If Popenoe is remembered today, it is probably for his newspaper and magazine series, which ran in North America continuously from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. In 1936, Popenoe started discussing the possibility of a syndicated feature with the National Newspaper Service, imagining something that would “cover the general field of the relations between the sexes both before and after marriage, bringing in relevant material from the fields of biology, sociology, and psychology; and including some heredity and eugenics (non-controversial phases) and some mental hygiene.”89 This project was postponed by the war, but in 1947 “Modern Marriage” debuted in the St. Louis Dispatch and was quickly picked up by the Cincinnati Times Star, the Hollywood Citizen News, and the Indianapolis News, and within months by dozens more. Under varying titles, this series ran until Popenoe bid an upbeat farewell to his readers in 1972.90 In 1953, “Can this Marriage be Saved?” commenced in Ladies’ Home Journal (LHJ) and was met with much applause.91 That same year Popenoe and Dorothy Cameron Disney, an editor at the LHJ, coauthored a book compilation of these columns, which contained an introduction by Popenoe summarizing the history and aims of the AIFR and chapters with instructive vignettes about fixing rocky marriages.92
Letters poured in to the institute’s mailbox from women and men across the United States and Canada who had listened to Art Linkletter’s House Party, perused “Can This Marriage Be Saved?,” or happened upon one of the AIFR’s pamphlets. These ranged from perfunctory notes of thanks and requests for more information to lengthy confessions, often from those who had never before dared to share their secrets of adultery, transvestism, sibling incest, and children born out of wedlock. Most readers were delighted with Popenoe’s brief and accessible columns, which one even deemed far superior to Ann Landers.93 Women and, to a lesser extent, men showered Popenoe with thanks for his sage counsel, which they judged to be sane, practical, and just plain commonsense. In 1959, for example, Mrs. T from Stockton, California, wrote, “I read your column every evening, and think what you advise people to do about their difficulties is human and very sensible. So very simple that we wonder why they themselves had not thought of it.”94 Hundreds asked for copies of the pamphlets Success in Marriage, Family Teamwork, and The Battle of the Budget and filled out the AIFR’s scorecards, designed to calculate if a man was a perfect husband, a woman was a perfect wife, or if a person was truly a mature adult. Devoted fans, such as Mrs. S from Indiana, sincerely appreciated these tools: “Thank you so much for all the help and encouragement your column has given me. Your self-rating scales have helped me to improve in several ways as well as helping me better understand the faults of others.”95 These journalistic endeavors, which narrated under pseudonyms the trials and tribulations of many couples that had sought help at the AIFR, solidified Popenoe’s standing as “Mr. Marriage.”
The AIFR flourished in the 1950s because its mission resonated with the cultural and ideological contours of the Cold War, above all, the doctrine of containment, which applied not only to the Soviet Union and China, but also to gender and the family. In the United States, fighting Communism abroad and shoring up internal security at home was linked to the idealization of motherhood and reproduction and to the sexual regulation of women’s bodies.96 Furthermore, if the AIFR prospered in this climate, it also contributed substantially to it. The institute was staunchly committed to the reconstitution of the American family from the inside out. Its pursuit of this objective was one piece of the puzzle of postwar eugenics. Indeed, Popenoe linked marital counseling to population policy through the rubric of planned parenthood; he published articles outlining the virtues of population planning and in 1952 presented a paper on the vital social function of the marriage counselor at the Third International Conference on Planned Parenthood in Bombay.97 However, for Popenoe the most effective way to influence reproduction and the family was not through fieldwork or congresses in foreign countries, but through teaching fit Americans that breeding was the key to human satisfaction and advancement: “there must be identification of having children with personal happiness, an elevation of the family and children to a higher place in the multiple scale of values characteristic of a high level of civilization.”98
