In case you missed last week’s post:
https://gendermystique.substack.com/p/the-experts-who-raised-me-325
Just as early psychoanalytic theory had raised concerns about how modern life was harming boys, mid-century experts responded to worries about the health of the family by focusing their attention on women. By far the most influential work on that subject was best-seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947) by Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, which had an enormous impact on how girls and boys were raised in the postwar period. Though now out of print, it made the American Library Association’s ‘Fifty Notable Books of 1947’ list and the Society for Science and the Public’s ‘Books of the Week’ list in April 1947.
According to Farnham and Lundberg, American women were in jeopardy, due to a series of forces that had transformed their traditional, natural role and turned them into unhappy neurotics and terrible wives and mothers. First, the industrial revolution had stripped women of their importance as producers and managers in the home. Then feminism encouraged women to seek education, careers and political power. (Evidence, they argued, of “penis envy”.) Finally, the need for women to replace men in factories and offices during the war had only exacerbated the problem. Servicemen were coming home to independent “mannish” women. Unless men and women were restored to their natural roles, family life in America was doomed. It wasn’t just adult women who needed saving. Little girls were being raised too much like boys, and the result, they predicted, would be a generation of women who rejected the lives for which they were biologically designed: marriage, home, and motherhood. Girls needed maternal guidance to help them learn to appreciate and love femininity, and to look forward to being wives and mothers. Mothers who didn’t demonstrate by their appearance and actions that they enjoyed being female were failing as role models. Her sons and daughters would grow into “seriously handicapped” adults, incapable of “normal” sexual relationships.
Parents did not need to own “The Modern Woman” in order to be familiar with its anti feminist message. Parent’s Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCalls, Woman’s Day, and Family Circle all featured articles citing Farnham and Lundberg and endorsing their advice.
It is hard to look through these magazines without seeing the influence of “The Modern Woman”. Especially in advertising. Betty Friedan certainly noticed; as she later pointed out in The Feminine Mystique (a phase she borrowed from “The Modern Woman”), the editorial content and advertising in women's magazines were designed to raise expectations and instill doubts and insecurities about the reader's ability to “succeed” as a woman, wife, and mother.
Most of the experts writing about childrearing did not hesitate to issue warnings along with their advice, or to blame “the home” for negative outcomes. “We almost failed as a family,” mourned author Dorothy Dowdell, relating how she and her husband missed the signs of her son’s unhappiness at school. “Maladjustments are traceable to the home environment “, wrote Rega Karmer McCarty, in an article about juvenile shoplifters. In an article about helping children feel more attractive, frequent contributor Constance Foster quoted an anonymous psychiatrist on the importance of self-esteem “Lack of self-love [is] at the root of mental illness”. One title sums it all up: “The Trouble With My Children Was Me”.
The solution: Sex roles must be taught, and the earlier the better!
Next Week: The Kinsey reports and sex education for tots.