Why Wait? Arguments for Chastity in the 1960s

 

I found this mid-60’s text while unpacking my books and decided to read it for a couple reasons.  First, I’ve been writing some stories set in the early ‘70s and thought the book would refresh my memory of the attitudes and language of the time.  Second, I thought it would be a hoot.

The language search was successful: “necking,” “making out,” “going all the way.”  But instead of a hoot, it was more of a grim reminder.

Dr. Duvall, 1909-1998, received her PhD in Human Development from the University of Chicago and was a Fellow of the American Sociological Association. She brought a lot of research to the table, citing papers and experts right and left. She also evidently had a lot of experience telling teenagers things they didn’t want to hear, as her tone throughout is reasonable, level-headed, and research-based.  She comes across as smart, serious, caring, and desperately fighting a rearguard action.  (Ok.  Maybe that last is just obvious from the perspective of 2021.)

Rather than take a religiously based “thou shalt not” approach, she warns her young readers of possible consequences, both developmental and social.  There are warnings about pregnancy and its consequences, which at that time were to give up the baby for adoption or a shotgun marriage.  There is a good passage about how early marriage can bring on responsibility that the young couple isn’t ready for and can derail potential careers.

But lot of the book is about social sanctions, and it is here that Duvall betrays the sexual attitudes and sexism of the time: A girl can’t afford that kind of reputation; A young couple, particularly the girl, won’t fully enjoy sex due to guilt; and so forth.  Sometimes this logic is circular.  Duvall regrets that there is a double standard that penalizes girls more than boys, but then turns around and uses the double standard as a reason not to have sex.

At the end of the book, Duvall makes the centrality of social sanctions to her argument explicit.  She quotes a 1948 paper by Dr. Clarence Leuba, in which he “suggests that a culture in which premarital sexual intercourse would be desirable and satisfactory would have to meet the following conditions,” and then lists pretty much was has actually happened in the last few decades.  (One of them is “[N]o social disapproval either for the persons engaging in premarital sexual relations or for the institutions of which they were members.”)  Rather than suggest that society should move in this direction, Duvall uses the lack of these conditions as a reason for maintaining chastity.

Interestingly, Duvall pretty much missed the major negative outcome of the sexual revolution: the horrendous rise in single-parent families, and the correlated increase in children living in poverty.  The relative freedom to make and break relationships has not been adequately coupled to an ethic of responsibility for the children created in those relationships, at both the personal and societal levels.

But a stronger argument wouldn’t have made any difference.  Dr. Duvall was bound to lose her fight, as society adjusted its mores to accommodate a sexual revolution that had already been under way for four decades.

Recommended for anyone suffering from 60s nostalgia.

 

 

 Copyright 1965, National Board of the YMCA.  Association Press, Paperback Edition, 1968, 128 pp.