At the AIFR, reaching this “higher level” began with clear-cut sex differentiation. The initial step in assessing clients was gauging the degree to which their gender identity and comportment corresponded to their anatomical sex.99 A proximate correspondence between sex and gender equaled normal, while distance and deviation indicated conditions stretching from minor and fixable gender distortion to nearly fatal gender pathology. According to Popenoe, sex differentiation had “characterized the species for many millions of years” and was “pretty firmly embedded in the constitution of every human being—even though not invariable.”100 Sex distinction was deep and carried profound ramifications: “men and women differ in every cell of their bodies, having a different combination of chromosomes—those little ‘strings of beads’ in the cell which are the carriers of heredity.”101 Defined as innate, with minimal leeway for adjustment, sex differentiation affected genetic inheritance, basal metabolism, constitutional vitality, structural makeup, physiological functionality, glandular composition, emotional equipment, and intellectual endowment.102 In this constellation, the average man, compared to the average woman, was more active, venturesome, aggressive, consistent, nomadic, businesslike, secular, rational, high-minded, and courageous. Women, conversely, were modest, submissive, romantic, sincere, religious, vindictive, “catty,” drawn to trivia, and affectionately demonstrative.103
Popenoe believed this intrinsically complementary dichotomy was under assault from the nefarious sides of modernity, particularly the anomie of urban living and the higher education of women, which decreased birthrates of the fit. His answer to this predicament was a return to, and a reinvention of, fecund marriages structured by appropriate sex-gender roles: “men and women were made for marriage, biologically and psychologically.”104 Making marriages work, however, was a burden that fell largely on wives. Even though Popenoe claimed that the sexes balanced one another, the AIFR’s marriage counseling program viewed the woman as much more malleable than the man, a condition rooted in her procreative capacity. Popenoe wrote that the female was an “intermediate between the baby and the adult man in her anatomy and her physiology.”105 Whereas boys matured uneventfully into men, girls, at the onset of puberty, became trapped in a state of arrested development, only passing “on to the physical maturity which makes her more like a man” at menopause.106 The complications for girls arose with the arrival of their reproductive system, which not only squashed any budding athleticism but also resulted in a lessening of intelligence. In arguing for the deep-seated effects of puberty on girls, Popenoe referred to a study conducted by Terman in which their average IQ dropped 13 points (as opposed to a decline of 3 for the boys) during this phase. The “girl, who probably inherits just as much intellectual capacity as her brother, has to lose part of this as the price she pays for motherhood—or at least, for specialization which will permit motherhood.”107 Women, such as Mrs. C, who refused to accept their sex destiny had most likely gotten “off track” during childhood; instead of readily relinquishing their smarts and sports ability to the hormonal demands of ovulation and menstruation, they had become deluded into thinking they were on a par with men. At the AIFR, this phenomenon was regularly diagnosed as “masculine protest,” a condition unique to what Popenoe called the “Machine Age”: “primitive women seem to have no such inferiority complex—it is only the well-educated woman who is ashamed of her sex.”108 Women were perpetual juveniles, and this protracted adolescence, which lasted from the first to the last menses, made them more open to alteration through self-help and modification. This stance reflected the insinuation of Freudian theories of arrested development and female infantilism into a model that privileged biological explanations.109 In brief, owing to their physiology and biology, it was much easier to change women t
han men. For this reason, Popenoe contended that when marital conflicts arose, the wife would have to “make more of the larger adjustments.”110 In a 1952 article written for general physicians, Popenoe explained that marriage counseling was about “re-educating one or both partners,” but also claimed that “when marital conflicts arise, it is usually the wife who comes to the physician for help and advice.”111
