The Engagement: Thinking about Marriage

The society sections of the conservative and respectable New York newspapers carry a picture of a young woman together with her parents' announcement of her engagement to be married. Perhaps the announcement lists briefly the schools of high social standing which the young lady has attended. It may also describe the party at which the engagement was announced. That the families which expect to be brought together in the future marriage are represented in the social register and that considerable family fortunes are involved are matters left unannounced, but they are nevertheless generally understood.

Are the engagements throughout our society simply slight variants on this theme? In Plainville, James West found that engagements are, in contrast to the above type, highly secret affairs. Only the immediate families of each of the pair know of the approaching marriage. Even in communities much less rural and isolated than Plainville, the engagement while not secret may be simply a scarcely perceptible aspect of the growing emotional involvement of two people who have been "going steady." Then again, in many individual cases, an engagement may have largely the function of cloaking sexual exploitation of one of the pair by the other, or, in other cases, a camouflage mutually worn in order to gain freedom from community sex regulations and controls.

What does it mean to be engaged? From the foregoing it is obvious that a good deal of ambiguity and haziness surrounds not only the act of becoming engaged but the very state of being engaged. Perhaps no situation in any society is ever completely defined by the symbols which relate to it, but the engagement situation in our society is one which is left almost completely undefined by its symbols. The symbols are commonly the wearing of a ring or fraternity pin, the announcement of engagement at a party and in the newspaper, exclusive courtship over a long period of time, the words "I love you. Will you marry me?" and so on.

Mate Selection in the College Campus

As a factor affecting mate selection, the college situation is, in a sense, only a special combination of factors we have already considered. If vicinal proximity of and by itself has any influence, then the small college in particular offers an opportunity par excellence for this factor to operate. Even the large university is often a rather closely knit community from the standpoint of its physical plant -- its dormitories, laboratories, and classroom buildings. But this factor is made significant, again, as in the case of residential areas in urban communities, by factors that determine social nearness and distance.

Attending a college or university is in itself an occupation, so that vicinal proximity is given meaning by the underlying factor of occupational propinquity. Then, too, the relative sameness of their socioeconomic class backgrounds gives college students more interest in common, more likelihood of speaking a "common language," and a greater sharing of common "social definitions of the situation" -- all of which quite obviously facilitate heightened participation and social interaction.
While recognizing that college students tend to come to a large extent from a relatively small stratum of the outside society, we would be blinding ourselves to important factors in mate selection if we were to ignore the existence of stratification on the college and university campus. However narrow in comparison to the breadth of stratification in our outside society the segments from which college and university students are drawn, there nevertheless exists on most campuses a fairly complex class structure, indigenous to the college itself and considered as a little society. 19 This class structure, on the one hand, tends both to reflect and magnify the relatively slight class differences in the larger society from which the students came and, on the other, to be a function of goals, many of them conflicting, peculiar to the campus in question.

There has been much over-simplification of this problem of social stratification in connection with descriptions of courtship patterns on college campuses. It has frequently been assumed that fraternity affiliation and football feats are the principal factors in placing the individual on the college social scale. It is further assumed that this scale has virtually universal recognition on each campus and that those who do not accept its validity consciously and overtly are merely those who rank low on that scale and who are thus manifesting nothing more than a "sour-grapes psychology" when they maintain they do not subscribe to the values such a scale objectifies.