13 Hilarious and Sexist Dating Tips for Single Women From 1938

The only keys to successful dating in the 1930s for single women were don’t talk too much, wear a bra, and don’t pass out in the middle of your date because you’re drunk...

Originally this article was published on Parade Magazine in 1938 and that’s how they thought single women should act back then. The key to getting a fella to put a ring on it in decades past was all about keeping your emotions, lady secrets, and basically any indication of a personality or individual humanity at bay (and also sitting properly). Unless you want to be left single and alone, with no one to love you. And in the late 1930s, you didn’t want to be “that woman.”

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“U.S. mating habits have undergone quite a change in the last generation, and the change is worrying leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. Far from being charged with lack of seriousness and fickle habits, youth is now being reproved for being too serious and not fickle enough. Instead of using their adolescent years to meet as many of the opposite sex as possible, to learn their ways and appraise their worth, teenagers are trending more and more to ‘go steady.’

By definition, boys and girls who go steady dance together exclusively (cutting in is frowned upon), sip their sodas, absorb their double features, and spin their platters in each other’s company or not at all. Steady-going girls indicate their unavailability in various ways, ranging from the old-fashioned fraternity pins and class rings to certain arrangements of pigtails or bobby pins. Parents often encourage these relationships as stabilizing or ‘cute.’ But Catholic authorities view them as a danger to morals so serious that last month the principal of St. Anthony’s parochial high school in Bristol, Conn. expelled four students for going steady, and the current issues of two Catholic magazines attack the custom.”

It’s likely that having stable monogamous relationships would have led to physical intimacy before marriage, which was something parents and the church did not want. It’s also reasonable to assume that one-night stands or hookups were not as prevalent as they are today.