Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (85 page)

Publishers and writers could read the signs, too. The 1950s saw several works of literature that were far franker about sexual matters than ever before. These tides included Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
(1953), J. P. Donleavy’s
Ginger Man
and Françoise Sagan’s
Bonjour Tristesse
(both 1955), William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
(1959), and Aden Ginsberg’s 1956 poem
Howl. Howl
and D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
the latter available in France since 1929, both became the subject of celebrated obscenity trials, in the United Kingdom and in the United States, in 1959; both eventually escaped censorship on the grounds that they had redeeming artistic merit. Curiously, Nabokov’s
Lolita
avoided the courthouse, perhaps because he did not use such explicit obscenities as the other authors did. But in some ways his theme, the love of a middle-aged man for an underage ‘nymphet,’ was the most ‘perverse’ of ad.

But then Nabokov was an extraordinary man. Born in Saint Petersburg into an aristocratic family who had lost everything in the revolution, he was educated at Cambridge, then lived in Germany and France until he settled in America in 1941. As well as writing equally vividly in Russian and English, he was a
passionate chess player and a recognised authority on butterflies.
⁴⁶
Lolita
is by turns funny, sad, pathetic. It is a story as much about age as sex, about the sorrow that comes with knowledge, the difference between biological sex and psychological sex, about the difference between sex and love and passion and about how love can be a wound, imprisoning rather than liberating. Lolita is the butterfly, beautiful, delicate, with a primitive life force that an older man can only envy, but she is also vulgar, a far from idealised figure.
⁴⁷
The middle-aged ‘hero’ loses her, of course, just as he loses everything, including his self-respect. Although Lolita realises what is happening to her, it is far from clear what, if anything, rubs off. Has the warmth in him created the coldness in her; or has it made no difference? In
Lolita
the sexes are as far apart as can be.

The final report of these years built on the earlier investigations and events to produce a definite advance. This was Betty Friedan’s
Feminine Mystique,
which appeared in 1963. After graduating from Smith College, Friedan (née Goldstein) lived in Greenwich Village in New York, working as a reporter. In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, moving soon after to the suburbs, where Betty became a full-time mother, ferrying her children to school each day. She liked motherhood well enough, but she also wanted a career and again took up journalism. Or she tried to. Her fifteenth college reunion came round in 1957, and she decided to write an article about it for
McCall’s
magazine, using a questionnaire she had devised as the basis for the information.
⁴⁸
The questions she asked chiefly concerned her classmates’ reactions to being a woman and the way their sex, or gender, had affected their lives. She found that ‘an overwhelming number of women felt unfulfilled and isolated, envying their husbands who had other lives, friends, colleagues, and challenges away from home.’

But
McCall’s
turned her article down: ‘The male editor said it couldn’t be true.’ She took it back and submitted the same piece to
Ladies’ Home Journal.
They rewrote the article so it said the opposite of what she meant. Next she tried
Redbook.
There the editor told her agent, ‘Betty has gone off her rocker.’
⁴⁹
He thought only ‘neurotic’ women would identify with what she was saying. Belatedly, Friedan realised that what she had written ‘threatened the very raison d’être of the women’s magazine world,’ and she then decided to expand what she had discovered about women into a book.
⁵⁰
To begin with this had the title
The Togetherness Woman,
later changed to
The Feminine Mystique.
By the feminine mystique, Friedan meant the general assumption that women liked being housewives and mothers at home, having no interest in wider social, political, or intellectual matters, nor feeling a need for a career. She was surprised to find that it had not always been so, that the very magazines that had turned down her articles had, until World War II, printed very different material. ‘In 1939 the heroines of women’s magazine stories were not always young, but in a certain sense they were younger than their fictional counterparts today…. The majority of heroines in the four major women’s magazines (then
Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping,
and
Women’s Home Companion)
were career women…. And the spirit, courage, independence, determination – the strength of character they showed in their work as nurses, teachers, artists, actresses, copywriters,
saleswomen – were part of their charm. There was a definite aura that their individuality was something to be admired, not unattractive to men, that men were drawn to them as much for their spirit and character as for their looks.’
⁵¹

The war had changed all that, she felt. Going away to war had been supremely fulfilling for a whole generation of men, but they had returned to the ‘little women’ waiting at home, often raising a family deliberately conceived before the man went away. These men returned to good jobs or, via the GI bid, good educational opportunities, and a new pattern had been set, not helped by the flight to the suburbs, which had only made women’s isolation more acute. By 1960, however, Friedan said that women’s frustration was boiling over; anger and neuroses were at an unprecedented level, if the results of the questionnaire she had sent out were to be believed. But part of the problem was that it had no name; that’s where her book came in. The problem with no name became
The Feminine Mystique.

