege youth in his 1924 novel, The Plastic Age. When the book’s protago- nist, Hugh Carver, arrives at Sanford College, he gains immediate favor “for his shy, friendly smile, his natural modesty, and his boyish enthusi- asm.” 88 But when it comes to sex, small-town Hugh is “pathetically ig- norant . . . consumed with