Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture

RELATIVE Intimacy

GENDER & AMERICAN CULTURE

RELATIVE Intimacy

FATHERS, ADOLESCENT DAUGHTERS, AND POSTWAR AMERICAN CULTURE

Rachel Devlin

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2005

The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Devlin, Rachel.

Relative intimacy : fathers, adolescent daughters, and

postwar American culture / Rachel Devlin.

    p. cm. — (Gender and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2946-3 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 0-8078-5605-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Teenage girls—Family relationships. 2. Fathers and

daughters. 3. Fathers and daughters in literature.

I. Title. II. Series.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 The Oedipal Age: Postwar Psychoanalysis Reinterprets the Adolescent Girl

CHAPTER 2 Delinquent Girls and the Crisis of Paternal Authority in the Postwar United States

CHAPTER 3 Adolescent Authorities: Teenage Girls, Consumerism, and the Cultural Transformation of Fatherhood

CHAPTER 4 Coming-of-Age: A Paternal Rite of Passage, 1948–1965

CHAPTER 5 Affection, Identification, Skepticism: Situating Men in Relation to Adolescent Daughters

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

A 1959 Life magazine photograph

A 1937 Parents’ Magazine photograph

Publicity still from Junior Miss (play), 1941

Illustration from Life with Teena, 1944

Illustration from Father of the Bride, 1948

Illustration from Mr. Banks’ Other Daughter, Good Housekeeping, 1950

Cover of the book Junior Miss, 1959

A 1950 advertisement for Chanel perfume from Seventeen magazine

Cover of a 1957 issue of Ebony magazine

Cover of a 1962 issue of Jet magazine

Publicity still from Kiss and Tell (play), 1943

Advertisement for Kiss and Tell (film), 1945

Photographs of F. Hugh Herbert from the New York Post, 1951

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We all write with an audience in mind, and this project benefited enormously in its early stages from the fact that Nancy F. Cott and Jean-Christophe Agnew were mine. Nancy F. Cott advised the dissertation on which this book is based at Yale University. Her quick eye and succinct questions galvanized both research and argument, while her own scholarship has been a constant source of inspiration. The idea for the project grew out of a paper for Jean-Christophe Agnew’s memorable seminar titled The American Century. His approach to cultural history animates my thinking throughout the book; his intellectual generosity and enthusiasm helped me see it through to completion.

Support from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation and a Mellon Fellowship for Research allowed me to complete research on the dissertation on which this book is based. Grants from the Sexuality Research Program of the Social Science Research Council, the Larry Hackman Research Program of the New York State Archives, and the Tulane University Committee on Research, allowed me to do additional research and to take time off to finish the writing.

Much of the research for this book was conducted at various arms of the New York Public Library, including the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture; the Science, Industry, and Business Library; and the Library for the Performing Arts. Archivists at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection helped me wend my way through midcentury drama—a field that, without this collection, might not have made it into my historical imagination. Jim Holts at the New York State Archives in Albany did a great deal to help, even when searches proved frustrating.

Two Medievalists, Bonnie Wheeler and Caroline Walker Bynum, were early models of intellectual reach and precision; both gave me much-needed encouragement early on. Robert Griswold answered questions at the beginning of this project and generously shared sources. Regina Kunzel helped me situate some of my thinking as I set out to turn the dissertation into a book. Jeannie Rhee helped me think through legal history and Sherrie Inness prompted me to make it more readable.

Catherine Stimpson read the entire manuscript and posed important questions at a critical juncture. At a time when I needed an audience, Martha Hodes arranged for me to give a presentation at the Program in the History of Women and Gender at New York University. James Boyden and Linda Pollock generously read chapters when I asked them to and offered useful suggestions.

This book rests on the shoulders of those who transformed the history of youth and their doings into the recognized and richly researched topic that it is today. I very much appreciate that Paula S. Fass and Beth L. Bailey, two such pioneers, read and commented extensively on a late draft of the manuscript.

In New Orleans, the friendship of Larry Powell, Laura Watts, Richard Watts, Alisa Plant, Kate Haulman, Natalie Ring, Daniel Hurewitz, Peggy Simon, Randy Sparks, and Justin Wolfe has helped see me through the day-to-day work of teaching and writing. Sylvia Frey has been a steadfast intellectual ally, and the simple knowledge of her presence was often reassuring. Beth Willinger, at the Center for Research on Women, and Cynthia Lowenthal, dean of Newcomb College, have helped make this city a hospitable home for thinking about women and gender. I have counted on Pamela Smith and Donna Deneen for their help with the office-based work of writing and travel.

In New York, Kio Stark read various chapters and offered helpful advice. Sabrina Banes and Tenea Johnson assisted with the often dreary business of tracking down sources on microfilm. Joshua Beckman helped with the arcana of photo editing.

