Source Database
Section 4: Courtship
(4.1) In her autobiography, The Hard Way Up, Hannah Mitchell described courting in working-class areas of Manchester in the 1880s.
The procedure was to parade the principal streets on Saturday and Sunday evenings, each sex in groups or couples, until some adventurous male would make the first advance with some fatuous remark such as ‘Can I see you home, miss?’ If the girls responded, this constituted a sort of introduction. The same groups would meet for several weeks and chat together before ultimately pairing off. Sometimes it all ended with nothing definite, and the groups began to parade again… I was agreeably surprised when we walked out with them to find they attempted no familiarities, beyond taking one’s arm in the darkness, or a light kiss at parting. I began to feel more at ease, although most of the young men were much better educated than myself. But my very mixed reading, a good memory and a ready wit enabled me to hold my own so well indeed that I became known as ‘Miss Repartee’.
(4.2) When she was a young woman Marie Stopes found relationships with the opposite sex very difficult. At the age of twenty-three she wrote to her sister Winnie about these problems.
I am ignorant of many of the branches of feminine learning, some good, some bad, and some frivolous: e.g., neither of us know anything about the way to carry on and lead an interesting conversation with either sex… We have had next to no social intercourse with anyone – and none with well-educated young gentlemen – the people of all others to polish and refine women.
(4.3) In 1905 Marie Stopes met Kenjito Fujii in Japan. The following year she wrote him a letter from her home in England.
Sweet, I long so for the physical touch of your hands on mine, and to look into your eyes. To be kissed, I sometimes long so much that I take a girdle and bind it tightly, so tightly that I can hardly breathe, round my waist and then close my eyes and dream that it is your arms around me. It gives me almost the feeling. You know I have never worn corsets. I have always been scornful of women who did.
(4.4) In 1919 Clementina Black wrote a pamphlet called Hopes of Better Housing. She included one section on housing and courtship.
Young people must and will hold, somewhere, those endless talks which pave the way to marriage, and there can be no better place than their own homes; but a living room full of younger brothers and sisters and their contemporary friends will not serve the purpose at all... Young people need a parlour as a place for courting… Failing a parlour, lovers have to resort to a cinema where the eternal conversation is carried on uncomfortably in a whisper.
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