Disapproval is not hatred, and petting certainly didn’t begin or end with the Crash or the Depression. Until birth control pills became widely available in the late 1960s, most young women avoided sexual intercourse because they didn’t want to get pregnant. Abortions were illegal, expensive and difficult to obtain.

If a young woman did get pregnant, she was sent away and often forced to give her baby up for adoption. It’s difficult for young people today to understand how frightened people in general were of this happening to either themselves or a family member.

The use of condoms was more as a protection from STDs than for birth control. In those days, the majority of Americans were church goers who believed only sinful people had sex outside of marriage. Young men had sex with prostitutes or with women who already were socially ostracized due to prior behavior. These same men wouldn’t dream of marrying a woman who wasn’t a virgin.

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, but in spite of the sexual revolution sparked by availability of the pill, many of those attitudes persisted. Teenagers did the same sort of thing. We didn’t call it petting, we called it making out. Reading this article was a bizarre experience. It’s like hearing someone from another planet discussing humans as alien life forms.