How common culture shapes the separate lives: Sexuality, Race, and Mid-twentieth-century social constructionist thought

Journal of American History

Volumn 96, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 1057-1084

  Meyerowitz, Joanne ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77957878138     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/96.4.1057     Document Type: Article

References (229)

1. Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wan (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 66-134;
2. Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley, 1998);
3. John P. Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case against Segregation (New York, 2001);
4. Peggy Pascoe, "Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of'Race' in Twentieth-Century America," Journal of American History 83 (June 1996), 44-69;
5. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (Chapel Hill, 1997);
6. Alice O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton, 2002).
7. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944);
8. United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, "Statement by Experts on Race Problems," July 20, 1950, UNESCO Documents and Publications, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001269/ 126969eb.pdf, Brown v. Board of Education, 3A7 U.S. 483 (1954).
9. W. H. Auden, "Heavy Date," 1939, in Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944, by W.H. Auden(London, 1950), 116.
10. A few recent works have pointed to the interlinked construction of race and sexualiry in early and mid-twentieth-century social science, especially in sociological thought. See, for example, Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York, 2001);
11. and Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis, 2004).
12. For recent works that look at other conjoined and overlapping constructions of race and sexuality in modern U.S. history, see, for example, Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, 2000);
13. Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, 2000);
14. Nayan Shah, "Between 'Oriental Depravity' and 'Natural Degenerates': Spatial Borderlands and the Making of Ordinary Americans," American Quarterly 57 (Sept. 2005), 703-25;
15. Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940 (Durham, 2007);
16. and Chad Heap, Slumming Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (Chicago, 2009).
17. By biopolitics, I refer to policies or policy prescriptions that aimed to manage, regulate, or administer the life and health of populations. This definition is influenced by Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol. 1: An Introduction (New York, 1978), 133-60.
18. For an interesting account of the eighteenth-century shift toward biological explanations, see Dror Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 2004).
19. For a historiographic essay on eugenics, see Frank Dikötter, "Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics," American Historical Review, 103 (April 1998), 467-78.
20. For other recent works on eugenics in the United States, see Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley, 2001);
21. Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, 2002);
22. Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis, 2003);
23. and Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontien of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley, 2005).
24. For a book that looks at (non-eugenic) behaviorist "human engineering," see Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York, 2005).
25. "Anthropologist Finds Psychological Seed of War in Baby Spanking," Boston Sunday Globe, Jan. 5, 1941, p. 2;
26. David J. Dallin, "Exterminate the Russians?," New Leader, Oct. 29, 1949, p. 2.
27. See, for example, Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas, 1963), esp. 409-30;
28. George W Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (1968; Chicago, 1982);
29. Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York, 1991), 59-211;
30. Barkan, Retreat of Scientific Racism, 66-134;
31. Baker, From Savage to Negro;
32. and John P. Jackson Jr. and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (Santa Barbara, 2004).
33. See, for example, Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (New York, 1981);
34. Kenneth Lewes, Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality (1988; Northvale, 1995);
35. and Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999).
36. Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament (New York, 1935), 280.
37. For the term "social inheritance," see, for example, Edward Sapir, "The Race Problem," Nation, July 1, 1925, p. 40.
38. Margaret Mead (and other culture-and-personality scholars) never entirely repudiated the "nature" side of the nature/nurture debate. They did not deny that biology might have some influence on some human behaviors or traits. Mead gave her strongest endorsements to cultural determinism in the late 1920s and 1930s; as many have noted, she retreated from it somewhat in the 1940s and after. Nonetheless, for Mead and her colleagues, human malleability and the primary influence of culture remained the central tenets of the culture-and-personality vision. Theirs was a liberal (not a postmodern) approach: they questioned biological determinism, but they rarely questioned biology or nature itself.
39. Edward Sapir, "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 27 (Oct.Dec. 1932), 233.
40. See also Edward Sapir, "The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures," Journal of Social Psychology 5 (Aug. 1934), 408-15;
41. and Edward Sapir, "Why Cultural Anthropology Needs the Psychiatrist," Psychiatry 1 (Feb. 1938), 7-12.