Genuine thanks to my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, Sian Hunter, for giving me the rigorous review process she promised and for her thoughtful advice. Thanks also to Mary Caviness, David Hines, and all at the University of North Carolina Press who have helped with the production of this book.

I thank Debby Applegate, Elizabeth Barnes, Virginia Blaisedale, Pamela Haag, Amy Kesselman, Trip McCrossin, and Susie Steinbach for their friendship and provocative conversation during the years spent on the dissertation and after. I am grateful to Cynthia Gooen Lesser and Deborah Rieders more than they know for making me laugh so much for so many years and for their patience with this book. Bernard Devlin looked up citations for me at the public library when I could not be in New York, and James E. Devlin helped on the financial end. I am indebted to Tony Lacavaro for various literary tips.

The friendship of Rosanne Marion Adderley has been a most unexpected gift, and it has sustained me during the time it has taken to finish this project. Athena Devlin has read every page of the book several times over; her insight has been invaluable. I do not know how to thank her enough. A room of one’s own is one thing, but in the age of Dr. Sears it is quite another to give oneself permission to go there. I am deeply grateful to Stephen Sollins for his endless conversations on all sides of this question, his generous help, and his unwavering faith in this project. Thanks to Jonah Sollins Devlin for making life outside of that room so rich, interesting, musical.

RELATIVE Intimacy

Introduction

His daughter’s room was full of life. His own old microscope stood on Margaret’s desk and around it was a litter of slides.... The books were beginning to be too many for the small bookshelf, starting with The Little Family and going on to his own soiled copy of The Light That Failed....The dolls were no longer so much to the fore as they once were, but they were still about.... And he stood contemplating the room with a kind of desolation of love for it.

—Lionel Trilling, The Other Margaret, 1945

The week that Pearl Harbor was bombed, Life was the only major magazine that did not have time to change its cover. Rather than an image of battleship guns ablaze or military commanders, Life’s cover on December 15, 1941, featured a picture of a sixteen-year-old girl: pretty, smiling coyly, and utterly oblivious to the national tragedy that had occurred a few days earlier.¹ The girl was Patricia Peardon, and she played a thirteen-year-old daughter in Junior Miss, a coming-of-age story that was Broadway’s biggest hit of the 1941 season. Based on a series of encounters—alternately difficult, confused, and fawning—between Peardon and her father, Junior Miss depicted growing up as a process that was defined by moments of sexual recognition and appreciation that took place between an adolescent girl and her father. In chronicling these moments, Junior Miss was a harbinger of what would become a national preoccupation with the meaning—particularly the erotic meaning—of the father-daughter relationship in the aftermath of America’s entrance into World War II. Indeed, in retrospect, what was probably a publishing mishap for Life looks like a prescient emblem of the cultural concerns of the war and postwar period.

At least since the mid-1920s, child psychologists had discussed the happy girl who ... has a father whom she can make the embodiment of her ideals.² Some of the more daring child experts incorporated Freudian notions of Oedipal attachment into their vision of female adolescence. But even in the best father-daughter relationships, the famed child psychologist G. Stanley Hall warned in 1925, there are dangers. For if her fondness for her father is too intense ... this may make it impossible for her ever to be happy if mated to a man not in the father image.³ After America’s entrance into World War II, warnings about overly intense Oedipal father-daughter relationships disappeared; they were discarded by a society suddenly—and universally—convinced of the special value of a father’s contribution to his adolescent daughter as she began to sexually mature.

In the early 1940s, the father began to be portrayed as the most important witness to his daughter’s transformations at adolescence: he was amused when she tried on her first pair of high heels, astounded when she appeared in her first cocktail dress, and weak-kneed when she emerged for her first junior prom. It became the common sense of an era—through the repetition of such scenes in parenting manuals, magazine fiction, advertising, Broadway plays, literature, journalism, and psychoanalytic studies of childhood—that this kind of paternal response to a daughter’s transformation from child to young adult was how affection was—or should be—manifested. The moment at which, as one father put it, he discovered that his baby had grown into quite a girl was imbued with fresh meaning in the 1940s and 1950s, celebrated with unambiguous pleasure and eventually institutionalized as a highly ritualized event.⁴ Such moments became definitive—socially, psychologically, and sexually—for daughter and father alike.

This book examines the unprecedented scale of interest in the father-adolescent daughter relationship during the war and postwar era, the sexual themes that informed its representation, and the decline of any detectable caution, particularly on the part of psychoanalysts, in espousing the benefits of the female adolescent’s Oedipal attachment to her father. It argues that because of these developments, the relationship between father and adolescent daughter came to be understood, in ways both subtle and overt, as primarily—if not exclusively—erotic in nature. Taken separately, transformations either in scholarly thinking about female adolescent development or in popular representations of fathers and daughters would comprise noteworthy historical developments. Together, they reflect a fundamental shift in the social meaning of the father-daughter relationship and challenge us to consider its significance to postwar sexual culture.

