For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  The “libidinal mothers” who had been working hard in the thirties and forties at not rejecting their children might have been relieved to find out that there was such a thing as overprotection. But it soon developed that a woman could be both rejecting and overprotecting at the same time—in fact if she was one, she probably was the other. Levy’s central conclusion about the over-protecting mothers was that they were all “aggressive”—in psychoanalytic terms, no light judgment, and practically an equation with “hostile” and “destructive.” Now aggression was also considered by him to be the main ingredient in the rejecting mother. Levy hypothesized that overprotection and rejection represented two alternate ways a woman might express her “unconscious hostilities.” The factor that determined which way a woman went (toward overprotection or rejection) was probably the “strength of the maternal tendency” or the amount of maternal-type hormones the woman possessed.

  Levy’s theories hung from his “data” by the slenderest of threads. Not only did his overprotective mothers fail to exhibit common personality traits—his overprotected children failed to develop a common neurosis. Follow-up studies showed there was little to differentiate the grown-up overprotected children from any other random sample of young adults. Quite a few of them, in fact, appeared to be happy and well-adjusted.§

  But all this mattered little. “Overprotection” had entered the vocabulary of the reading public and the front-line child-raising experts. The vision of the grasping, power-hungry mother frightened women into new torments of self-doubt, which were no doubt exacerbated by the fact that the malicious, overprotecting mother so closely resembled the ideal mother of just a short while before. Betty Friedan quotes Dr. Edward Strecker, consultant to the Surgeon General of the Army and Navy, describing the type of mother whom he “found guilty” for emasculating the nation’s potential soldiers:

  … From dawn until late at night she finds her happiness in doing for her children. The house belongs to them. It must be “just so”; the meals on the minute, hot and tempting … Everything is in its proper place. Mom knows where it is. Uncomplainingly, gladly, she puts things where they belong after the children have strewn them about, here, there, everywhere … Anything the children need or want, mom will cheerfully get for them. It is the perfect home … Failing to find a comparable peaceful haven in the outside world, it is quite likely that one or more of the brood will remain or return to the happy home, forever en-wombed.42

  “Overprotectiveness” became an accusation hurled not only at individual women but at whole cultures, such as the Italians and the Jews. Progressive-minded women, who tried to keep up with the latest scientific information, examined themselves anxiously for signs of this new danger. In her memoirs Margaret Mead describes her own docile reaction to Levy and his theories:

  … I had been a “baby carriage peeker,” as Dr. David Levy described the child with an absorbing interest in babies, and he identified this as one of the traits that predisposed one to become an over-protective mother. When I told him, in a telephone conversation, that I was expecting a baby, he asked, in that marvelous therapeutic voice which he could project even over the telephone, “Are you going to be an over-protective mother?” I answered, “I’m going to try not to be.…”

  Mead recalled,

  “I knew that I would have to work hard not to overprotect my child.”43

  Steering a course between the cliffs of maternal rejection and the shoals of overprotection was indeed hard work. The beautiful libidinal bond between mother and baby had turned out, under closer professional scrutiny, to be an intense libidinal conflict—in which the child’s psychological integrity, if not its very life, was at stake. Dr. Joseph Rheingold of Harvard Medical School carried the experts’ suspicions of maternal pathology to their logical extreme: every mother was subconsciously trying to kill her child. Maternal destructiveness was built into the female psyche, he wrote, and it arose from a fundamental horror of being female, which was the “basic conflict of the woman’s personality.” Having a baby confirms to a woman that indeed she is a woman and, “… To save herself she must disown motherhood by destroying the child and rejecting it. Only this extremity of fear, this infantile terror, gives rise to the self-preservative need to undo motherhood. It is kill or be killed. Most mothers do not murder or totally reject their children, but death pervades the relationship between mother and child.”44

  “Momism” and the Crisis in American Masculinity

  The experts’ disillusionment with libidinal mothering reflected a widespread anxiety that something was going wrong with America—or Americans. World War II brought the problem into sharp focus. Psychological screening methods were used for the first time by American draft boards, and over 2,000,000 men were rejected or discharged for psychiatric reasons because, according to one medical authority, they lacked “the ability to face life, live with others, think for themselves and stand on their own two feet.”45 Who was to blame? Obviously, their mothers. The spirit of the American male was being broken in babyhood.