Friedan’s attack was wide-ranging and extensively researched, her anger (for the book was a polemical but calmly marshalled thesis) directed not just at women’s magazines and Madison Avenue, for portraying women as members of a ‘comfortable concentration camp,’ surrounded by the latest washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and other labour-saving devices, but also at Freud, Margaret Mead, and the universities for making women try to conform to some stereotypical ideal.
⁵²
Freud’s theory of penis envy, she thought, was an outmoded way of trying to say that women were inferior, and there was no credible evidence for it. She argued that Mead’s anthropological studies, although describing differences between women of differing cultures, still offered an ideal of womanhood that was essentially passive, again conforming to stereotypes. She made the telling point that Mead’s own life – a career, two husbands, a lesbian lover, an open marriage – was completely at variance with what she described in her writings, and a much better model for the modern Western woman.
⁵³
But Friedan’s study was also one of the first popular works to draw attention to the all-important nuts-and-bolts of womanhood. She explored how many women got married in their teens, as a result of which their careers and intellectual lives went nowhere; she wondered how many supported their husbands in a ‘qualification’ – she ironically called it the Ph.T. (putting husband through [college]).
⁵⁴
And she was one of the first to draw attention to the fact that, as a result of these demanding circumstances, it was always the mother who ended up battering and abusing her children.

Friedan’s book hit a nerve, not just in its mammoth sales, but also in that it helped spark the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. This commission’s report, when it appeared in 1965, detailed the discriminatory wages women were earning (half the average for men) and the declining ratio of women in professional and executive jobs. When the report was buried in the Washington bureaucracy, a group of women decided they had to take things into their own hands. Betty Friedan was one of those who met in Washington to create what someone at the meeting called ‘an NAACP for women.’
⁵⁵
The acronym eventually became NOW, the National Organization of Women. The modern feminist movement had begun.
⁵⁶

Part of the message of the Kinsey reports, and of Betty Friedan’s investigation, was that Western society was changing in the wake of war, and in some fairly fundamental ways. America was in the forefront here, but the changes applied in other countries as well, if less strongly. Before the war, anthropology had been the social science that, thanks to Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, most caught the imagination, certainly so far as the general public was concerned. Now, however, the changes within Western society came under the spotlight from the other social sciences, in particular sociology, psychology, and economics.

The first of these investigations to make an impact was
The Lonely Crowd,
published in 1950 by the Harvard sociologist David Riesman (who later moved to Stanford). Riesman began by stressing what sociology had to offer over and above anthropology. Compared with sociology, he said, anthropology was ‘poor.’ That is to say, it was not a big discipline, and many of its field studies were little more than one-man (or one-woman) expeditions, because funds were unavailable for more ambitious projects. As a result, fieldwork in anthropology was amateurish and, more important, ‘inclined to holistic over-generalisation from a general paucity of data.’ By contrast, public opinion surveys – the bread-and-butter material of sociologists, which had become more plentiful since the inception of Gallup in the mid-1930s and their widespread use during World War II to gauge public feeling, aided by advances in statistics for the manipulation of data – were rich both in quantitative terms, in the level of detail they amassed, and in the representativeness of their samples. In addition to survey data, Riesman also added the study of such things as advertisements, dreams, children’s games, and child-rearing practices, all of which, he claimed, had now become ‘the stuff of history.’ He and his colleagues therefore felt able to deliver verdicts on the national character of Americans with a certainty that anthropologists could not match. (He was later to regret his overconfident tone, especially when he was forced to retract some of his generalisations.)
¹

Riesman was a pupil of Erich Fromm, and therefore indirectly in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Like them, his ideas owed a lot to Freud, and to Max Weber, insofar as
The Lonely Crowd
was an attempt to relate individual psychology, and that of the family, to whole societies. His argument was
twofold. In the first place, he claimed that as societies develop, they go through three phases relating to changes in population. In older societies, where there is a stable population at fairly low levels, people are
‘tradition-directed.’
In the second phase, populations show a rapid increase in size, and individuals become
‘inner-directed.’
In the third phase, populations level off at a much higher level, where the people are
‘other-directed.’
The second part of his argument described how the factors that shape character change as these other developments take place. In particular, he saw a decline in the influence and authority of parents and home life, and a rise in the influence of the mass media and the peer group, especially as it concerned the lives of young people.
²

