Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 1997"

Feeding the Organization Man: Diet and Masculinity in Postwar America

Abstract: In 1958, the renowned historian and cultural critic Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. publicly lamented the decrepitude of American masculinity. "What has happened to the American male?" he wondered. "For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity." But now he was a harried, sexualiy indeterminate refugee from the affluent society, seemingly in flight from everything that had once made him forceful and individual. How to resolve this "crisis"? Schlesinger favored reengagement with the political process, which he termed "virile" democratic exertion, but whatever the remedy, reform from within struck him as particularly crucial: "the achievement of identity, the conquest of a sense of self.... [T]hese will do infinitely more to restore American masculinity than all the hormones in the test tubes of our scientists."1 In his own way, the exuberant television health guru Jack LaLanne was ad' dressing exactly the same malaise. "You gotta get down to the masculinity!" he bellowed to one interviewer while discussing the American man's dangerous lack of interest in dieting. "He's losing his manhood! They just sit and overeat and overdrink and they won't do anything until it becomes a status symbol!"2 To LaLanne, at least, dieting offered a way for the American man to reverse the ebbing tide of manhood. Throughout the early postwar era, a variety of white middle-class men who agreed with his diagnosis, ranging from social critics Vance Packard and John Gunther, from advertising executive Elmer Wheeler to the "ordinary people" profiled in popular magazines, publicly explored the implications of male weight loss. Both critiquing and accommodating themselves to the nation's affluence, they responded to the "crisis" Schlesinger had identified by producing diet narratives. By adapting what had typically been tales of female self-discovery, and by relocating the fulcrum of masculinity from exercise to diet, such narratives rewrote masculinity to fit a "soft" age of organization and suburbanization. In so doing, they articuiated a new consumerist masculinity whose renewed authority resided in the ability to control consumption. Few today might associate thinness, especially male thinness, with the 1950s. Given the popularity of cookbooks that extolled dinners prepared by can-opener, the pastel creativity of suburban cuisine, and the almost institutionalized threemartini lunch and cocktail hour, middle-class American males, at least, spent more time filling their stomachs than worrying about what they ate. Indeed, public-opinion polls consistently revealed that far more women than men de? scribed themselves as dieters. (Nor do average weight figures suggest any drastic change in men's weights.) In 1955, Science News Letter even resorted to adver? tising for a "motivating force, social, fashion or otherwise, to make men 'strive for slimness' the way women have. If found, this motive might lead to progress against that major health problem, obesity, or, in less polite terms, fatness." As

Women and Antivivisection in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: "O sister women, I appeal to you," said the antivivisectionist leader Mary E Lovell in March 1895, addressing an audience of several hundred at the triennial convention of the National Council of Women (NCW). "Will you, with the chivalry which belongs to good and true womanhood, side with the suffering and the helpless? This wrong will never be righted until women do their part. Caroline E. White, LovelPs colleague from the American Anti-Vivisection So? ciety (AAVS), also spoke. She too knew that the progress ofthe antivivisection movement depended upon the mobilization of women, and she echoed LovelPs entreaty. "I appeal to you, the women before me, begging you to help us in this work." The AAVS leader admonished her audience to "Remember your moral accountability."2 The antivivisection movement in late nineteenth-century America drew upon a number of social groups for its membership. Clergy who were troubled by the materialism of medical science and physicians whose training predated the laboratory revolution in medicine were well-represented in the crusade. The defining presence, however, especially by the 1890s, was that of hundreds of middle-class women. Antivivisectionists comprised influential contingents inside the nation's anti-cruelty societies (SPCAs) and they had their own or? ganizations, notably the AAVS, founded in Philadelphia in 1883. Opposition to experimentation on animals was on the rise, dismissed by a critic in 1898 as nothing but "a lot of zoophilist women."3 AAVS founders Lovell and White spoke for America's antivivisectionist women. The NCW convention, a gathering of reform-minded women, pro? vided a perfect opportunity to expand the cause. The occasion called upon Lovell and White to explain why action on behalf of animals was particularly a female concern, pitting women against the exclusively male medical research establishment. Their speeches in 1895 were the cause's manifestos. What did Lovell and White say? What made AV4 an issue in the minds of so many women in late nineteenth-century America, a number to which Lovell and White, in addressing the NCW, hoped to add?

History from the Inside Out: Prison Life in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts

Abstract: It cannot be denied, that [penitentiaries] have been Seminaries established and sustained at the public expense, for educating, in the most effectual and thorough manner, hundreds and thousands of villians [sic] to depredate and prey upon the very communities which have thus encouraged and fostered them. This is no fiction, and our astonishment could hardly be greater, had legislators, with the numerous other encouragements afforded, authorized the constituted authorities of these Institutions to confer Diplomas and Doctorates upon those who had most highly distinguished themselves for their improvement in the science and manifold mysteries of iniquity.

