Monday, February 27, 2006
Destructive Women and Little Men:
During the early decades of the twentieth century, American women's social, political, and economic opportunities seemed to broaden dramatically. More and more young women entered higher education and the professions (1), while Progressive-era reform work and the women's-club movement offered a chance for married women also to enter the public sphere.
At no time did lasting change in gender roles seem more likely than in the 1910s, the final decade of the suffrage drive. The vote was not the only potential gain for women during this era: radicals who called themselves "feminists" pushed for reforms in the institution of marriage, the American popularity of the works of Freud prompted a public acknowledgement of women's sexuality, and a new birth-control movement enabled women to express that sexuality more freely and safely.
The same period saw extensive public discourse on the role of men in American society as well. This national preoccupation with masculinity--what historian John Higham called "a muscular spirit" in America (2)--was a response partly to women's advances and partly to racial and ethnic population changes due to massive waves of immigration. New organizations such as the Boy Scouts embraced President Theodore Roosevelt's vision of the "strenuous life" to help boys and men avoid becoming "over-civilized." Experts in the new social science of psychology believed that athletics and outdoor adventure would help to remove young men from the "feminizing" influence of overbearing mothers and female schoolteachers. (3)
During the 1910s, Americans' hopes for, and anxieties about, changing gender roles were frequently debated in magazine and newspaper articles. These concerns also provided a recurrent theme for visual communication. The spectre of a world in which domineering and destructive women emasculated weak and powerless men inspired a distinctive motif that ran through various forms of popular culture: the pairing of large (though usually beautiful) women and little, often tiny, men. While this motif was always presented as a joke, it never was only a joke.
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