By the middle of the twentieth century, Riesman said, countries such as India, Egypt, and China remained tradition-directed. These locations are in many areas sparsely populated, death rates are high, and very often the people are nonliterate. Here life is governed by patterns and an etiquette of relationships that have existed for generations. Youth is regarded as an obvious period of apprenticeship, and admission to adult society is marked by initiation ceremonies that are formal and which everyone must go through. These ceremonies bring on added privilege but also added responsibility. The ‘Three Rs’ of this world are ritual, routine, and religion, with ‘Little energy … directed towards finding new solutions to age-old problems.’
³
Riesman did not devote any space to how tradition-oriented societies develop or evolve, but he saw the next phase as clearly marked and predicated upon a rapid increase in population, which creates a change in the relatively stable ratio of births to deaths, which in turn becomes both the cause and consequence of other social changes. It is this imbalance that puts pressure on society’s customary ways of coping. The new society is characterised by increased personal mobility, by the rapid accumulation of capital, and by an almost constant expansion. Such a society (for example, the Renaissance or the Reformation), Riesman says, breeds character types ‘who can manage to live socially without strict and self-evident tradition-direction.’ The concept of ‘inner-direction’ covers a wide range of individuals, but all share the experience that the values that govern their lives and behaviour are implanted early in life by their elders, leading to a distinct individualism marked by a consistency within the individual from one situation to another. Inner-directed people are aware of tradition, or rather traditions, but each individual may come from a different tradition to which he or she owes allegiance. It is as if, says Riesman, each person has his own ‘internal gyroscope.’ The classic inner-directed society is Victorian Britain.
⁴

As the birth rate begins to follow the death rate down, populations start to stabilise again, but at higher levels than before. Fewer people work on the land, more are in the cities, there is more abundance and leisure, societies are centralised and bureaucratised, and increasingly,
‘other people
are the problem, not the material environment.’
⁵
People mix more widely and become more sensitive to each other. This society creates the other-directed person. Riesman thought that the other-directed type was most common and most at home in twentieth-century America, which lacked a feudal past, and especially in American cities, where people were literate, educated, and well provided for
in the necessities of life.
⁶
Amid the new abundance, he thought that parental discipline suffered, because in the new, smaller, more biologically stable families it was needed less, and this had two consequences. First, the peer group becomes as important as, if not more important than, the family as a socialising influence – the peer group meaning other children the same age as the child in question. Second, the children in society become a marketing category; they are targeted by both the manufacturers of children’s products and the media that help sell these products. It is this need for direction from, and the approval of, others that creates a modern form of conformity in which the chief area of sensitivity is wanting to be liked by other people – i.e., to be popular.
⁷
This new other-directed group, he said, is more interested in its own psychological development than in work for personal gain, or the greater good of all; it does not want to be esteemed but loved; and its most important aim is to ‘relate’ to others.

Riesman went on to qualify and expand this picture, devoting chapters to the changing role of parents, teachers, the print media, the electronic media, the role of economics, and the changing character of work. He thought that the changes he had observed and described had implications for privacy and for politics, and that whatever character type an individual was, there were three fates available – adjustment, anomie, and autonomy.
⁸
Later he recanted some of his claims, conceding he had overstated the change that had come over America. But in one thing he was surely right: his observation that Americans were concerned above all with ‘relationships’ foreshadowed the obsession later in the century with all manner of psychologies specifically designed to help in this area of life.

The Lonely Crowd
was released in the same year that Senator Joseph McCarthy announced to the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that ‘I hold in my hand’ a list of Communist agents in the State Department. Until that point, McCarthy had been an undistinguished Midwestern politician with a drinking problem.
⁹
But his specific allegations now sparked a ‘moral panic’ in America, as it was described, in which 151 actors, writers, musicians, and radio and TV entertainers were accused of Communist affiliations, and the U.S. attorney general issued a list of 179 ‘Totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, subversive and other organisations.’
*
While McCarthy and the U.S. attorney general were worrying about Communists and ‘subversives,’ others were just as distressed about the whole moral panic itself and what that said about America. In fact, many people – especially refugee scholars from Europe – were by now worried that America itself had the potential to become fascist. It was thinking of this kind that underlay a particular psychological investigation that overlapped with
The Lonely Crowd
and appeared at more or less the same time.