42. On the culture-and-personality school, see Milton Singer, "A Survey of Culture and Personality Theory and Research," in Studying Personality Cross-Culturally ed. Bert Kaplan (Evanston, 1961), 9-90.
43. For one attempt to spell out the culture-and-personality "unified theory of social science," see the 1943 article Geoffrey Gorer, "Themes in Japanese Culture," in Personal Character and Cultural Milieu: A Collection of Readings, ed. Douglas G. Haring (Syracuse, 1949), 274-75.
44. For recent historical commentaries, see George W. Stocking Jr., ed., Malinowski, Riven, Benedict, and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality (Madison, 1986);
45. John S. Gilkeson Jr., "The Domestication of' Culture' in Interwar America, 1919-1941," in The Estate of Social Knowledge, ed. JoAnne Brown and David K. Van Keuren (Baltimore, 1991), 153-74;
46. and Mari Jo Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents: A Century of Struggle with Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 85-164.
47. Of the core group listed above, the immigrants included the anthropologists Gregory Bateson, Ashley Montagu, and Edward Sapir, the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst Karen Horney, and the social psychologist Otto Klineberg. Those of Jewish descent included the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer and psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner as well as Fromm, Klineberg, Montagu, and Sapir. The women included the anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Cora DuBois, and Mead as well as Horney. Those who identified as gay and lesbian or who were identified as such by their contemporaries and historians included the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan as well as Benedict, DuBois, and (with some speculation, then and now) Gorer. Mead had sexual relationships with women as well as men. The most central and best-known figures in the culture-and-personality networks were white, but also involved were a few people of color, including the sociologist and lay analyst Bingham Dai, who was Chinese, and the (male) anthropologist and psychologist Allison Davis, who was African American. The core culture-andpersonality figures also worked with, influenced, and were influenced by a wide array of other well-known authors and scholars, including (but not limited to) child development expert and social science impresario Lawrence Frank, anthropologists A. Irving Hallowell, Melville Herskovits, Clyde Kluckhohn, Anthony F. C. Wallace, and John and Beatrice Whiting, political scientist Harold Lasswell, psychoanalysts Erik Erikson, David M. Levy, and Clara Thompson, psychologists Kurt Lewin and Henry Murray, and sociologists E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and Talcott Parsons.
48. I borrow the terms "deprovincializing" and " cosmopolitan" from David Hollinger's discussion of Jewish intellectuals, including Franz Boas and many of his students. See David A. Hollinger, Stience, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996), 24.
49. David A. Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison, 2006), 160-84, esp. 170.
50. See also F. H. Matthews, "The Revolt against Americanism: Cultural Pluralism and Cultural Relativism as an Ideology of Liberation," Canadian Review of American Studies, 1 (Spring 1970), 4-31.
51. For works (not yet cited in earlier footnotes) that acknowledge culture-and-personality influence in various areas, see Carleton Mabee, "Margaret Mead and Behavioral Scientists in World War II: Problems in Responsibility, Truth, and Effectiveness," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 23 (Jan. 1987), 3-13;
52. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley, 1995), 17-47;
53. Naoko Shibusawa, America's Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 60-62;
54. Diana Selig, Americans All The Cultural Gifts Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), 258-59;
55. Philip Gleason, "World War II and the Development of American Studies," American Quarterly 36 (no. 3, 1984), 343-58;
56. Jonathan Zimmerman, Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (Cambridge, Mass., 2006);
57. Julia Grant, Raising Baby by the Book: The Education of American Mothen (New Haven, 1998), 219-20;
58. and Deborah F. Weinstein, "Culture at Work: Family Therapy and the Culture Concept in Post-World War II America," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 40 (Winter 2004), 23-46.
59. The first of Benjamin Spock's child rearing books was Benjamin Spock, Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (New York, 1946).
60. On the modernist sexual revolt, see Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York, 2000);
61. and Christina Simmons, Making Marriage Modern: Women's Sexuality from the Progressive Era to World War II (New York, 2009).
62. On sexuality in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury anthropological writings, see Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons, Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality (Lincoln, 2004).