  Betty Friedan, who lived through it, recalls the deep mood of misogyny that settled over the country in the nineteen forties, fifties, and early sixties:

  It was suddenly discovered that the mother could be blamed for almost everything. In every case history of the troubled child; alcoholic, suicidal, schizophrenic, psychopathic, neurotic adult; impotent, homosexual male; frigid, promiscuous female; ulcerous, asthmatic, and otherwise disturbed American, could be found a mother. A frustrated repressed, disturbed, martyred, never satisfied, unhappy woman. A demanding, nagging, shrewish wife. A rejecting, overprotecting, dominating mother.46

  At first sight, the American mother might seem to be an unlikely target for public expressions of misogyny. The strongest disapproval had always been reserved for the “loose” woman, the “bad” woman, or the ambitious woman who dared to break with the romantic expectations about her place and role. Psychiatrist Marynia Farnham and sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg, authors of the 1947 best-seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, a pop-Freudian diatribe against women, acknowledged that the American mother was “not a feminist or a courtesan type,”—she had been attempting to do her job as a woman. But she was still “afflicted very often with penis envy”—that unwomanly drive to power which, in the confines of the home, could only fester until it destroyed the people around her.47

  In the popular imagination, the American mother had become actually more powerful than any career woman could hope to be, and probably more powerful than her own husband. She had accepted her domesticity, but now it appeared that within the privacy of the home she had secretly been accreting more and more power unto herself: first, power over the children, and now—it seemed from a masculinist standpoint—power over the economy.

  The housewife may have been economically invisible in the accumulation-oriented economy of the nineteenth century, but in the consumption-oriented economy of the twentieth century she had become a force to be reckoned with. “Never underestimate the power of a woman,” became the Ladies’ Home Journal’s motto in the nineteen forties, and the power they were referring to was clearly purchasing power. Marketing men raved about “Woman USA: The World’s Greatest Consuming Phenomenon.” Admen aimed their psychological artillery at her. It seemed as if, by some strange quirk of history and despite the collapse of feminism in the nineteen twenties—women had taken over the country. Women had been granted the home as “their sphere, and now they had stealthily extended their dominion to the Market. A popular child-raising book from the fifties observed anxiously that the American woman “rules her husband, she rules her children, and to an ever-increasing degree she is beginning to own, if not rule, American business.”48

  The real power of housewives in the consumption economy consisted of the power to choose between Ivory and Lux, between Bendix and Westinghouse, between Cheerios and Sugar Pops. And of course the admen, the retailers, and the marketing men all conspired to stupefy her to such an extent
that even these trivial decisions were hardly hers. Nevertheless the popular wisdom advanced by novelists, cartoonists, politicians, and experts, insisted that America had not only achieved sexual equality, but had somehow overshot the mark and become a matriarchy.

  Philip Wylie, novelist and social commentator, sounded the alarm with his 1942 best-seller Generation of Vipers. The sentimental insistence on seeing Mother as a figure in a Norman Rockwell painting, perpetually bearing hot pies to the table, had blinded men to her true nature—which was cunning, ruthless, and power-hungry. And while American men had foolishly held the doors open for them, the mothers of the land had rushed in and staged a cultural coup d’état. America had its own dictator, as vicious as any produced by European fascism, and her name was Mom:

  … megaloid momworship has got completely out of hand. Our land, subjectively mapped, would have more silver cords and apron strings criss-crossing it than railroads and telephone wires. Mom is everywhere and everything and damned near everybody, and from her depends all the rest of the U.S. Disguised as good old mom, dear old mom, sweet old mom, your loving mom, and so on, she is the bride at every funeral and the corpse at every wedding.49

  The accusative “Mom,” coined by Wylie, quickly bounced upward into the language of professional acceptability. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson for example, accepted “Momism” as if it were a scientific diagnostic term coined by clinical researchers, and offered this devastating analysis:

  … “Mom” is a woman in whose life cycle remnants of infantility join advanced senility to crowd out the middle range of mature womanhood, which thus becomes self-absorbed and stagnant.50

  The towering figure of “Mom” reflected no change in the social and occupational position of women, which, if anything, had reached a nadir for the twentieth century. Behind the hatred and fear of the mother was a growing sense that men had somehow lost power—that they were no longer “real men.”

  The end of World War II brought millions of men to sudden consciousness of their situation: they had been away for months or years in the most masculine endeavor of all, where nothing counted more than male solidarity, stamina, and “balls.” Then one day sometime after the war had ended, the American male woke up to find himself driving a blue Ford (like the hundreds of others on the highway) between a job he found no meaning in and a tract house he could identify only by looking at the street number. Thus the flip side of the megalomaniac Mom was the degraded Dad—the mid-century middle-class man who sensed that he was powerless, a conformist, adrift in a world that had no use for his manhood.

  The mid-twentieth-century masculinity crisis hit the middle class—which the experts themselves belonged to—hardest. A generation ago the growing urban middle class had seen a heroic role for themselves as the tamers and “rationalizers” of capitalist society. They had carved out the professions and made themselves indispensable to industry as managers, lawyers, and researchers. Now their sons faced a world that, if anything, seemed to be overly mechanized, rationalized, and organized. Research had been bureau-cratized during the war; medicine was increasingly organized around the large, bureaucratic hospital; universities were becoming more like corporations; and corporations themselves were becoming more like medium-size nations, with vast and intricate systems of internal government. William H. Whyte wrote that the bureau-cratization of the work world was calling forth a new type of man—the “organization man”:

  Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierachy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory.51

  The classic description of the change in American manhood was David Riesman’s 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd. Earlier Americans, he argued, had been “inner-directed”—self-motivated achievers spurred by the Protestant work ethic. But “… the ‘scarcity psychology’ of many inner directed people, which was socially adaptive during the period of heavy capital accumulation … needs to give way to an ‘abundance psychology’ capable of ‘wasteful’ luxury consumption of leisure and of the surplus product.”52 The new “other-directed” men of post-accumulation capitalism were relaxed consumers and adaptable bureaucratic workers. No inner drive to achieve propelled them, no obsessions lurked in their subconscious minds—they wanted only to “get along” at work and cash in their earnings for a private life of suburban leisure.