Unnatural Selection: Intelligence Testing, Eugenics, and American Political Cultures

Abstract: The "myth ofthe menace ofthe feeble-minded" blamed early twentieth-century social problems on a rising tide of feeble-minded men and women who were said to be filling America's custodial institutions, while even greater numbers of unrecognized morons were loosed to reproduce in the streets.1 Conflicting interpretations of this myth have been central to the debates among historians of mentai retardation and psychological testing for over two decades.2 One school of historical research has stressed growing altruism in the care of the mentally retarded and portrayed the menace myth as an exceptional episode distinct from the origins of intelligence testing.3 They use the term "myth" to denote falsehood. For them, the menace myth was merely a bad theory proven wrong by interwar scientists. An opposing group of historians has claimed that knowledge about intelligence is constructed to meet the needs of social control.4 A "myth," for them, exposes something essential about the world views of its believers. They say the menace myth is a recurring theme in the enduring undemocratic defense of social hierarchy. This essay charts a new direction in the way we interpret the meaning of the menace myth by altering the dominant research questions, and under this new framework pursuing a case study ofthe relationships between eugenics, testing technology, and youth custody policy in early twentieth-century Ohio. Although the dichotomy between altruistic progress and social control of? fered vital energy to historical work for a time, partisans of both approaches have drawn broad conclusions from a narrow history of intellectuals without properly working through the social and policy contexts.5 Fortunately, recent work by James W. Trent has provided a sharper sense of the impact that so? cial policies have had upon the lives of the mentally retarded. Trent's main argument that, "control and care merged as interrelated and interdependent factors in specialized services for retarded people," was an important attempt to bridge the gap between progressive altruism and social control. However, he did not consistently follow a narrative course that might allow one to see clearly how it is that care and control are part of the same social processes. When he examined the menace myth he retreated to the old framework of reformer motivations and argued that physicians and psychologists used the menace myth to capitalize on xenophobic class fears. When they found it in their professional interests to abandon eugenic rhetoric in favor ofthe therapeutic language ofthe mentai hygiene movement, the menace myth disappeared. Trent deftly exposed the political maneuvering of the philanthropists and scientists who advanced the menace myth, but the concept of self-interest stripped his interpretation of broader historical significance, while failing to further our understanding of how difficult it has been to "care" for the mentally retarded in a non-"controlling," apolitical, scientific way.

Philanthropy and Identity: Gender and Ethnicity in London

Abstract: During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, English Jews not only organized extensive charitable networks, they participated actively in philosophical discussions about philanthropy. Analysis of their words and deeds reveals deep tensions in the relationship between middle-class and poor Eastern Euro? pean immigrant Jews as well as anxiety about the image ofthe Jewish community within the dominant Christian society. Using the lens of philanthropy, this paper examines those conflicts and asks how ethnics and religious minorities negotiate the tensions between ethnic solidarity and broader attachments to their country of birth or adoption. Anglo-Jewry combined traditional Jewish and late Victorian approaches to philanthropy. Jewish charity, or tzedakah in Hebrew, comes from the root for righteousness, and was a religious obligation. As historian Nancy Green notes, it is a "collective responsibility" and "a form of intracommunal solidarity."1 Ac? cording to Jewish tradition donors must act in a manner that prevents the needy from feeling shame; ideally both those giving and receiving remain anonymous, implying that philanthropy was unconditional. According to rabbinic tradition, human possessions are really God's and the poor make it possible for the rich to fulfill a legal obligation or mitzvah. It was customary for Jewish communities to form societies for visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, and burying the dead; they supported widows, orphans, and scholars, and provided loans to promote self-sufficiency.2 Victorians also emphasized self-help, but were concerned to separate deserving from undeserving. Many were highly sensitive about avoiding pauperization or dependency, and generally Victorian assistance came with expectations of morality, cleaniiness, decorum, and sobriety. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish philanthropic services in Britain grew in size and sophistication with the arrival of Eastern European immigrants. The host Jewish community numbered about 60,000 in 1880 and had an influential middle class that was highly acculturated.3 The community, first settled by Jews of Spanish descent, also included German Jews and Eastern Europeans who began arriving at mid-century.4 Typical of Jewish communities around the world, Britain offered comprehensive religious institutions and ex? tensive social services. A tradition of asylum, jobs, and a liberal atmosphere also attracted Jews to England.5 The arrival of poor, foreign-looking Jews, however, aroused conflict for native-born, middle-class Jews. Poor Jews had the option of drawing on various resources, but the estab? lished Jewish community created separate charitable networks for their poor co-religionists, many of which resembied typical Victorian charities. In part this

The distance from home: The domestication of desire in interior design manuals

Abstract: In the Beacon Hill interior design showroom, sturdy and elegant pieces of furniture, tantalizingly grouped together, model a room within a home. Old books, baskets of bread and home magazines appoint the simulated living space like props on a stage. Next to an over-stuffed primitive print couch, I pick up the copy of Architectural Digest resting on a coffee table. On the cover, David Bowie stands in front of his Indonesian-style home located on the island of Mustique. Ten glossy pages of magazine photographs seize a nineteenth-century spirit of exoticism in Bowie's refuge; outside his house, Bowie, dressed in a sarong and woven hat, embraces his wife Iman, the Somalian model; inside, Bowie stands by the gilt Balinese-style living-room doors; the master bedroom displays a collection of nineteenth-century Egyptian revival furniture, and the guest bedroom shot reveals twin beds with a palm frond pattern silk screened onto the mosquito netting and the bed coverings. Surely this is the room where I would stay if David Bowie invited me to his home. The white mosquito netting flutters slightly as a cool breeze drifts through the french door. Exhausted from the Caribbean sun, I crawl under crisp cool sheets and take a nap until I am summoned for dinner.