Musing About the Movie Gaby from 1956

When the double standard was still alive. Before what replaced it was arguably much worse.

Decoding a movie that honors purity outside of marriage, while not enforcing the double standard when a woman falls. Remarkable for its day, and inconceivable in ours.

In this movie, French ballerina Gaby meets an American soldier while she is performing in London during the German bombing of the city during World War II. They fall in love and plan to marry on their first date before he gets sent into combat, but the wedding is delayed by military red tape. When the night before their finally scheduled wedding arrives, she reluctantly refuses to sleep with him even though they will be married the next day. The young pilot tells her he loves her even more because she insists on remaining chaste until they are married.

Then, unexpectedly, the next day his leave is terminated before the wedding can be performed, and he is called up to join the D-day invasion of Normandy. She is soon told that he was killed in action.

When her fiancé returns alive after all after some long time has passed, she tells him she cannot marry him, but won’t tell him why. When forced to explain, she confess to him that she had taken many lovers fter she heard he was dead. In her grief, she mistakenly blamed herself for having let him go to his death without having given herself to him, and her promiscuity was her reaction to that guilt.

At first, he is shocked speechless, and she ashamedly runs outside while a bombing raid is going on. He follows her and after narrowly saving her from an explosion, he confesses if she had died, he could never love another, essentially accepting her in spite of her not being a virgin anymore.

Remember, one principle of the era was that no decent man would want to marry a woman who was not a virgin.

To those of you raised in the era of sexual freedom (aka license), it must seem that a story like this from the 50s is from another universe. These days, what man would demand to marry a pure woman or what woman wants to keep herself pure? (Except, maybe the good folks from the home school culture, and a few other small enclaves I've found where the ideal of purity of both partners before marriage is treasured. ) I’m not going to be naive and claim that all couples getting married were virgins, but virginity at marriage, at least of the wife, was a societal expectation.

This reminds me of two scenes that stood out for me when I was attending an Evangelical Free Church (a splinter off of Presbyterianism) on what turned out to be my way back to the Catholic Church. The first scene occurred after a Bible study at the family home of one of the young unmarried women who attended the church. We were socializing over homebaked cookies and coffee when a number of girls who had recently gotten engaged began showing off their rings. I thought the scene looked as if the group of pretty, modestly but attractively dressed young women were posing for a painting of a mythological dance of the virgins, the way they all stood in a circle with their left hands elevated so their diamond rings would catch the light from the ceiling fixture.

The other scene occurred one day in the First Free sanctuary before the Sunday morning service. A bit of background. Roger Magnuson, a brilliant Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford-trained lawyer who somehow kept his faith in the tenets of his denomination in spite of his exposure to the wider world of belief and unbelief outside of Minneapolis, was a deacon and led the Bible studies for young adults, since he was in his 20s himself. Roger worked at the biggest law firm in the city, and he had been trying to convince a Catholic colleague and his wife that the Catholic Church was wrong, and his denomination’s version of fundamentalist Christianity was right.

It was the late 70s. By then, the slogans of the sexual revolution had affected the thinking of many liberal Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, not to mention people of no faith at all, and it was already pretty much obligatory that a couple would try each other out before marriage, supposedly to ensure they were sexually compatible. (The contrary news hadn’t gotten around, and still hasn’t, but even Playboy magazine had to concede that couples who remained chaste until marriage were more happy sexually than those who hadn’t, based on their own surveys.)

Courtship had been replaced with a kind of staged truce between the partners, with their roles being defined by negotiation during each stage of the “relationship.”

A man could no longer expect, let alone demand, that he would be his wife’s first love. A woman could no longer expect that she would be respected for wanting to wait for marriage before giving her love away, without being mocked as a prude. What had been called the marital act wasn’t even referred to as love anymore.

But the earlier rules still applied at First Free. On the day of the second scene I mentioned, Roger brought his Catholic friend and the friend’s wife into the sanctuary, before the service started. All the young unmarried women were sitting together in a single pew. As I saw the wavering Catholic man’s eyes wander over the pew full of slender attractive modest women in their pretty dresses, one after another blooming like a fresh flower, I realized the appeal of marrying a women who followed the traditional kind of morality was not being lost on him.

One major inequity in the days before the sexual revolution was the double standard, and it was one thing I expected would end with feminism. According to the sexual double standard, men were expected to “sow their wild oats before marriage,” and women were expected to “save themselves for marriage.”

The double standard was wrong and cruel, terribly so. I was upset as a teenager to realize that boys followed the idea of all’s fair in love and war, and would use any trick to seduce a girl without marrying her. It was disturbing to realize that boys who were trying to see how far I would go with them at drive-in movies had no concern for the fact that they could destroy my reputation, ruin my chances for marriage, and possibly get me pregnant with a child they didn’t want.

The right way to fix the double standard would be to expect men to live up to the high standards expected of women. But instead, we have gone in the direction of insisting on the right of women to be as licentious as the worst of men. Women are not the same as men, but we are expected to pretend we are and allow ourselves to be unsexed.

We are required to thwart the full expression of our sexual nature by accepting the normalization of uncommitted sexual relations. We have to deny our real feelings and pretend we don’t want commitment. “Don’t scare him away by being possessive.”

We are taught what everybody knows, that the feeling of love is not love unless both partners want it, and whatever you feel in the beginning of a “relationship,” you are a fool if you call it love. And we are taught, a child if conceived is not considered a child unless both partners want it. People don’t talk about it, but abortion clinic waiting rooms are full of sad women, and after abortions almost every woman sobs in grief. Some mourn the rest of their lives.

Both sides have lost in this paradigm shift, marriage and family life has been weakened. Marriage has been redefined, what it means to be male and female also have been redefined, and now there is even a strong movement condemning marriage itself by those who have lived the modern sexual ethics and found themselves dreadfully dissatisfied.

The dire consequences of sexual immorality is much too big of a topic to exhaust in this article, of course. This is just a rough start.