In the post-war period the experts mapped out two key functions for Dad in the home. One had to do with sex: only sex could drain off the poisonous energies Mom might otherwise direct at her children, and of course, only Dad could provide the sex. The other had to do with gender: left to herself, Mom would produce emasculated males and equally Mom-ish females. According to expert theory, only Dad could undo the damage and guide the boys toward manliness and the girls toward true womanliness. It was a brilliant stroke—calling in Dad to perform these tasks. Not only would the children be saved, or so the experts hoped, but something would at last be found for poor old Dad to do—a job which was not make-work, like puttering with tools, and was not women’s work, like drying the dishes, but was quintessentially male. “Being a real father is not ‘sissy’ business,” a psychiatrist wrote in Parents’ Magazine in 1947, “It is not an avocation, a hobby to be pursued in spare moments. It is an occupation. And for the father and his children, it is the most important occupation in the world and for the world.”57
Levy had been one of the first to hypothesize that sex might be necessary not only for the conception of children, but for the successful raising of them. Levy argued that a woman could protect herself and her children from overprotectiveness by immersing herself in heterosexual femininity:
A wife devoted to her husband cannot be exclusively a mother. In a more fundamental sense, the release of libido through satisfactory sexual relationship shunts off energy that must otherwise flow in other directions—in the case of our group, in the direction of maternity. The child must bear the brunt of the unsatisfied love life of the mother. One might theoretically infer that a woman sexually well adjusted could not become overprotective to an extreme degree.58
From Levy’s hypothesis in 1943 the idea matured into this self-confident assertion in a 1959 child-care book:
The truly feminine mother, fulfilled in her marriage to a truly masculine father, does not overprotect, dominate, or over-fondle her children. She lets them judiciously alone. She knows exactly what they need of food, shelter or clothing, because she waits until they tell her.…59
It followed that it was the husband’s duty as a father to keep his wife sexually satisfied:
A man who is a good lover to his wife is his children’s best friend.… Child care is play to a woman who is happy. And only a man can make a woman happy. In deepest truth, a father’s first duty to his children is to make their mother feel fulfilled as a woman.60
Good sex had been discovered as the antidote to bad mothering. It cured Momism and overprotectiveness, rejection of the female role, and disparagement of the father. Furthermore, the experts suggested subtly, it could act as a preventative against future male homosexuality. “That mother-bound boy, so uncreative in work and love, is a casualty of his mother’s mismating.”61
From the thirties to the fifties the sexologists spawned a brood of marriage manuals, directed primarily at husbands, which alerted them to the need for wifely satisfaction and instructed (or misinstructed) them in the techniques to bring it about. While the husband was reading the marriage manual, the wife was reading the child-care book, and they both got the same message. Marital sex was not only permissible, it was obligatory. Sex, in fact, had a therapeutic function for the whole family. “Your Sexual Happiness Is Your Child’s Emotional Security” blared a chapter title in the parent’s guide quoted above, declaring “The happy lovers are the potentially effective parents … Unless you love each other, you cannot really love your children!”62
On the one hand, the linking of sex and parenthood was a tremendous breakthrough for women. Recall the late-nineteenth-century denial (and fear) of female sexuality. Now the experts were not only acknowledging female sexuality, but welcoming it as they insisted that it was the husband’s duty to satisfy it. But there was also a hint of a threat to women in the new insistence on marital joy. At no time was a woman to “let herself go” in terms of grooming or dress—lest she cease to be “feminine.” Apparently this stricture applied even to the primal act of childbirth. In Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, Priss Crockett has just given birth to her son Stephen:
She was wearing a pale blue bed jacket, and her thin ashy hair was set in waves; the student nurse had done it for her that morning. On her lips, which were dry, was a new shade of lipstick, by Tussy; her doctor had ordered her to put on lipstick and powder right in the middle of labor; he and Sloan [her husband, Dr. Sloan Crockett, a pediatrician] both thought it was important for a maternity patient to keep herself up to the mark.… She would have been more comfortable in the short cotton hospital nightshirt that tied in back, but the floor nurses every morning made her struggle into a satin-and-lace “nightie” from her trousseau. Doctors orders, they said.63
The woman who didn’t make the effort to be sexy and feminine at all times might not only damage her children; she might lose her husband. “Husbands are often neglected,” wrote child-raising expert Goodman. “Some of them feel pretty bad about this, though they don’t say much. Some go wandering, and that’s never good. Smart wives see to it that it doesn’t happen.”64 In fact, the kind of sex being recommended at this time was actually almost wholly husband-centered: vaginal penetration with little attention to the clitoris. (Freudian theory branded clitoral sexuality as “immature”—more on this in the next chapter.) The “smart wife” would just have to pretend that she liked it. “It is good advice to recommend to the women the advantage of innocent simulation of sex responsiveness,” a 1952 gynecology text advised doctors, “and as a matter of fact many women in their desire to please their husbands learned the advantage of such innocent deception.”65 [Emphasis added.]