63. For an influential work, see, for example, Edward Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (London, 1891).
64. Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (New York, 1927), 77;
65. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York, 1928), 158;
66. Bronislaw Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (London, 1929), 200.
67. On Bronislaw Malinowski and Mead, see Lyons and Lyons, Irregular Connections.
68. George W Stocking Jr., "Essays on Culture and Personality," in Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others, ed. Stocking, 7;
69. Havelock Ellis, "Preface," in Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, by Malinowski, xiii; Paul Palmer to Bronislaw Malinowski, Oct. 30, 1935,
70. Malinowski Correspondence, film no. 129 (microfilm: frame 61, reel 1), Bronislaw Malinowski Papers (Manuscript and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.). An undated ditty on Mead points to the same inverted hierarchy: "Margaret Mead, Margaret Mead/Helps to fill our country's need/Thinks our culture is much lower/Than the one that's in Samoa." Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (New York, 1984), 270.
71. Francis L. K. Hsu, "The Cultural Problem of the Cultural Anthropologist," American Anthropologist, 81 (Sept. 1979), 571-32;
72. Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Othen, American Modernity (Chicago, 1998);
73. Louise Michele Newman, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York, 1999), 158-80.
74. For racist comments by Malinowski, see, for example, Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (Stanford, 1989), 69, 272, 279.
75. Phyllis Blanchard, "Homosexuality: Ancient and Modern," in Our Neurotic Age: A Consultation, ed. Samuel D. Schmalhausen (New York, 1932), 181;
76. Franz Boas to Margaret Mead, July 14, 1925, in An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict, ed. Margaret Mead (Boston, 1959), 289.
77. On Mead's relationships with women, see Lois W. Banner, Intertwined Liva: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circk (New York, 2003).
78. On the changing meanings of "romantic friendships" in the twentieth century, see Estelle B. Freedman, "'The Burning of Letters Continues': Elusive Identities and the Historical Construction ofSexuality," Journal of 'Women's History 9 (Winter 1998), 181-200.
79. Bronislaw Malinowski, "Aping the Ape; Or, an Anthropologist Looks at the Modern World from His Primitive Cave-Dwelling," in Sex, Culture, and Myth, ed. Bronislaw Malinowski (New York, 1962), 112, 111;
80. Malinowski, Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, 398, 401-2.
81. On Malinowski's heterosexuality, see Michael W. Young, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920 (New Haven, 2004).
82. Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, 285, 147-49.
83. For more on Mead's views of sexuality in this book, and in her other books from the early 1930s, see Maureen A. Molloy, On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism (Honolulu, 2008).
84. Edward Sapir, "Observations on the Sex Problem in America," American Journal of Psychiatry 8 (Nov. 1928), 519-34, esp. 522-23, 529;
85. Edward Sapir to Ruth Benedict, April 29, 1929, mimeographed edited copy, Correspondence with Ruth Benedict folder, Edward Sapir Papers (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pa.). The version of this letter at the American Philosophical Society includes sentences left out of the published version in Mead, ed., Anthropologist at Work, 195-96.
86. On Benedict's relationships, see especially Banner, Intertwined Lives;
87. Hilary Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women (Amherst, 1999).
88. On Benedict and Sapir, see also Regna Darnell, Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist (Berkeley, 1990), 172-83.
89. For Mead's and Malinowski's responses to Sapir's 1928 article, see Margaret Mead, "Jealousy: Primitive and Civilised," in Woman's Coming of Age: A Symposium, ed. Samuel D. Schmalhausen and V. F. Calverton (New York, 1931), 41 ;
90. Malinowski, "Aping the Ape," 98.
91. For more on Sapir's views on premarital sex, see "'Affairs' Based on Love Preferred to an Early Marriage," Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 7, 1931, p. 3.
92. Sapir, "Observations on the Sex Problem in America," 520;
93. Sapir, "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry," 229-42, esp. 235.
94. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, other cultural commentators also noted how the "norm" depended on local custom. For a humorous example, see James Thurber, "Freud: Or the Future of Psychoanalysis," in Whither, Whither, or after Sex, What? A Symposium to End Symposiums, ed. Walter S. Hankel (New York, 1930), 123-24.
