The Patriarchy Connection: When Purity Balls Replaced the Debutante Balls

The purity ball is considered a new ceremony, in which daughters promise their virginity to their fathers, eat cake and dance. It may seem odd, but the purity ball has a long and illustrious past in the form of the debutante ball.

The debutante ball was created to ensure that marriages were contracted in an era in which the upper class confined itself to the parlor. At the ball, eligible bachelors, and parents looking for suitable partners for their sons, were able to find which young women were of a marriageable age, and what family they came from. It made things simple and neat. The young women wore white dresses as they were presented, there was cake and lots of dancing. In those days there was no need for the girls to sign agreements with their fathers as their virginity was taken for granted by everyone; a scandal effectively ended a young woman's hopes of a marriage - at least a good one. 

It is worth noting that the working class didn't need debutante balls, for less privilege meant more freedom of movement. Not that the girls didn't feel equal pressure to remain pure; the pressure just came in different forms.

It is also worth noting that the debutante ball was one of the few occasions in life in which privileged young women were the center of attention. In a society in which women are largely ignored, the young women must have been eager participants - just as their modern counterparts, who eagerly flock to the purity balls in their white dresses, not really thinking what the ball is really about; the ball is all about making a distinction between the desirable young women and the undesirable ones. It makes women into commodities one either wishes to purchase, or decides to reject. It removes the person from the young woman; it is not who she is that matters, but whether her purity, the commodity, is intact.

The purity ball is an attempt to turn back the clock to a time in which young girls were more or less commodities in the marriage market. By presenting young women as eligible, and by giving them a purity ring as a sign of their virginity, the old custom is revived and the old-fashioned courtship has a chance to survive in a world that has become far too informal for patriarchal comfort. But is it really going to produce what it promises? Are marriages going to be happier when parents make the decisions, and young men and women are forced to comply? Or is this just another misguided attempt to save the institution of marriage by prescribing a remedy that didn't work then, and won't now?

Purity begins in the heart. A dance is not going to put in the heart what is not there, nor is the absence of a dance going to take it away.

I wonder what the original Puritans would say about the purity ball?