Outside the Magic Circle, by Virginia Foster Durr
I'm reading Virginia Foster Durr's autobiography. Learning what life was like for an upper class young white woman growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late 1920s, is a little like reading a science fiction novel. She describes the system used for social gatherings:
The hostess of a party or dance would make a list of the girls who had been invited and put it on the cigar counter at a drugstore. The boys would go in and check the names of the girls they wanted to take to the event. No matter what you were invited to, whether it was a buffet supper or a picnic or anything, the boys would check the names. The boys were totally in control of the social system. If you didn't get checked, you didn't go, even if it was a private party. The hostess would make frantic efforts to try to make some boy bring you! We were in a state of absolute terror all the time because we were totally dependent on popularity with the boys.
To me, this lays out the parameters of absolute hell. Durr wasn't particularly popular - she describes herself as too outspoken and stubborn - and the next couple of paragraphs are devoted to the advice people kept giving her to try to become more attractive to boys so she could go to parties.
That a girl's attendance at any social event required being selected by a boy first... how that alone must have warped interactions with them toward charm and flattery, and away from forthrightness and honesty.
And I'm sure when boys made generalizations among themselves about the "fundamental nature" of girls, the underlying power structure that forced those kinds of interactions was utterly obscured, leaving behind only the pretty scrum of girls' sweet and unthreatening conversation.