The corollary of this sex-gender logic was the presumed “greater aggressiveness of the male,” which “often gets out of bounds and becomes a nuisance, but if it had not existed, the race would never have survived.”112 Once naturalized as a male attribute, aggressiveness became anathema to women and mandatory for men.113 Wives were portrayed as engaging in the most egregious form of gender distortion when they nagged, pushed, or were too forceful. Bossy wives, for example, hurt the egos of their husbands, who even if they apparently enjoyed being the passive partner, deep down craved to prove their supremacy. It was a patent fact: “a man who does not see himself in the age-old role of hunter, fighter, and protector of the home becomes dissatisfied.”114 At the AIFR, wives learned that making more money than their spouses was an aberration that most husbands could not tolerate, and were warned at all costs to avoid competing with their husbands lest they diminish their manhood: “if she is wise, she will let Ray run his own business while she turns her energy and enthusiasm, her real ability, into some other channel.”115 To substantiate such assertions, Popenoe often quoted a national AIFR survey of three thousand respondents that had shown that the least happy marriages were the ones in which the wives dominated. Only 47 percent of such unions were content, as compared to 61 percent of those where the man was dominant, and 87 percent of those that qualified as “cooperative partnerships.”116 In pamphlets such as Smart Wives Don’t Have to Nag and Boss Him and Lose Him, AIFR counselors clarified through marital fables why female aggressiveness was detrimental and how to effectively combat it.117
Figure 8. Woman entering the American Institute of Family Relations office when it was on Sunset Boulevard. Source: Photograph in article by Paul Popenoe, “Marriage Counseling,” GP (General Practitioner) 6, no. 4 (1952): 53–60. Photograph is from page 53.
If this biological reductionism impugned aggressiveness in women, it granted men a wide margin for violent behavior since their sex destiny was posited, in a quite primatological fashion, as hard-wired and virtually unchangeable. Male aggressiveness was “widespread in evolution” and could be traced to man’s primal role as warrior and fierce guardian of the tribe.118 Over and over again Popenoe painted men as innately prone to outbursts and anger, and, furthermore, linked this to the sexual domination of women. As he conjectured, “suppose that husband and wife have had a violent quarrel, as may happen in almost any family. The husband’s aggressiveness is aroused by the quarrel, and, as a result, he is then ready for and desirous of intercourse. But the wife’s aggressiveness, which has also been aroused by the quarrel, makes her quite unfitted for the submissiveness that is a part of her role in intercourse.”119 Perhaps the most damning accusation that could be leveled at Popenoe and the AIFR was the extent to which they condoned or turned a blind eye to husbands’ emotional and physical abuse of their wives. In letters responding to women who complained bitterly about their misery at the hands of hostile husbands, Popenoe, following clearly delineated AIFR protocol, never recommended divorce (although separation was sometimes an option).120 In one instance, where the wife stated that she was frequently beaten, the “counselor then pointed out how much her nagging was undermining her husband, making it impossible for him to show love for her. She admitted that she had egged him into beating her.”121
If women were admonished for being too aggressive and belittling their spouses, men were sometimes encouraged to embrace their sex by being more so. In 1940, for example, Mr. R wrote to Popenoe about his confusion regarding a young woman whom he had been dating and with whom he shared the hobbies of music, poetry, and sports. This young woman had kissed Mr. R passionately two times, but lately had been giving him the cold shoulder. He declared gushingly that he worshipped her, but because he did not want to hurt her feelings he was hesitant to ask her directly if her attention was genuine. Popenoe candidly told Mr. R that he was too passive, and that if he was prepared to marry her he needed to be “aggressive, insistent, insuring her that you could not live without her any longer.”122 On rare occasions, men, usually military officers home from the war whose stiff disciplinary tactics were disrupting the household, were encouraged to temper themselves by finding physical and social outlets.123
Through the lens of an ordinary and family-centric eugenics, the AIFR’s clients were first analyzed according to the dictates of this sex-gender hereditarianism. Biology should be destiny and if it was not, then behavior—which was understood in terms of what we today call gender or gender identity—was expected to change, usually through self-help and therapeutic exercises based on psychosexual and psychoanalytic theories of human personality and relations.124 The concepts of gender and gender identity began to be adopted during the Cold War era as a majority of scientists interested in the etiology of polymorphous sexualities abandoned biological for psychological explanations.125 It should be recognized, however, that postwar eugenicists, who pursued a more plastic hereditarianism and wielded the diagnostic tools of personality tests, contributed to the decoupling of sex and gender by inventing new kinds of gender distortion and pathology and new techniques to measure them.