I begin with the most authoritative—and striking—changes in thinking about adolescent girls’ relationship with their fathers produced by psychoanalysts practicing in the United States during and just after World War II. I then consider some of the events that prompted psychoanalysts to reformulate their assumptions about adolescent girls, particularly a steep rise in female juvenile delinquency cases in the 1940s and the growth of institutions created to monitor and control girls’ behavior. I argue that the diagnosis collectively embraced by psychoanalysts working with wayward girls —that antisocial behavior originated in Oedipal disturbance during adolescence—played a major role in establishing the father as the sexual focal point of female adolescent psychology. I then examine the idiom of eroticism that informed virtually every representation of adolescent girls and their fathers in popular culture. I begin with the earliest, often subtle, erotic links that appeared between 1941 and 1948 in plays, marketing campaigns, advice books, and works of fiction. The next period, 1948–60, saw the triumph of the eroticized view of the father-daughter relationship in popular culture, a period when the celebration of paternal economic indulgence, frank sexual interest, and rituals of paternal sexual recognition held sway. A final chapter is devoted to exploring literature and plays that took a more skeptical view of men’s motivations in dealings with their adolescent daughters. Father–adolescent daughter eroticism leads, in these works, to empty sexual banter, abject paternal sexual desire, or father-daughter incest. While some writers explored the moral dimensions of incestuous relationships, others simply exploited, caricatured, or satirized the eroticism of the modern father-daughter relationship—a fact that provides some clues to weakness inherent in its conceptualization.

Most of the material on girls and their fathers was considered fluff when it appeared and has since been forgotten. Much of the psychoanalytic literature has been rejected by current practitioners. As with so much of women’s history, ideas and images have been thrown out, superseded, and, most important, condemned as silly. Meanwhile, texts both popular and academic about boys (and very often their fathers) have been canonized and reprinted. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd: The Problems of Youth in an Organized Society (1960), J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1945), and Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950)—our impressions of the midcentury relationship between parents and children, youth and authority, have been molded by these texts. In many instances, the material on girls and their fathers simply does not measure up to these works; in others, texts have been unjustly forgotten. Yet we must keep in mind that at the time of their creation, works involving ideas about fathers and daughters were just as influential and very often more popular. To name just a few: Helene Deutsch’s towering work of psychoanalysis, The Psychology of Women (1944); the hit plays (and films) Kiss and Tell (1943; film, 1945) and Janie (1942; film, 1944); Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding (book, 1946; play, 1950; film, 1952); Grace Metalious’s record-breaking block-buster, Peyton Place (1956; film, 1957); Edward Streeter’s best-selling book of humor, The Father of the Bride (1948; film, 1950); Douglas Sirk’s melodrama Imitation of Life (1959); and William Styron’s acclaimed first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951).

The proposition that there was a pervasive cultural interest in fathers’ relationships to their teenage daughters during the postwar years is at odds with several received ideas about the period. First, the 1940s and 1950s have widely been envisioned as the historical moment when teenagers dramatically and self-consciously separated themselves from adults, including their parents, and America became an age stratified society.⁵ The achievement of near-universal high school attendance, the segregation of high schools from lower schools, and the rapid growth of teen incomes—a $10 billion market by 1958—have supposedly been the key factors behind a rupture between adolescents and the rest of society.⁶ In the face of large and increasingly bureaucratic public high schools, teenagers created— through fads, fashions, magazines, and private rituals—a world of their own. The gradual but definitive acceptance of sexual liberalism on the part of parents was particularly important for girls.⁷ Girls reported a sharp decline in conflict with their parents about how often to date and appropriate places to go.⁸ At the same time, however, the system of going steady, according to historian John Modell, remained threatening to adult observers, who thought it offered premature liberties, dominated by a code of alien design.⁹ Apparent sexual precocity was accompanied by a steady decline in the ages at which girls married, from 20.5 in 1947 to 20.1 in 1956. By the late 1950s, the most common age at which girls married was 18. Histories of postwar youth have thus emphasized the increasing independence of adolescents, beginning with what Joseph Kett has called an insulated value system during the high school years, followed by early marriage and the creation of their own families.¹⁰