95. Banner, Intertwined Lives;
96. Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
97. On Benedict's life and work, see also Judith Schachter Modell, Ruth Benedict: Patterns of a Life (Philadelphia, 1983).
98. Ruth Benedict, "Anthropology and the Abnormal," Journal of General Psychokgy 10 (Jan. 1934), 59-80, esp. 60, 64, 73, 74,75.
99. Ruth Benedict, "Anthropology and the Abnormal," Journal of General Psychokgy, Ibid., 75, 76-77;
100. Benedict to Ruth Underhill, May 3, 1933, file 8, box 34, Ruth Benedict Papers (Archives and Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.).
101. On Benedict's intense relationship with Sapir in the 1920s and her irritation with him in the 1930s, see Banner, Intertwined Lives;
102. and Darnell, Edward Sapir, 172-83.
103. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston, 1934), 20, 237, 273. Benedict to Alfred A. Knopf, Aug. 25, 1932, file 5, box 2, Benedict Papers.
104. Benedict, "Anthropology and the Abnormal," 75.
105. On sociologists who were addressing homosexuality around the same time, see Chad Heap, "The City as a Sexual Laboratory: The Queer Heritage of the Chicago School," Qualitative Sociology 16 (Winter 2003), 457-87.
106. "The Reminiscences of Otto Klineberg," interview by Robert Rieber, 1984, p. 10, transcript, Columbia University Oral History Project (Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York, N.Y.).
107. For more on Klineberg's life and career, see Ono Klineberg, "Otto Klineberg," in A History of Psychology in Autobiography ed. Gardner Lindzey (9 vols., Englewood Cliffs, 1930-2007), VI, 163-82;
108. Bruce Lambert, "Otto Klineberg, Who Helped Win '54 Desegregation Case, Dies at 92," New York Times, March 9, 1992, p. B6;
109. Benjamin Harris, "Klineberg, Otto," American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-01080.html;
110. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 135-38;
111. and Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 179-86.
112. Otto Klineberg, Race Differences (New York, 1935), vii.
113. Otto Klineberg, Race Differences, Ibid, 300. 28
114. Otto Klineberg, Race Differences, Ibid., 272, 274, 308.
115. On the relativity of abnormality, Klineberg cited and was influenced by Sapir, "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry."
116. Klineberg, Race Differences, 274, 290-91.
117. See also Otto Klineberg, Social Psychology (New York, 1940), 508-9.
118. In the latter book, Klineberg suggests that some conditions might be abnormal in all contexts, but he explicitly excludes homosexuality from the universally abnormal.
119. On the history of the concept of normality, see Carter, Heart of Whiteness. Julian Carter, though, does not address the challenges posed by the numerous commentators, including Benedict, Sapir, and Klineberg, who critiqued "normality" from early on.
120. Leonard S. Cottrell and Ruth Gallagher, "Important Developments in American Social Psychology during the Past Decade," Sociometry A (May 1941), 119, 121.
121. See also George Devereux, "Maladjustment and Social Neurosis," American Sociological Review, A (Dec. 1939), 844-51;
122. Alfred L. Kroeber, "Psychosis or Social Sanction," Character and Personality 8 (1940), 204-15;
123. Clellan Ford, "Sexual Behavior among Primitive Peoples," in About the Kinsey Report: Observations by 11 Experts on "SexualBehavior in the Human Mak,"ed. Donald Porter Geddes and Enid Curie (New York, 1948), 26-35;
124. Clellan S. Ford and Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior (New York, 1951);
125. John P. Foley Jr., "The Criterion of Abnormality," Journal of'Abnormal and Social Psychology 30 (Oct.-Dec. 1935), 279-91;
126. Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time(NewYork, 1937), 13-29;
127. Karl M. Bowman, "The Challenge of Sex Offenders: Psychiatric Aspects of the Problem," Mental Hygiene, 11 (Jan. 1938), 10-20;
128. Henry J. Wegrocki, "A Critique of Cultural and Statistical Concepts of Abnormality," Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 34 (April 1939), 166-78;
129. Joseph Wortis, "Sex Taboos, Sex Offenders, and the Law," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 9 (July 1939), 554-64;
130. and Clara Thompson, "Changing Concepts of Homosexuality in Psychoanalysis," in A Study of Interpersonal Relations: New Contributions to Psychiatry ed. Patrick Mullahy (New York, 1949), 214-15.
