Question

What was chaperonage? How did young Mexican-American women in the United States react to this traditional practice?

Answer 1

Chaperonage was a situation whereby for property's sake a person accompanied an unmarried girl into public and mostly was an older woman married and sometimes the mother of the girl.

Explanation:

Chaperonage was a situation whereby for property's sake a person accompanied an unmarried girl into public and mostly was an older woman married and sometimes the mother of the girl. The chaperone mostly accompanied the woman to meet a man she was going to marry and the main purpose of chaperonage was to preserve the honor of the family. The main issue was that the woman was supposed to remain virgin but the younger Mexican men were not that much preservative in terms of their sexual relations as most of them engaged in those relations before marriage. It was believed that the 'value' of a woman rests on with her having one sexual partner and that happened when she was married. Chaperonage however did not get to last long especially for those who migrated to the United States from Mexico as most of them were 'transformed' and chaperonage became a thing of the past. Since the emergence of the modern age the Mexicans born in the United States have experienced what became known as 'Americanization' (Macdonald & Cook, 2018).