Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  The Second Sex, the Kinsey reports, and Human Sexual Response all helped change attitudes. But they were themselves also the fruit of an attitude change that was already taking place. In Britain, this change was particularly acute owing to the war. During wartime, for example, there was in Britain a marked rise in illegitimate births, from 11.8 percent in 1942 to 14.9 percent in 1945.36 At the same time, a shortage of rubber meant that sheaths (as condoms were then called) and caps were both in short supply and substandard. Simultaneously, the main problem in the family Planning Association was subfertility. There was so much concern that, in 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast to the nation about the need to encourage ‘our people … by every means to have large families.’ This worry eventually led to the appointment, in 1944, of a Royal Commission on Population. This did not report until 1949, by which time concerns – and behaviour – had changed. The commission found, for example, that in fact, after falling continuously for half a century, family size in Britain had been comparatively stable for twenty years, at about 2.2 children per married couple, which meant a slow population increase over time.37 But it also became clear to the commission that although central government did not seem concerned about birth control (there was no provision in the new National Health Service, for example, for family planning clinics), the population at large, especially women, did take the matter very seriously indeed; they well understood the link between numbers of children and the standard of living, and they had accordingly extended their knowledge of contraception. This was yet another area of sexual behaviour where there had been many private initiatives, though no one was aware of the wider picture. In particular, the commission concluded that ‘the permeation of the small family system through nearly all classes had to be regarded as a fundamental adjustment to modern conditions in which the most significant feature was the gradual acceptance of control over the size of one’s family, particularly by means of contraception, as a normal part of personal responsibility.’38

  Artificial contraception was an issue that split the church. The Anglican Church voted to approve it in 1918, but the Roman Catholic Church has not done so yet. So it is an especially poignant fact that Dr John Rock, the chief of obstetrics and gynaecology at Harvard Medical School and the man who, in 1944, became the first scientist to fertilise a human egg in a test tube and was one of the first to freeze a human sperm for up to a year without impairing its potency, was a Catholic. His initial aim was to effect the opposite of contraception, and help infertile women conceive.39 Rock believed that administering the female hormones progesterone and oestrogen might stimulate conception but also stabilise the menstrual cycle, enabling all religious couples to use the theologically sound ‘rhythm method.’40 Unfortunately the action of these hormones was only partly understood – progesterone, for example, worked because it inhibited ovulation, but exactly how was not clear. But what Rock did notice was that when he administered progesterone to a number of so-called infertile women, although the progesterone didn’t appear to work at first, a substantial number became pregnant as soon as the treatment was stopped.41 Enlisting the aid of Dr Gregory Pincus, a Harvard biologist also interested in infertility, he eventually established that a combination of oestrogen and progesterone suppressed gonadotrophic activity and consequently prevented ovulation. Conception therefore could be prevented by taking the chemicals on the right days, so that the normal process of menstruation was interfered with. In 1956 the first clinical trials were organised by Rock and Pincus among two hundred women in Puerto Rico, since birth control was still unlawful in Massachusetts.42 When the nature of his work became known, there were attempts to have Rock excommunicated, but in 1957 the Food and Drug Administration in the United States approved the Rock-Pincus pid for treating women with menstrual disorders. Another trial followed, this time with a sample of nearly nine hundred women, the results of which were so promising that on 10 May 1960 the FDA sanctioned the use of Enovid, a birth-control pid manufactured by G. D. Searle & Co. in Chicago.43 The development rated two inches in the New York Times, but it was enough: by the end of 1961 some 400,000 American women were taking the pid, and that number doubled the next year and the year after that. By 1966 six million American women were on the pid, and the same number across the rest of the world.44 Some idea of the immediate success of the pid can be had from the British statistics. (Britain had a long tradition of family planning, with well-informed and proselytising volunteers, a residue of the benign end of the eugenics movement in the early years of the century. This made its statistics excellent.) In 1960, in family Planning Association clinics, 97.5 percent of new birth control clients were advised to use the cap (the pid wasn’t available in Britain until 1961); by 1975, 58 percent were advised to use the pid.45 What the research into sexual statistics showed above all was that public perceptions of intimate behaviour were, by and large, wrong, outdated. People had been changing privately, silently, in countless small ways that nonetheless added up to a sexual revolution. This is why de Beauvoir, Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson had sold so wed; there was the thrill of recognition among the hundreds of thousands who bought their books.

  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

  25

  THE NEW HUMAN CONDITION

  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 genera
tions. 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