My mother (b. 1948) said something the other day that struck me as strange. She said that growing up, ear peircing wasn't very common.
She grew up in Minneapolis, and according to her, the only women who had their ears pierced were Latina.
She didn't get her ears pierced until she was in college by her friend, which was accomplished one drunken night with the help of some ice cubes and a potato.
I had assumed that ear piercing and earrings had ubiquitous popularity in the modern era, but this appears not to be the case.
When and where was piercing popular? When did it become common to pierce your ears as a young girl? Did it fall in and out of fashion? And if so, why?
Thanks!
I actually have a previous answer on this topic! I'll paste it below.
You actually seem to have things mixed up - clip-on and screw-back earrings are much more recent than earrings for pierced ears. This is true on a grand scale (have a look at these gold earrings from Ur, 2600-2500 BCE, or this one from Ramesside Egypt, 1295-1186 BCE), but also during the nineteenth century (see this set from Tiffany and Co., ca. 1856 and this cool set with snap-on covers from the 1880s).
Western women generally stopped piercing their ears around the turn of the century - instead, they used screw-backs to clamp the earring onto the earlobe. Guides for antiques appraisal are vague and contradictory about specific years, but I can find clear textual references to earrings for unpierced ears from 1904, described alongside normal post or drop earrings. By 1908, newspapers could talk very disdainfully about how pierced ears were "mutilated", and by 1914, the trade magazines (who would know) were saying that it was mostly screw-back earrings that were being sold. The clip-on seems to have come about around 1934, possibly patterned after the already-existing shoe clips, which were put on the throat/vamp of a dress shoe pointing downward. By the late 1960s, however, the trend was reversing itself, and more women were choosing to pierce.
I cannot find anything that discusses the transition in a scholarly manner. The impression I get from the primary sources is that the idea that pierced ears were seen as disreputable prior to recent decades is just ... not really a thing. Perhaps a bit of reflexive anti-Victorianism? Women seem to have taken to screw-back and clip-on earrings because they were convenient, in a period where having your ears pierced was slightly more difficult and piercings were a bit more prone to get infected than today, but because screw-backs and clip-ons have their own drawbacks (screw-backs can hurt like a mother, and both can slip off fairly easily), the trend didn't last. I have seen some speculation about the pierced ear being more sexual and so going hand-in-hand with the sexual revolution, but, frankly, I don't see much to support it.