“Love for Sale” by Alice Clement is a book examining gender roles, sexual morality, and sexual practices between 1900 to 1945. It compares prostitution and courtship with a new social practice called “treating.” Women were “treated” when they provided sexual favors for material goods like shoes and dresses or dinner and entertainment offered by men (Clement, 2006). Clement called these women “charity girls” which created moral conjunction that is placed between prostitution and courtship. Although treated as a part of identity and language started to vanish after the 1920s and 1930s, Clement claims that it still had critical and lasting effects on contemporary sexual norms and practices. She illustrates how treatment influenced the courtship and dating practices of heterosexual partners.
Her book also shows the impacts of treating on the abundance and increased meaning of premarital sex and the development of the sex industry in the United States. Clement highlights that treating enhanced sexual commerce in the country after World War II. Moreover, the book demonstrates how treating practices made the perception of women as sexual objects. By this, she means that before the 1900s, women were mainly considered and valued for being mothers and daughters whose main aim was to serve men, while after, females were also viewed as subjects of pleasure. Furthermore, Clement’s study deletes the methods in which sexuality and morality interact and make a contribution to the broader discourses of gender, race, and class.
The book’s major strength is its time frame, as by focusing only on a particular period, Clement could identify patterns and trends of sexual practices influencing society. Clement had rich examples that showed her arguments and made the book interesting to a reader. Additionally, her study has done what most studies of sexuality and courtship have not, that is, combining the past stories of white ethnics, African Americans, and Native Americans. It successfully elaborates on the differences between these groups and their similarities, providing several critical comparisons about family life, sexuality, and generational conflict. Clement also provides insights into how women from different social and cultural backgrounds end up working in the sex industry.
Yet, Clement’s discussion of prostitution overshadows the potential differences in the courtship practices. It is not clear how prostitution differed from courtship and in what aspects. In addition, her description of treatment as men paid for dates and expected sexual favors in return from their female partners seems similar to that of courtship. However, the study blends these terms to show that prostitution and courtship were giving the means for treating practice and that treating is almost the same as those two terms.
Overall, Clement’s book is a discourse on sexual practices, eating habits, and morality during the period before World War II. It reveals how the societal perspectives on sex and women were changing and embedded in social norms. The construction of these norms finds its place even in today’s people’s perception of dating and sex. Therefore, this book can be interesting for modern people to understand the roots of their dating and sex habits. It also shows how sexual morality was shifted before and after the war and why people started to invest in the sex industry. As such, the readers can find new information on the development of sexual commerce in the United States and the perception of people working in that industry.
Reference
Clement, E., A. 2006. Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945. University of North Carolina Press.