Shipley the Sheep, Dave the Gator, elk hunters in orange caps, and our favorite park ranger at Great Sand Dunes National Park. My, did I have fun while on vacation with my friends Molly and Liz. Our little “hen party” discussed many important topics while covering 1,700 miles of Western terrain. Among those: boys, sex, love, sex, lust, sex, boys… well, you get the point. Here’s one subject we touched upon, brought to you by Tom McGinnis’s 1968 A Girl’s Guide to Dating and Going Steady.
1968: Should Girls Ask Boys for Dates?
Fifteen, twenty or more years ago, there was one answer to this question ~ a resounding no. Most people believed that boys should always take the first step so that they could feel that they were choosing the girl. Probably boys still want to be the pursuers, although there is much evidence that they do not seem to be as firm about it today as they seemed to be in earlier times.
I say this mainly because of the telephone. At one time, a girl would not phone a boy for any reason, except perhaps to say she could not keep her date with him because of a serious emergency. Now, however, girls call boys for all kinds of reasons ~ to get her homework assignments, to find out a football schedule, to learn when the next glee club practice is. Such calls usually are not considered out of order.
Nor, in these times, should there be anything wrong with a girl asking a boy on a date if he has given signs that he likes her. However, in many places the custom of a girl’s coming right out and asking a boy for a date is still frowned upon deeply.
A main reason for feeling that the boy should ask the girl is that when a boy asks, he puts her in the position of doing him a favor if she accepts. That means that he is more likely to feel that he must behave toward her in a way which meets her approval. But when he instead of you makes the decision to say yes or no to a date, he is in a stronger position and may become bolder about necking than you consider desirable. If you tell him to stop, he may tell you that he will not do you the favor of accepting you the next time you want a date.
It is possible for girls to suggest dates without seeming to do so. In a way, you can have your cake (a date with a boy) while eating it too (being able to stop him if he tries to go to far). Some girls often ‘just happen’ to have tickets or invitations handy which they invite a boy to share with them. A friend may be giving a party and a girl asks a boy if he would care to go. She has some tickets for a movie or a football game and she wonders if he would like to attend with her. She knows that he is interested in rock and roll records and she and friends pool their new records and invite him and other boys to a listening party at her home. In all these cases, she invites the boy to do something he enjoys which she has just run across and wants to share with him. To ask a boy for a date in this indirect way does not seem to be difficult. Girls seem to be more and more successful at it.
Source: McGinnis, Tom. A Girl’s Guide to Dating and Going Steady. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, 1968.
~ pp. 107-108 ~