...This chapter focuses on a selection of teen couples in the 1950s, who were “going steady” and experimented in intense and intimate sexual acts, including premarital intercourse. Going steady—a practice that was in the mainstream of postwar culture—was a pervasive site of sexual initiation...

... not control for later explanatory factors. It focuses on how the heterosexual experiences of the children during their adolescent years—specifically dating, going steady, and sexual initiation—are related to the timing of union formation and the choice between cohabitation and marriage. The chapter also...

...Tracing the centrality of sexuality to twentieth-century American youth culture reveals changes in patterns of courtship. It shows that young men and women have incorporated necking, petting, and eventually sexual intercourse into the rituals of treating, dating, going steady, and hooking up...