Prom

Every spring, millions of teenagers across the United States take part in a quintessentially American rite of passage known as the high school prom. Experienced by rich and poor, black and white, Jewish and Catholic, Californians and Virginians, prom night is arguably the most widely shared of all modern American rituals. Certainly, it is one of the most talked about. Though the exact format varies, a traditional prom involves high school students in tuxedos and gowns coming together for a formal dinner-dance. Corsages, limousines, favors, photographers, and post-prom festivities are all standard extras. Depending on the location of the school and the age of the participants, proms are held either in school gyms and cafeterias or in hotels, country clubs, and banquet halls. Freshman, Sophomore, and Junior Proms tend to be less extravagant rehearsals for the all-important Senior Prom, the final social gathering of a graduating class.

Though popular historical imagination, influenced by films like Back to the Future (1985) and Grease (1978), remembers proms as a product of the 1950s, they in fact long pre-date that legendary era of bobby socks and drive-ins. In Philadelphia, home to many of the nation's oldest public, private, and parochial schools, proms first emerged in the 1920s and rapidly replaced "Senior Play and Dance" evenings as the high school social events of the year. By the 1930s, proms were commonplace, their rise in popularity linked to several interwoven factors, including ongoing urbanization and industrialization, the expansion of secondary education, the rise of "youth culture," and, stemming from all of the above, the mass dissemination of prom stories.

Tales about the glories and mishaps of prom night were first published in the pages of high school magazines which were then exchanged between educational institutions throughout the nation. Early twentieth-century student journalists were extremely zealous about this new event and appear to have regarded prom attendance as an essential marker of good citizenship. "If You Don't Like This," quipped the headline of a 1931 article on the merits of prom night, "Go Back to the Country Where You Came From." There is evidence to suggest that these early proms served an important unifying function, especially in city schools filled with first and second generation immigrants from around the world. Certainly then, as now, prom night was constructed as having been synonymous with "Americanness."

Prom night quickly became a hot topic for the writers of popular dramas and romance novels. From 1934 onwards, a whole series of prom plays, short stories, and novels went to press. The 1930s also saw the publication of the first ever prom guidebook, penned by Marietta Abell and Agnes Anderson. Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, the authors hailed the prom as a potential money-saver but admonished readers that "No one should think of planning and arranging for any one of the proms suggested in less than four weeks." To millennial readers, both statements seem laughably ironic. Modern proms cost individual students anywhere from $200 to $2,000, are planned a year in advance, and call on the expertise and services of a vast array of party professionals. Proms, 1990s style, are very big business.

The exact ritual antecedents of prom night are difficult to trace as proms draw on a number of earlier cultural traditions. To many observers, the prom resembles a democratic version of the elite debutante ball, which is in turn a Republican version of the aristocratic ritual of presenting young ladies at the royal courts of Europe. Proms are also closely related to the cotillions and college dances of the mid to late nineteenth century where formal dress and terpsichorean skill were essential and where the practice of giving out party favors was popularized. Important regional differences existed though: in the Deep South, where religious intolerance of dancing determined the shape and form of early-twentieth-century youthful pleasures, proms were literally "promenades" during which young ladies would take short and keenly supervised walks around the block with male escorts.

Throughout their history, proms have most obviously resembled weddings in both their ritual form and function. Weddings and proms share an emphasis on heterosexual pairing that is reinforced through parallel iconography and corresponding rites of exchange and remembrance. Prom couples often look--from the gown to the tux, flowers, limo, and location--like a young bride and groom. Their night together is subject to many of the same acts of ritual celebration and sanctification. Families gather to send the young couple off, photographs are taken, and flowers and keepsakes are exchanged. Late-twentieth-century prom couples also often share a post-ritual "honeymoon." Indeed, for many teens, these post-prom trips are now more eagerly anticipated than the prom itself.

Prom night's emphasis on heterosexual dating has, since the early 1980s, been a subject of public controversy. Several lawsuits have arisen at schools where students who wanted to attend solo, or who wanted to attend with a same sex partner, were barred. Aaron Fricke's Reflections of a Rock Lobster offers an autobiographical account of his legal battle to take his male partner to his senior prom in 1980. As the century draws to a close, many public schools have been forced to relax their boy-girl dating rules and many teenagers now regard prom night less as a night of romance and more as a night to have fun as a group. Meanwhile, since the late 1980s, lesbian, gay, and bisexual teenagers who want to celebrate with a date and who live in major cities in the United States have had the option of attending "gay proms" that provide a safe and friendly environment in which these teens can celebrate. Prom traditions, however, prevail, particularly in parochial schools. In Philadelphia, Catholic schools continue to insist that prom night be a heterosexual affair and they continue to bar both single teens and same-sex couples.