131. See also Terry, American Obsession, 279-81, 284-85.
132. Alfred C. Kinsey et al., "Concepts of Normality and Abnormality in Sexual Behavior," in Psychosexual Development in Health and Disease, ed. Paul H. Hoch and Joseph Zubin (New York, 1949), 28.
133. See also Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia, 1948), 202.
134. Clyde Kluckhohn, "The Influence of Psychiatry on Anthropology in America during the Past One Hundred Years," in One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry ed. American Psychiatric Association (New York, 1944), 609.
135. On Benedict's ambivalent relativism, see Elgin Williams, "Anthropology for the Common Man," American Anthropologist, 49 (Jan-March 1947), 84. Benedict to Joseph K. Folsom, Dec. 24, 1936, file 8, box 4, Benedict Papers.
136. Schmalhausen, ed., Our Neurotic Age;
137. Horney, Neurotic Personality of Our Time;
138. Lawrence K. Frank, "Society as the Patient," American Journal of Sociology 42 (Nov. 1936), 335, 336, 338, 342.
139. On the impact of fascism on cultural relativism, see Matthews, "Revolt against Americanism," 22-23.
140. On the frustration-aggression thesis, see, for example, John Dollard et al., Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, 1939).
141. Geoffrey Gorer, The American People: A Study in National Character (NewYork, 1948), 64.
142. On German fathers and American mothers, see also Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, "Notes on the Mother Rôle in the Family Group," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, A (1940), 132-48.
143. Clyde Kluckhohn to Carl S. Joslyn, May 7, 1943, Clyde Kluckhohn file, Correspondence Series I, Ashley Montagu Papers (American Philosophical Society).
144. On Montagu, see Susan Sperling, "Ashley Montagu (1905-1999)" American Anthropologist, 102 (Sept. 2000), 583-88;
145. Susan Sperling, "Ashley's Ghost: McCarthyism, Science, and Human Nature," in Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism, and the CIA, ed. Dustin M. Wax (London, 2008), 17-36;
146. Anthony Ramirez, "Ashley Montagu, 94, Anthropologist and Popular Author," New York Times, Nov. 29, 1999, p. A23;
147. and Ann T. Keene, "Montagu, Ashley," American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/14/14-01120.html.
148. M. F. Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (New York, 1942);
149. M. F. Ashley Montagu, "The Cultural Determinance of Sexual Status," Univenity Review, 7 (no. 1, 1940), 21-32;
150. Ashley Montagu, "Anti-feminism and Race Prejudice," Psychiatry 9 (1946), 69-71;
151. Ashley Montagu, "The Natural Superiority of Women," Saturday Review, March 1, 1952, pp. 8,9, 28-29;
152. Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women (New York, 1953);
153. M. F. Ashley Montagu, "Undemanding Our Sexual Desires," in About the Kinsey Report, ed. Geddes and Curie, 59-69.
154. On Montagu and race, see Michelle Brattain, "Race, Racism, and Antiracism: UNESCO and the Politics of Presenting Science to the Postwar Public," American Historical Review, 112 (Dec. 2007), 1386-413.
155. Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth, 148, 181, 151 ;
156. Montagu, "Understanding Our Sexual Desires," 60.
157. Montagu, "Understanding Our Sexual Desires," 64, 65.
158. Montagu's views of homosexuality changed; by the late 1970s, he believed in "the essential normality of the homosexual" and rejected antihomosexual bigotry, but he still saw homosexuality as a result of "parental inadequacy." See Ashley Montagu, "A 'Kinsey Report' on Homosexualities," Psychology Today 12 (Aug. 1978), 66, 91.
159. Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth, 89, 91, 94.
