The Confidence of Never
Adoucette said:
This, as far as I know, was NEVER the way it has been.
Most recently, we saw this in the "Long Decade", from 1945-1962.
I recommend Stephanie Coontz's
Marriage: A History—
In 1999 the neoconservative William Kristol, who has made a lucrative career out of rehashing nineteenth-century ideas, argued that modern woman must move "beyond women's liberation to grasp the following three points: the necessity of marriage, the importance of good morals, and the necessity of inequality within marriage" .... (187)
• • •
The "protectors" of women's special sphere reacted to these charges with near hysteria. Physicians claimed that bicycle riding was a woman's first step down the road to sexual abandon. In 1890 the British anthropologist James Allen predicted that granting married women the vote would lead to "social revolution, disruption of domestic ties, desecration of marriage, destruction of the household gods, dissolution of the family." In 1895, James Weir warned readers of the American Naturalist that establishment of equal rights would lead directly to "that abyss of immoral horrors so repugnant to our cultivated ethical tastes--the matriarchate" ....
.... When women finally got the vote in England after World War I, the editor of the Saturday Review called it a form of treason. "While the men of England were abroad dying by the hundreds of thousands for the preservation of England," he charged, Parliament "handed over the government of England to the women ... who were living at home in ease. Surely valour and suffering and death never had a poorer reward." (194-195)
• • •
Fears about women's political and personal emancipation were compounded by the surge in women's employment between 1900 and 1920. William Sumner wrote in the 1924 Yale Review that this had produced "the greatest revolution" in the history of marriage since the invention of the father-headed family many millennia earlier. It gave women "careers and ambitions which have dislodged marriage from its supreme place in their interest and life plan." (201)
• • •
... the two twentieth-century innovations that most shocked traditional Victorians--the sexual revolution and the attack on separate spheres--did not reflect any widespread rejection of marriage or of women's duty to please men. Indeed, the pressure for couples to put marriage first and foremost in their lives led many women to become more dependent on their relationships with men. Proponents of "modern" sexuality and marriage were deeply suspicious of close ties between women. By the 1920s the profound female friendships that had been such an important part of nineteenth-century female culture were under attack.
As late as the first decade of the twentieth century, children's books commonly contained love poems from one teenage girl to another. The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself, published in 1902, detailed her love for a former teacher. She described feeling "a convulsion and a melting within" in her loved one's presence and wished she could go off with her friend to "some little out-of-the-world place ... for the rest of my life." The book gives no hint that these feelings should be interpreted as sexually deviant or a sign of lesbianism.
By the 1920s, however, few self-respecting "modern" women would have admitted to such feelings. By that time intense relationships between women were usually considered childish "crushes" that girls were encouraged to outgrow. At worst, they raised the specter of "abnormal" sexual or emotional development that could make heterosexuality unsatisfactory and marriage unstable.
By the end of the 1920s American psychoanalysts were warning that one of the most common "perversions of the libido" was the tendency of teenage girls to fix their "affections on members of the same sex." Such perversions, they claimed, were a serious threat to normal development and to marriage. The best way to avoid them was to allow teenage girls to engage in some degree of sexual experimentation with boys. (205-206)
• • •
A wife must "cease to take pride" in "outgrown maidenly reserve," scolded sociologist Ernest Groves. She should accept her husband's sexual initiative and follow his lead, because "his attitude toward sex is less likely to be warped" than hers. Physicians and marriage counselors came to believe, in the words of one contemporary, that women "have to be bluntly reminded that one main source of prostitution is the selfish and unsurrendered wife." Women who failed to find physical satisfaction in such surrender were told that they were not "fully adult" in their sexuality.
Nor, contrary to the fears of William Sumner, did the greater acceptance of women's work and social activities outside the home after World War I dislodge marriage "from its supreme place" in women's lives. Most people believed that women should retire from work after a few years. And such a course of action became possible for wider segments of the population as men's wages rose in the unprecedented prosperity of the 1920s. It was during this period that for the very first time in U.S. history, a majority of American children lived in families in which the man was the primary wage earner, the wife was not involved in full-time labor outside the home or alongside her husband, and the children were in school instead of in the labor force. (209)
And from that period, described in the last excerpt, until the end of the Long Decade, is the "traditional marriage" to which the right wing subscribes. It's a June Cleaver, Ozzie and Harriet kind of vision. Perhaps some might look back on the chintzy prudery of John Forsythe and Noreen Corcoran in
Bachelor Father (CBS, 1957-62) and chuckle at its obslete outlook, but even that show looked somewhat forward compared to
Leave it to Beaver (CBS/ABC, 1957-63) and
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952-66) insofar as it explored the themes of independent masculine parenthood (Bentley Gregg was Kelly's uncole, not father).
(Incidentally, I've seen the influence of this period, and it is powerful. My father, born in '45, grew up an ardent anti-communist and was a capitalist-conservative
at least from Reagan until Bush, Jr.—though it should be noted, for clarity, that Dubya was
not the primary reason for his philosophical shift. He is hardly a bleeding-heart liberal these days, but one of his most profound moments that I have witnessed came about during that period when he came face to face with the economic philosophies he advocated, and found them lacking. Still, though, that aspect is beside the point. His disappointment in
family life—even though, after five years of separation, it was my
mother who eventually had to file for divorce, as he couldn't bring himself to do it despite having moved out and taken up girlfriends—was that we weren't the perfect (quite literally)
Ozzie and Harriet family, which was all he ever really wanted in the world after surviving an alcoholic father and incompetent, weak-willed mother. It's one of the few times I choose between genders insofar as I am specifically glad I am a son, and not a daughter.)
On a side note .... Perhaps, sir, you might be able to advise me regarding a particular phenomenon I witness sometimes, and it
always confuses me. In the vernacular of the English language, people are rarely in these sorts of conversations so literal as we demand online. One might say that the exact, literal situation Bells describes never really existed; others would counter that it did, in fact, exist. Regardless, however, as figurative expressions of cultural history go, it's hard to see how she's inaccurate in that paragraph. Regardless of my disagreement with you about the history involved, I cannot figure the failure of communication involved that leads you to the use of the word "
never". The nearest I can figure is that a certain confusing phenomenon is in play, but even that doesn't work. I mean, certainly one might protest a sense of exaggeration or overrepresentation, and then attempt to pick apart the general themes with exceptional statistics, anecdotes, and other examples. They might even attempt to define the "real" conditions (I assert none here) that lead to such "exaggerations". But
never is an especially confident word, all things considered.
To the other, if it never existed, someone ought to tell Michael Reagan.
Either way.
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Notes:
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005.