history of courtship vs modern fundy courtship

[socuteyoullpuke]

Hi Ya'll,

I'm an avid lurker thats been obsessing over the duggars, bates, vision forum, ATI etc for a few years now. I hardly participate, but I follow most quiver full of snark threads.

I'm working on a paper for my history of sexuality class at my college, and I am wanting to write about the history of dating and courtship and how our favorite fundamentalist institutions, specifically Doug Phillips (is a tool), have romanticized and twisted 18th/19th century ideas while trying to recreate them/mold them to their needs. However, I have not read many primary sources from the institutions, if you can call them that.

I was hoping someone a little more well versed could help direct me to some sources- web pages, sermons, etc, where they particularly expand upon their ideas of patriarchy and rigid rules of courtship.

I hope this an appropriate request? :think:

[ianthe]

Putting on my college professor hat, I think that first you will need to narrow this topic a lot, because there is a boatload of material out there.

To begin with, what social class are you going to concentrate on? Working class/working poor families traditionally had little time for supervising the behavior of their grown children, and young people seem to have met and paired off in ways that we would recognize: they met at work, or at school (as far as that went), or at church, or in the neighborhood. Remember, too, that before the widespread acceptance of the bicycle, getting around was very hard and most people would marry someone who lived within a mile or two of them. The families were very likely to know each other, or even be related. (I know, ick. But cousin marriages were quite common.)

Middle class/upper class families might be able to better spare a mother's time to chaperone her daughters, but this, again, was somewhat limited. (Here there is a real dividing line among American behavior and English behavior, and you have to be careful because sources don't necessarily indicate which country they are covering, and the same books were often printed in both countries.) Most American households were chronically short of domestic help--there were other options for young women besides being a domestic servant--and mothers of families had more direct household responsibilities--a factor that limited the amount of time they could spend chaperoning daughters or arranging courtships. Indeed, if Henry James' _Daisy Miller_ can be believed (and James, an American living in England, had a unique perspective on this) middle-class American girls were considered almost intimidatingly casual about being alone with men to whom they were neither related nor married.

The very wealthiest American women might be free of domestic work, and they would often see their duty as properly marrying their daughters off to men of wealth in their "set." To accomplish this task (and many of them seem to view it as damned hard work), they would entertain extensively, take their daughters to fashionable watering places (such as Newport, RI), and cultivate the mothers of the targeted young men. In other words, they provided an extensive, even exhausting, social life where their daughters could be seen, talked to, and generally known. The patriarchal "courtship only" families seem to have missed the message about throwing young people together frequently so that everyone would get to know everyone else, and have some basis for decision. Certainly none of these privileged people sat around waiting for an appropriate young man to show up at the doorstep. I should note that the activities of the wealthy might be adopted and adapted, insofar as possible, by the middle classes, but in a very scaled down version.

Also, be careful about time. Taking the period of, say 1780-1918 (dates chosen pretty much randomly) things changed a lot. A good deal of the change was occasioned by more and more middle class girls joining the workforce, at least before marriage, so that more freedom had to be allowed to them. (Working class women always had to work.)

If I had to point you in a single direction, I think I'd get you to start with etiquette books. First of all, there are tons of them available at Project Gutenberg and archive.org. Almost all of the ones I've seen (and I've seen a few) have chapters on courtship, in between telling you how to address letters to bishops, etc. Remember that the etiquette book is really a middle-class phenomenon: the upper classes would not think that they needed them, and the working classes faced an entirely different set of challenges. And that etiquette books tidied up reality appreciably.

Good luck.

[TrueRebel1]

If you are specifically wanting to learn about the origins of modern fundie courtship, I believe the following are the earliest/most popular proponents of courtship:

1. Bill Gothard. Since I'm not a member of IBLP, I don't have the books. I'm not sure how you'd get your hands on their literature, but I guarantee that a lot of families turned to courtship due to Gothard's teachings.

2. Jonathan Lindvall. Lesser know than Gothard, and he took courtship to another level by adding betrothal. Like IBLP, you'd have to go to his seminars to get the booklets; but I think some of his sermons on courtship have been published on the web.

3. Patriarch Magazine (edited by Phil Lancaster) and Quit You Like Men Magazine (edited by Robert Greene, IIRC). These -- to my knowledge -- are the first published articles from Doug Phillips and others (including Doug Wilson, I believe!), all about their idea of Courtship. These articles later became the basis for the courtship materials sold by Vision Forum.

Edited to add: A newer source of teaching that converted a lot of fundies to courtship would be the book "I Kissed Dating Goodbye".

[socuteyoullpuke]

thankyou thankyou thankyou!