160. Emphasis in original. Montagu, "Understanding Our Sexual Desires," 60, 64.
161. Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth, 94;
162. Montagu, "Understanding Our Sexual Desires," 64, 66.
163. T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950), 15;
164. Gorer, American People, 126, 205-6.
165. For an earlier book in which Gorer also addressed American men's fear of homosexuality, see Geoffrey Gorer, Hot Strip Tease and Other Notes on American Culture (London, 1937), 88-91.
166. Margaret Mead, "Anthropological Techniques in War Psychology," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 7 (1943), 137.
167. On the national character studies, see also Margaret Mead, "National Character," in Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory, ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago, 1953), 642-67;
168. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, "Science, Democracy, and Ethics: Mobilizing Culture and Personality for World War II," in Malinowski, Riven, Benedict, and Othen, ed. Stocking, 184-217;
169. Richard Handler, "Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture," American Quarterly 42 (June 1990), 252-73;
170. Herman, Romance of American Psychology 17-47;
171. and Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents, 125-64.
172. Geoffrey Gorer, "Some Aspects of the Psychology of the People of Great Russia," American Slavic and East European Review, 8 (Oct. 1949), 155-66;
173. Gorer, "Themes in Japanese Culture," 273-90.
174. On Kardiner, see "The Reminiscences of Abram Kardiner," interview by Bluma Swerdloff, 1963, transcript, Columbia University Oral History Project;
175. William C. Manson, The Psychodynamics of Culture: Abram Kardiner and Neo-Freudian Anthropology (Westport, 1988);
176. M. A. Farber, "Dr. Abram Kardiner, 89, a Student of Freud's, Dies," New York Times, July 22, 1981, p. A19;
177. and William C. Manson, "Kardiner, Abram," American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/12/12-01948.html.
178. Abram Kardiner, My Analysis with Freud: Reminiscences (New York, 1977).
179. "Reminiscences of Abram Kardiner," 296, 283-85;
180. Ruth Landes to Benedict, Oct. 17, 1939, file 4, box 31, Benedict Papers; "Reminiscences of Abram Kardiner," 364.
181. Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, The Mark of Oppression: Explorations in the Personality of the American Negro (Cleveland, 1951), 61;
182. Abram Kardiner, Sex and Morality (Indianapolis, 1954), 160-92.
183. In Mark of Oppression, Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey recognized that some African Americans identified as homosexual; in Sex and Morality Kardiner's account of homosexuality did not address race and seemed to refer presumptively to the white middle class. Kardiner was not particularly interested in the intersections of race and sexuality or in how conceptions of sexuality were racialized and conceptions of race were sexualized; he focused more on what he portrayed as the common cultural and psychodynamic origins of racial and sexual pathologies. Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia, 1953). A few historians have noted how some social scientists and social workers attributed the alleged mental deficiencies of African Americans to cultural pathology and the alleged mental deficiencies of whites to individual psychological aberration. Kardiner and the culture-and-personality school more generally show the two views as more intertwined. Kardiner acknowledged the interiority, subjectivity, and individual psychological life of African Americans (as well as their alleged cultural pathology) and pointed to cultural causes of the alleged neuroses of whites (as well as to their individual psychological constitution).
184. On "black pathology" and "white neurosis," see especially Regina G. Kunzel, "White Neurosis, Black Pathology: Constructing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy in the Wartime and Postwar United States," in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Philadelphia, 1994), 304-31.
185. Kardiner, Sex and Morality 196. On Kardiner and motherhood,
186. see Buhle, Feminism and Its Discontents, 154-55;
187. and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (Ithaca, 2000), 53-60.
188. Herman, Romance of American Psychology 174-207;
189. Scott, Contempt and Pity.
190. See also O'Connor, Poverty Knowledge;
191. and Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 162-92.