If the sex-gender system stood at the foundation of the AIFR’s marriage counseling, then the binary of extroversion-introversion was well ensconced on the ground floor. Besides the “difference between male and female,” this was the “greatest that can exist between two ‘normal’ human beings,” and distinguishing extroversion-introversion variance according to likes, dislikes, metabolism, temperament, and body-build was a crucial component of the AIFR’s client evaluation. According to Popenoe, extroversion-introversion was “largely inborn and seen in the cradle” and he often warned marriage counselors that they ignored it at their peril.126 Drawing from the psychologists Alfred Adler and Terman, Popenoe stated that the introvert had “his attention turned on himself,” and was found “more frequently in the asthenic body-build, a slender physique sometimes called the linear type because the characteristic lines are vertical.”127 Conversely, the extrovert was more interested in external circumstances and “more likely to be of the lateral type, characteristic lines being horizontal.”128 The extrovert was boisterous, uninhibited, and closer to a “primary type of personality,” akin to a “wild animal,” while the “secondary type,” the introvert, was more fastidious, shyer, and detail-oriented.129 As examples of introverts, who were more likely to be engineers, artists, and planners, Popenoe listed Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Woodrow Wilson, and Adolf Hitler. On the other roster, which included “men of action,” administrators, entertainers, and sheriffs, were Huey P. Long, Will Rogers, and Dwight Eisenhower.130 These two biotypes were determined by the resistance of the neural synapses, which in introverts was low, implying that nervous impulses tended to be captured in the brain and not made manifest. The synapses of extroverts, on the other hand, put up “a high resistance to the circulation of an idea, hence it tends to branch off and express itself in action, instead of remaining in the closed circuit of thought processes.”131
In the AIFR’s framework, women were more likely to be introverts, and, in turn, were more complicated and problematic than their opposites. Introverts were also more likely to be unhappy in marriage, repressed, and neurasthenic, whereas extroverts were predisposed to hysteria and mania. Like females, introverts were easier to change: “you can turn an introvert out, to some extent; you can’t turn an extravert in.”132 And it was the introvert who required more expert care, in order to be “pushed out and socialized.”133 Extroverted women were often characterized as having too much “ego drive” and instructed to become more submissive and deferential. In one case
, JTA tests determined that the wife was an introvert and her husband a near polar opposite. Even though this husband was generally disengaged from social life, except for his obsession with baseball, the wife was instructed to “take him ‘as is’—he’s an extravert and she can’t change that.” In order to save the marriage, she was advised to “act as if she enjoyed the game” of baseball and take responsibility for enriching “their common life with other activities that he finds enjoyable and profitable.”134
The AIFR’s ideas about sex-gender distinctions and constitutional types reached thousands via the radio, television, and the printed lay media. Through these venues, and by promoting eugenic marriage through education, training, and directive counseling the AIFR fostered the internalization of sex and gender norms and helped to popularize biotypological understandings of human difference. Unlike other postwar eugenicists, who preached in the pages of professional journals and books about family relations, reproduction, and eugenic marriages, the institute’s activities had an immediate impact and left a lasting imprint on the intimate lives of thousands, if not millions, of Americans. One of the hallmarks of the Popenoe’s family-centric eugenics was that it encouraged Americans to absorb dominant norms by engaging in self-scrutiny and self-measurement. Seemingly impartial instruments, such as personality tests, were offered as the most reliable way for a client to take stock of her or his malaise and problems. Perhaps it was the enticement of self-revelation and realization, by simply responding to true-false or multiple choice personality profiles, that made Popenoe and the AIFR so appealing to Americans during the Atomic Age. Through reflecting on her or his performance on self-rating scorecards, a person could see “himself, as in a mirror, through his own eyes. He is not taking somebody else’s word—he has described his own personality.”135
Eugenic Nation Page 23