What was really supposed to save the children was not the sex itself, but the wife’s efforts to remain sexually attractive to her husband. Thus the marriage of sex and parenthood laid the basis for a new “energy economy” for the American family: the wife would work hard to be attractive and thus hold the husband in the home. The husband in turn would strive to make the wife feel more womanly so that she could face her children with a serene, laissez-faire attitude. As a result, the female energy which might have destroyed the children would be safely shunted off into marital coquetry, and everyone, presumably, would be happy. In the nineteen fifties this arrangement was celebrated as “togetherness.”
Having sex with Mom was just the first step in Dad’s new task of preventing her from messing up the kids. His second important function was to use a firm hand to guide the kids toward their proper sexual identifications—masculinity for the boys and femininity for the girls. His function as a sex partner contributed to this of course, by draining off some of the maternal energies which might have gone into overprotecting—hence emasculating—the sons. But if the family was once again to produce “real men” and “real women,” a little more fine tuning was called for. In the nineteen forties and fifties sociologists, psychologists, and child-raising experts became obsessed by the problem of “socializing” children into their appropriate “gender” or “sex role.”
Previous generations had not even bothered to distinguish “sex” from “gender,” so complacent were they that people’s behavior would end up matching their genital organs. “Boys will be boys,” went the comfortable old adage, as if masculinity were a genetic potential which would simply unfold in time. (If there was any problem, it was with the girls, whose brains, as we recall, could undo the influence of the uterus and ovaries.) But from the midst of the mid-century masculinity crisis things did not seem so simple. Any lingering hopes of biological predestination were destroyed by anthropologists’ reports of cultures where women did “masculine” things, like engaging in trade, and men did “feminine” things like watching the children. While old-fashioned psychoanalysts clung to “maternal instinct” and other innate sex-linked drives, social psychologists, sociologists, and behaviorist psychologists took the less biological position that sex identification was not natural—it had to be learned. You
were born with a sex, but not with a gender. In the new terminology coined at the interface of psychology and sociology, gender-appropriate behavior was not something built into your genes or etched on your neural circuitry by hormonal tides—it was a “role,” like a part in a high school play.
But scientists agreed that sex roles were not something that could be learned as easily as the Latin declensions or the names of the presidents. Sex roles obviously sank deeper, becoming part of the self in a permanent way. Certainly, mere knowledge about sex roles was not enough, as one expert noted with concern:
There are many individuals who have knowledge of sex-role norms but prefer to behave in an opposite sex manner. For example, a boy can be aware that he is a male and possess knowledge about sex-typed toys yet prefer to play with girls’ toys.66
So the experts agreed that sex roles would have to be inculcated. Child-raising advice books began to pay more and more attention to instructing the parents in how to produce the appropriate sex roles in their children. The first step, obviously, was for the parents to get a tight grip on their own sex roles, so they could provide “role models” for their children. “Live Your Gender!” exhorts a chapter title in the 1959 child-raising book cited before. “What kind of parents are best for children?” the author demands of his readers. “Manly men and womanly women. They provide a harmonious home and a sound heredity.”67 Lundberg and Farnham asserted that girls would have little problem so long as the mother was in the home, performing womanly functions:
… it is her mother’s grasp on femininity on which the girl chiefly depends … If the girl has the good fortune to have a mother who finds complete satisfaction, without conflict or anxiety, in living out her role as wife and mother, it is unlikely that she will experience serious difficulties.68
With boys it was a slightly more difficult problem, since the traditional male sex role involved not being present in the home at all, at least not enough to be a successful role model. Experts agreed that fathers would have to be present occasionally to play their part in sex-role production. More important than the amount of time he spent at home, though, was the father’s strict adherence to the masculine role while he was present: “Imitation of the father enhances the boy’s masculine development only if the father displays masculine behavior in the presence of his son.”69 [!] He should spend time with his children to be sure, but yet not get so involved in domestic affairs as to undermine the value of his presence by confusing the children as to his sex role:
A crucial factor in the father-present boy’s masculine development is the degree to which his father exhibits masculine behavior … adolescent boys low in masculinity of interests often came from homes in which the father played a traditionally feminine role. The fathers of these boys took over such activities as cooking and household chores.…70
In practice, the problem of what sort of masculine behavior the father should “display” or “exhibit” (like the plumage of a male bird) was solved by sports. The world of sports became a sort of all-male subdrama within the larger family sex-role performance—the only setting where fathers could pass on the ancient male values of competitiveness, male solidarity, and physical prowess. Besides, unlike work, or religious duties, or the tasks of citizenship (all integral aspects of an earlier male experience) sports appealed to the permissively raised, pleasure-oriented boys. The new masculine ideal of fatherhood was not the patriarch, but the “pal.” “The emergence of the father as an imp of fun,” Jules Henry observed about life in the fifties, “is a revolution in our time.”71
Parents had to do more than provide sex-role models, though. They had to actively guide the children toward the proper roles, and in this endeavor the father turned out to be far superior to the mother, despite the relatively small amount of time he put in with the kids. According to Talcott Parsons, “dean” of American sociology and author of most of the seminal sex-role theory, fathers (and men generally) play “instrumental” roles in society, meaning they serve technical, executive, and judicial functions. Mothers were “expressive”—emotional, supportive, and nurturing. Being “instrumental,” or rationally in control of themselves, fathers were able to act differently with their sons and daughters in ways which would condition masculinity and femininity respectively. As one psychologist explained Parsons’ theory:
… the mother has a primarily expressive relationship with both boys and girls; in contrast, the father rewards his male and female children differently, encouraging instrumental behavior in his son and expressive behavior in his daughter. The father is supposed to be the principal transmitter of culturally based conceptions of masculinity and femininity.72
Thus a competently instrumental father could make up for the harmful effects of even an unfeminine mother.
