Now fourteen, Betsy is growing up. She is tall, slender, and conscious of her looks, putting curlers (Magic Wavers) in her hair and applying face cream nightly. She spends two weeks at the Taggarts’ farm the summer before she starts high school. She is desperately homesick, but too stubborn to ask to return.

On the train trip home, during a layover at Butternut Center, Betsy wanders into Willard’s Emporium, the town’s general store, and Betsy meets the boy who would become the love of her life. Joe Willard emerges in the Betsy-Tacy universe fully conceived: he is handsome, proud, witty, curious, and kind, with a keen interest in literature (he is reading The Three Musketeers for the sixth time when Betsy first sees him) that matches Betsy’s own. As he helps Betsy shop for presents for her family, they joke and banter like old friends.

When it is time to say goodbye, Betsy does not know how to further the encounter. She hasn’t started going out with boys, and, unlike her sister Julia, doesn’t know how to flirt or encourage him to call on her. She manages a few words of thanks, though, and Joe tosses off one last joke. She re-boards the train feeling reasonably satisfied and more than a little independent.

American courtship customs were in an emergent state in the very early 1900s. Courting or “calling on” someone was not yet called “dating” (as it would be starting in the 1920s or so), but the prior system of arranged marriages was giving way to one that was love-based. Couples generally spent time together under parental or organizational supervision, were not allowed to go out together alone, and did not ordinarily have romantic physical contact except in the most serious of relationships, generally those headed toward marriage.

Dating norms have changed tremendously over the years, of course. They are often spurred forward by technologies, such as the automobile, which provided couples with privacy and a means to escape the family home, and the internet, which permitted dating to be initiated and even conducted online. Still, the feelings and desires that underlie the romantic adventures of Betsy and her friends throughout the rest of the books in the series, including Betsy’s uncertainty as to how to perpetuate her flirtation with Joe, are exactly as they might be experienced today. Lovelace’s depictions of romantic attraction, intrigue, confusion, jealousy, and heartbreak in the Betsy-Tacy series are vivid, universal, and identical across time, space, and any other imaginable dimension.

Joe will not become Betsy’s paramour for some time to come, but the seeds for their eventual partnership are sown in their effortless give-and-take as she shops for the gifts:

Joe: “Cheese for your father. Sharp or mild?”

Betsy: “Sharp.”

Joe: “If you brought home mild cheese, he wouldn’t let you in, I’ll bet.”

Betsy: “He’d use it for the mousetrap.”

(p. 15, Harper Trophy paperback edition, 1994)

Playful romantic chemistry: delicious in every era.

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On the history of courtship and dating, see: https://bashcub.com/features/2023/12/07/the-history-of-dating-and-how-it-has-changed-in-the-last-century/

See also this classic sociological account of the transformation of courtship, dating, and marriage over time: Stephanie Coontz. 2006. Marriage: A History. Penguin Random House. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291184/marriage-a-history-by-stephanie-coontz/