192. On the gay protest against psychiatry, see Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry.
193. Robert M. Hughes, "The End Products of Oppression," Phylon, 12 (no. 4, 1951), 393;
194. "Reminiscences of Abram Kardiner," 424;
195. Luther Allen, "Reformers Can Be Cruel," Mattachine Review, 1 (March/April 1955), 30, 31.
196. For other similarly critical reviews in African American publications, see Howard E. Mitchell, review of The Mark of Oppression
197. by Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey, Journal of Negro History 36 (Oct. 1951), 452-53;
198. "Attacks Phony Yardstick Used to Create Bias," New York Amsterdam News, May 31, 1952, pp. 18-19;
199. and Robert T. Amos, "Personality and Psychosocial Adjustment Patterns," Journal of Negro Education, 22 (Autumn 1953), 493-94.
200. Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 278.
201. On the varied meanings of and more recent debates over cultural relativism, see, for example, Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity 160-84.
202. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, The Races of Mankind (New York, 1943);
203. Violet Edwards, "Note on The Roca of Mankind," in Race: Science and Politics, by Ruth Benedict (New York, 1947), 167-68;
204. Margaret M. Caffrey, Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land (Austin, 1989), 297-99;
205. "Plans New Edition of Race Pamphlet," New York Times, March 8, 1944, p. 11.
206. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword- Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston, 1946), 15;
207. D. Donald Klous to Benedict, Dec. 26, 1946, file 10, box 13,
208. Benedict Papers. Benedict declined the War Department invitation because she was already involved in her own international project, Research in Contemporary Cultures, for which she had sought and soon received funding from the Office of Naval Research. The Chrysanthemum and the Sword has been extensively critiqued (in Japan as well as the United States) for its inadequate research, sweeping generalizations, and orientalist and pathologizing vision of Japanese culture.
209. For a recent analysis, see Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York, 2003), 171-90.
210. Nathan Glazer, "The Anthropological Revolution," Nation, June 15, 1946, p. 722;
211. "New Plan at Rugters to Widen Knowledge," New York Times, Nov. 28, 1948, p. 36;
212. "Reminiscences of Abram Kardiner," 284.
213. For sales figures, see Ferris Greenslet to Benedict, May 18, 1943, file 5, box 11, Benedict Papers;
214. "Paperback Books Go Highbrow; Sartre, Spillane Slug It Out," Wall Street Journal Nov. 23, 1956, p. 1;
215. and David Dempsey, "What's in It for Authors?," New York Times, Jan. 5, 1964, pp. BRA26-27.
216. On translations, see Donald Cook, "Ruth Benedict: Culture as Personality," New Republic, March 2, 1959, p. 17.
217. On the reaction against relativism, see also Martin Gardner, "Beyond Cultural Relativism," Ethics, 61 (Oct. 1950), 38-45.
218. Matthews, "Revolt against Americanism," 18.
219. For examples of activists using Patterns of Culture,
220. see Appendix E of Amicus Curiae Brief of the Homosexual Law Reform Society of America, 91,
221. Supreme Court Records and Briefs for Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 387 U.S. 118 (1967);
222. and Louis Crompton, Homosexuality and the Sickness Theory: A Critique (London, 1969). Thanks to Margot Canaday for the Boutilier reference.
223. Siobhan B. Somerville, "Queer Loving," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 11 (no. 3, 2005), 355-70, 347, 359.
224. For postwar critiques of national character studies, see Robert Endleman, "The New Anthropology and Its Ambitions: The Science of Man in Messianic Dress," Commentary 8 (Sept. 1949), 284-91;
225. Otto Klineberg, "Recent Studies of National Character," in Culture and Personality ed. S. Stansfeld Sargent and Marian W. Smith (New York, 1949), 127-38;
226. and Alfred R. Lindesmith and Anselm L. Strauss, "A Critique of Culture-Personality Writings," American Sociological Review, 15 (Oct. 1950), 587-600.
227. By the mid-1950s, the field of anthropology, which had been shaped by culture-and-personality arguments, had moved away from relativism and psychology, and psychoanalysts tended to focus more on individual family dynamics and therapeutic adjustment than on cultural diversity or broad cultural change.
228. Weston LaBarre, "The Age Period of Cultural Fixation," Mental Hygiene, 33 (April 1949), 211, 216.
229. Emphasis in original. For a recent account of the politicization of motherhood in the postwar era, see Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White.