The Authoritarian Personality
had been conceived as early as 1939 as part of a
joint project, with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and the American Jewish Committee, to investigate anti-Semitism.
¹⁰
The idea was for a questionnaire survey to explore whether a psychological profile of the ‘potential fascist character’ could be identified. It was the first time that the critical school of Frankfurt had used a quantitative approach, and the results of their
‘F’ (for
fascist) scale ‘seemed to warrant alarm.’
¹¹
‘Anti-Semitism turned out to be … the visible edge of a dysfunctional personality revealed in the many “ethnocentric” and “conventional” attitudes of the general American population, as well as of a disquietingly submissive attitude towards authority of all kinds.’
¹²
This is where the link to Riesman came in: these potential fascists were ‘other-directed,’ normal, conventional Americans.
The Authoritarian Personality
therefore concluded with a warning that fascism rather than communism was the chief threat facing America in the postwar world, that fascism was finding ‘a new home’ on the western side of the Atlantic, and that bourgeois America and its great cities were now ‘the dark heart of modern civilisation.
¹³
The book’s other conclusion was that the Holocaust was not simply the result of Nazi thinking, and its specific theories about degeneration, but that the rationality of Western capitalist civilisation itself was responsible. Theodor Adorno, the exile from Frankfurt and the main author of the report, found that whereas left-wing types were emotionally more stable, usually happier than their conservative counterparts, capitalism tended to throw up dysfunctional personalities, highly authoritarian anti-Semites who linked reason to power. For them, the pogrom was the ultimate expression of this power.
¹⁴
If
The Lonely Crowd
may be seen as an early effort to combine public opinion survey material with social psychology and sociology to understand whole nations, a rational – if not entirely successful – project to assimilate new forms of knowledge,
The Authoritarian Personality
is best understood as a late throw of the Germanic tradition of Freud and Spengler, yet another overarching attempt to denigrate the Western/Atlantic alliance of rationalism, science, and democracy. It was an arresting thesis, especially when read against the backdrop of the McCarthy shenanigans. But in fact it was immediately attacked by fellow social scientists, who systematically and ruthlessly disassembled its findings. By then, however, the unsubstantiated phrase ‘the authoritarian personality’ had caught on.

A better picture of totalitarianism, both as to its origins and its possible expression in the postwar world (especially America), was given by
Hannah
Arendt. She had been in New York since 1941, after she escaped from France. In Manhattan she had lived in poverty for a time, learned English, and begun to write, moving among the intellectuals of the
Partisan Review
milieu. At various times she was a professor at Princeton, Chicago, and the University of California as well as being a regular contributor to the
New Yorker.
She finally settled at the New School for Social Research in New York, where she taught until she died in 1975.
¹⁵
As home to the University in Exile, for emigré European intellectuals fleeing fascism in the 1930s, one aim of the New School was to develop an amalgam of European and American thought. Arendt made a name for herself with three influential – and highly controversial – books:
The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951),
The Human Condition
(1958), and
Eichmann
in Jerusalem
(1963).
¹⁶
She began
The Origins of Totalitarianism
after the war ended, and it took several years.
¹⁷
Her main aim was to explain why so ‘unimportant’ a matter in world politics as ‘the Jewish question,’ or anti-Semitism, could become the ‘catalytic agent for, first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of the death factories.
¹⁸
Her answer was that mass society led to isolation and loneliness – the lonely crowd of Riesman’s title. In such a condition, she realised, normal political life deteriorated, fascism and communism drew their remarkable strength, offering a form of politics that provided people with a public life: uniforms, denoting belonging; specific ranks, recognised and respected by others; massed rallies, the experience of participation.
¹⁹
That was the positive side. At the same time, ‘loneliness’ she identified as ‘the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government.’
²⁰
And this is where the controversy started, for although she equated Stalinism with Nazism and left many thinking that there was therefore no alternative to the emerging American way of life, she still implied that the ‘massification’ of society was ‘a step towards totalitarianism’, towards ‘radical evil,’ a key phrase, and that ‘the new mass society in the West was in danger of converging with the totalitarian East.’
²¹