  The decline in ambitious individualism documented by Whyte and Riesman did not go unlamented. To a not inconsiderable extent the emergence of the bureaucratic order seemed to be an attack on maleness itself. Liberal and conservative alike, social commentators studied the American man with distaste. They found him “absurd,” and “alienated.” He was the man in the gray flannel suit, the cog in the machine, and worst of all, they were him, or rapidly becoming so. Yet the corporation was so comfortable, so safe, so secure, that according to novelist Alan Harrington you gradually swallow your self-disgust and

  … become accustomed to the Utopian drift. Soon another inhibition may make you even more amenable. If you have been in easy circumstances for a number of years, you feel that you are out of shape. Even in younger men the hard muscle of ambition tends to go slack, and you hesitate to take a chance in the jungle again.… Apparently when you remove fear from a man’s life you also remove his stinger.‖ 53

  For men who had nothing to fear at work but the loss of their “stinger,” home offered the only chance of masculine redemption. The “collectivized” work world no longer provided a sure sense of maleness; perhaps private life—suitably augmented with power tools, do-it-yourself hobbies, and home-repair projects—could make things right. Wasn’t a man’s home his castle—the only place he could count on to give him a feeling of individuality, autonomy, and control? But, unfortunately for all concerned, someone had gotten there ahead of him—the American woman.

  The American housewife, as so many GIs noted with disappointment on their return, was no geisha girl or French coquette. She was a busy mother, housekeeper, and household finance manager. In the small space of the home, her much-vaunted economic power had some real meaning. It was the husband’s job to earn, but it was her job to spend. And in a consumer society centered on private life, her job often seemed more important. From the vantage point of the home, all that mattered about the man’s job was the size of the check it produced, and this the housewife stood prepared to measure against all the family’s needs, wants, and expectations. Did he bring home seventy-eight dollars a week? Then there might be a baby-sitter for Saturday night but no vacation trip. Did he bring home two hundred dollars? Then there would be summer camp for the kids but no new furniture until next year. So long as she did the buying and budgeting, it was largely her decision. After all, private life was supposed to be the “woman’s sphere.” Now men were furious to find women dominating the home, and there was nowhere to tell them to go.

  Mass culture became obsessed with the diminution of the American male. In cartoons, the average male was shorter than his wife, who habitually entered the frame in curlers, wielding a rolling pin over her cowering husband. TV squeezed the American male’s diminished sense of manhood for whatever laughs—or thrills—were left. The domesticated Dad, who was most hilarious when he tried to be manly and enterprising, was the butt of all the situation comedies. Danny Thomas, Ozzie Nelson, Robert Young, and (though not a father) Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners, were funny only as pint-size caricatures of the patriarchs, frontiersmen, and adventurers who once defined American manhood. Meanwhile, cowboy shows provided men with an escape into a world where men were men, and women were—absent. In literature, Norman Mailer glorified America’s suppressed masculinity as a subversive principle which might overthrow “the system” as well as the dominating woman. (Two of the most memorable novels of female domin
ation and male revolt were written in the sixties: Portnoy’s Complaint [1969] and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest [1962].)

  Psychomedical science was quick to ratify the idea that women were dominating the American male. With their usual anatomical precision, the experts announced that American women were, in fact, castrating men. “The ‘Battle of the Sexes’ is a reality,” wrote Farnham and Lundberg, “and one of its results has been rather extensive psychological castration of the male.”55 Naturally the combat that most concerned the child-raising experts was the unequally matched one between the mother—now known to the world of science as well as to the misogynist-on-the-street as “Mom”—and her little boy. Science had already concluded that the mother-child relationship was full of mortal dangers for the child. In the light of mid-century misogyny, it became clear that what was at stake, in the case of the sons, was not only life and sanity, but something even more precious—their manhood.

  The Obligatory Oedipus Complex

  By the mid-twentieth century the experts were grimly acknowledging that despite their constant vigilance the American mother was failing at her job. There was only one person to turn to now, and that was the long-neglected father. Parent advice articles in the media began to feature titles like “What Every Father Should Know,” “Let Daddy Take Over!” and “Men Make Wonderful Mothers.” But as the experts made abundantly clear, Dad was not being called home just to “help out.” He was needed to protect the children, and especially the sons. Levy, the discoverer of “overprotection,” believed that overprotected patients had to “fight” for release from the mother. “When the father entered the picture,” he observed in one study, “the patient had an ally in this battle.”56 By returning to active duty in the home, a man could defend his children and at the same time regain his own endangered masculinity.