Grace Palladino, in her Teenagers: An American History, has this discussion about advice given in the 1930s in the Ladies’ Home Journal:
The book implies that this kind of forthright talk about teen sexuality was new in the 1930s, no matter how old the notion of blaming the victim was. Does anyone has a cite for just how old the phrase “you’re asking for it” in this context is?
I also feel compelled to report that in 1936 Scholastic magazine, already the major magazine aimed at high-schoolers, started a new advice column called “Boy Dates Girl.” The column was written by Gay Head.
I have a feeling that “It’s your fault for walking by” and “You’re just asking for it” were not in the original 1930s articles, but are Grace Palladino’s paraphrases, filtered through her modern sensibility.
BTW, Gay Head is a promitory on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. As a pen name it was used at Scholastic Books as late as 1963.
Women are hardly passive actors in these situations and people aren’t complete idiots. I’m sure the notion of being females being chaste vs being flirtatious and/or provocative in dress and behavior when being courted is a tension that goes back to the dawn of civilization.
Doesn’t seem likely in context. Every quoted comment before and after that page appears to be directly lifted from the originals. The sensibility is not the tiniest bit modern but floats through the entire chapter on advice given in that era.
When I saw modern sensibility, I am mean 2005’s view of a 1930s sensibility. I’m not saying that Grace Palladino shares this view. To the contrary, I am saying that this is how she summarizes the 1930s articles. Without actually looking at the original articles, you can’t be sure what are actual quotes, and what are Palladino’s paraphrases.
You’re right. I can’t tell without going to the original articles. And this is a popular work, mining other books rather than a work of primary source scholarship.
But I’m the one reading the book. I don’t have the slightest doubt that her quotes are true quotes standing independent of her non-quoted paraphrases. All the quotes are set off by reference to the columnists, editors, or other writers, just as in the paragraphs I cited.
This is not a case of a modern biographer inventing dialog to put into quotes. This is a writer quoting contemporary writings to give flavor to the distance we are from their lives. If I thought Palladino was simply tendentious in putting her sensibilities into their lives I wouldn’t read another page.
I can find, in a quick newspaper search, in a 1942 Mary Haworth advice column in the Washington Post, the phrase “she was asking for it” in reference to what a man might say about a girl who acted with impropriety and got herself in a jam.