The sociologist’s terminology—“transmitter,” “instrumental”—made the imposition of gender sound more like a problem in engineering than an issue in human psychic development. But there was a deeper, emotional level, the sociologically oriented experts conceded, though this too could be understood and manipulated. Talcott Parsons explained that people assume their roles in order to satisfy their deeper “relational needs.” For example, a little girl has a relational need to be loved: she learns that if she takes on the feminine sex role she will be loved and that she will not be loved if she takes on the role of a man. The purpose of the family as a small social system, in Parsonian language, was to tailor the girl’s social options to her relational needs in such a way that the appropriate role-outcomes occurred. In simpler terms, parents could turn on a little heterosexual charm to coax along the kids’ sex-role development. Spock wrote: “I’m thinking of the little things he [the father] can do, like complimenting her on her dress, or hair-do, or the cookies she’s made.”73
These little cross-sex, cross-age flirtations which were so essential for sex-role socialization could never go on in a well-run nursery school or first grade. Only the family could provide the appropriate Oedipal nest for the hatching of infant gender identities. Parsons and the host of child-raising experts who followed him not only acknowledged the Oedipus and Elektra complexes, they virtually insisted that families should provide them for their children. Boys would not become men unless they fell in love with their mothers and then gradually shifted their allegiance to the father; girls would not become women unless they competed with their mothers for a heterosexual attachment to the father, and so on.
In this melding of psychoanalytic theory with sociological role theory, a funny thing happened to the Oedipus Complex. Freud had conceived it as a psychic crisis so profoundly disturbing that its memory could only be unearthed by psychoanalysis, and then only after breaking through layers of resistance and denial. In Freud’s theory, the little boy automatically forms an initial erotic attachment to his mother. But he is rudely awakened from this incestuous fantasy by the powerful figure of the father, who (in the boy’s subconscious mind) threatens castration if the boy should attempt to act on his desires. As a result of this traumatic insight, the boy abandons his subversive goal of sleeping with the mother and patterns his behavior on the father, who is, after all, the most powerful figure around. Girls went through a somewhat parallel, but less intense “Elektra Complex,” in which they learned that they could not become the father, and would have to settle for his love. But now that the Oedipus Complex and its female counterpart, the Elektra Complex, were seen as ordinary stages in “sex-role socialization,” the drama lost its tragic quality, not to mention its shock value. Parsons and his followers managed to transform Freud’s stormy epic into an orderly series of functional necessities.
Parents would have to gently direct the child through the steps of the Complex. Children who were a bit slow to want to kill the parent of the same sex and marry the parent of the opposite sex would need a little coaching. Baby books rushed to print with the plot and characters of the drama, complete with suggested lines and entrance and exit cues. Here are typical instructions fr
om Dr. Spock:
We believe that a boy’s attraction to his mother in the three-to-six-year-old period is vital in establishing an idealistic romantic pattern for his future life as an adult … [But in] the ordinary family he is prevented from feeling that he can have her all to himself by three interrelated factors: his awe of his father, his realization that his mother’s romantic love belongs to her husband, her tactful refusal to let the boy become too intensely affectionate toward her in a physical sense.74
The reformulation of the Oedipus Complex as a hygienic family routine went hand in hand with the new realities of American manhood. Dad the “organization man” and domestic “imp of fun” was hardly a model of male mastery (if he had been, the experts wouldn’t have found it necessary to legislate the Oedipus Complex in the first place). He was still given a starring role in the drama. But he would have been miscast in the part of the vengeful patriarch. In the new social-psychological child-raising theory, Dad was simply a skilled domestic sex-role engineer doing his job. This job was to coax the daughter into feminine sex-role identification and rescue the son from the erotic thralldom of the mother—not with the threat of castration (as it went in the original script), but perhaps with two tickets to a Yankees game.
By the mid-fifties child-raising theory had become so dependent on the father that the experts could only contemplate the “father-absent” situation with alarm and confusion. In the paternally deprived home, the full dramatic burden of the family sex-role performance would fall upon the woman. But this did not mean that she should take on a masculine, instrumental role in child-raising—far from it: the absence of a father required her to ham up her feminine sex-role performance even more: “… even in a father’s absence, an appropriately identified mother will respond to the boy ‘as if’ he were a male [sic] and will expect him to treat her as a male would treat a female.”75 Dr. Spock even suggested that the very helplessness felt by the single mother confronted with the task of raising sons could be turned to good account, since to admit inadequacy was to be more fully a woman:
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 29