I attended my first and last high school prom on Saturday. I rented a tux. I got my date a corsage while she brought a boutonnière. We took photos with the group going to prom before piling into a van and driving to the antique, stately club that was hosting.
Prom is a solid part of American culture, a national coming-of-age ceremony. All the traditions, from the venue to the boutonnières, seem almost like innate knowledge after decades of repetition. So how did they originate and how has prom developed from its origins.
The word prom comes from the word “promenade” (from the French “promener,” to walk), originally referring to the formal procession of guests into a party or dance. Prom originated in the 1800's, when single-gender colleges in the Northeast would hold co-ed dances together. In an article published on Mentalfloss, Matt Soniak reported that the earliest known record of a prom comes from a male Amherst student’s description of an invitation to a dance at the all-female Smith College in his diary. These proto-proms were simple affairs; they were held in school gyms and featured “tea and light refreshments.”
Prom made the jump over to high schools in the early 20th century as a way of teaching social etiquette under heavily chaperoned situations. "The Junior-Senior Prom: Complete Practical suggestions for Staging the Junior-Senior Prom" was published in 1936 as a guide to putting on proms, a sign of the national popularity of the dance with school administration.
These dances were still held in school gyms. However, this changed after the Second World War. “In the 1950’s, a thriving postwar economy allowed high schools to eschew the traditional gymnasium in favor of proms held in hotels or at country clubs,” Claire Suddath wrote in a 2010 Timearticle “Brief History: The Prom.” Since then the venue of the prom has increased in importance; in 1975 Gerald Ford’s daughter Susan hosted prom in the White House.
As the venues became more extravagant, so did the traditions and customs. While students at earlier proms would simply wear their “Sunday best,” from the '50s on students would buy or rent tuxedos and dresses specifically for prom. Students started wearing boutonnières and corsages around the same time to match their outfits, borrowing from older and more formal traditions dating back to the 1700s.
The history of "prom-posals," the extravagant way students ask potential dates to the prom, is shakier than the origins of other traditions. While they grew in popularity as social media became omnipresent, they could have been a phenomenon long before that. After all, the Amherst student wrote about being asked to a prom in his diary, but were those the lavish propositions that characterize the modern proposal?
Caitlin Dewey of The Washington Post writes, “We can’t conclusively say when the first-ever prom proposal went down, but the first newspaper story to use that phrase seems to have been the Dallas Morning News, in 2001. The paper was commenting on what was, at the time, a charming new phenomenon.”
The prom-posal has since blossomed into its own art form, with a fair number of failures in the craft. A photo that went somewhat viral pictures a student who wrote, “PROM?” on their back in sunscreen and let the rest of his skin get burnt to ask out his date.
Prom’s origins are more conservative than liberal; the practice was first developed to allow for heavily moderated interactions between the sexes. As such, it’s unsurprising that schools have been resistant to change their proms.
Like many aspects of Southern life, prom was affected by segregation. Though schools were desegregated with Brown v. Board of Education, many high schools, especially in the South, held out against the change. Many schools cancelled prom rather than integrating the event, with parents and students replacing them with private, exclusive “black proms” and “white proms.” Wilcox County High School in Wilcox County, Georgia, for example, held its first integrated and official prom in decades in 2014.
A similar challenge has faced LGBT+ students attempting to attend their respective proms. A famous case in 2010 encapsulated the problem; the Itawamba County Agricultural High School in Itawamba County, Mississippi refused to allow a student, Constance McMillen, to bring her girlfriend to prom. Rather than allow the couple to attend, the school canceled its prom. A private prom was created and then reportedly canceled when she attempted to attend. The prom controversy eventually forced McMillen to transfer schools.
Prom continues to a be a key part of American culture, despite more troubling aspects — racist histories and potentially homophobic and sexist rules. It seems unlikely that it will drop out of eminence any time soon; a Visa survey in 2014 found that the average West Coast family spends $1,125 on prom. After years of repetition, prom and its traditions seem to have settled into their own groove of history and pop culture.