Assumptions about adolescent separateness during the postwar period began with contemporary observers’ perceptions of teenage alienation. Erik Erikson famously recommended that children be given a social moratorium during adolescence; Holden Caulfield railed against phony adults in Catcher in the Rye; and popular books regularly bemoaned the distance between parents and children with titles such as But You Just Don’t Understand (1950), Where Did You Go? Out, What Did You Do? Nothing (1957), The Adolescent Society (1961), and Teen-Age Tyranny (1963).¹¹ The advent of Seventeen magazine in 1944, the screaming idolatry of Elvis in the mid-1950s, the insularity of hep language and fashions—all seem to have reduced parents to marginal figures in girls’ lives. With their daughters’ bedroom doors closed, the music blaring, and the soda shop beckoning, parents became irrelevant. Parents were to provide the funding, the schooling, and the opportunities, and then, in the name of sexual liberalism and American freedom, kindly step aside. Not only did social commentators envision American childhood in this manner at mid-century, it is a form of coming-of-age that many believe to be one of our most important social inheritances from the postwar period. As the historian Christopher Lasch wrote in his influential book on the modern family, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, parents accept their obsolescence with the best grace they can muster, voluntarily relegating themselves to the background of their children’s lives.¹²

The other dominant perception of the 1950s that is challenged by the fascination with eroticism between fathers and adolescent daughters is the image of social and sexual conservatism that is so central to our understanding of the period, despite thoroughgoing revisions by such prominent historians as Elaine Tyler May, Beth L. Bailey, and Joanne Meyerowitz. According to this still-prevalent view, postwar Americans effectively exchanged the sophisticated, worldly, politicized values of the New Deal era for what appeared to be a safer path: isolationism, political disengagement, and a bland, anesthetized culture. Some rebelled, but most capitulated to what one journalist recently called the country’s platonic image of itself at mid-century—an image of America as wholesome, cheerful, and churchgoing.¹³ There was, as Stephen J. Whitfield has described it, a proclivity to hang a giant Do Not Disturb sign over the nation.¹⁴

Because of this powerful image of the decade, the historiographical debate has centered on the extent of the impact of the family ideal, rather than the nature of its expression. How did women and men absorb the ideal of family togetherness? Did older, progressive movements for social change survive or did they disappear?¹⁵ Were women happy in their new homes or miserable?¹⁶ Did the 1950s represent a throwback to more traditional family life, or was it a bridge or link to the social movements of the 1960s?¹⁷ One problem with these inquiries is that, for many historians, the real interest is not with the 1950s but with how we got to the 1960s. For others, in contrast, it has been impossible to get out from under the sentimental yearnings attached to the 1950s. It is a decade, to many, of exemplary moral strength and singular cultural innocence, one that has become, in Frederic Jameson’s words, a privileged lost object of desire.¹⁸ The seductive appeal of this notion of the 1950s has often made it difficult to make the postwar period feel in any sense real, even when those who have written its history actually lived through it.

The seismic shifts in ideas about family life that occurred in the postwar period, however, suggest a form of interaction between fathers and adolescent daughters that required anything but naive innocence on the part of the American public.¹⁹ What we see in the father-daughter relationship is something very different: a culture that provided fresh opportunities for eroticism and ever more sophisticated modes of sexual self-understanding. Though adolescent girls might have been more on their own in certain ways, in others, their relationship with their fathers was imbued with unprecedented intimacy, sexual power, and cultural prominence (significantly, at the expense of their relationships with their mothers). While girls might have been segregated from parents on a day-to-day basis, they were newly depicted as fundamentally motivated by their Oedipal needs, dependent upon paternal sexual approval, and interested in their fathers’ romantic lives. The locus of the father’s role might have shifted —from protector and occasional companion to Oedipal object— but in the process the paternal role was actually enhanced rather than diminished.

Why did American culture become so consumed with the question of the sexual significance of the relationship between adolescent daughters and their fathers at midcentury? Why did psychoanalysts, the popular media, and the American public become fascinated with the dynamics of the father-daughter relationship and the increasingly seductive exchanges that became its chief characteristic? What did the eroticization of normal father-daughter relationships have to do with the enormous popularity of literary and dramatic representations of father-daughter incest? Or with larger historical developments, including the end of the war and the rise of youth culture, the growing influence of psychoanalysis and economic prosperity?

In some measure, scholarly interest in fatherhood was inspired by demographic shifts caused by the war. The return of soldiers after World War II prompted widespread discussion about the place of men in the American family. Wartime absence—of fathers, husbands, and sons—affected almost one-fifth of the nation’s families.²⁰ As William M. Tuttle has shown, the reintegration of a father into the family could prove difficult: children grew used to life without him and were sometimes afraid or resentful upon his return.²¹ Social scientists discovered that boys had trouble establishing male identity in a culture in which they were brought up primarily (or during the war exclusively) by their mothers.²² In the face of such social anxieties, sociologists and psychologists redoubled their efforts to explain the particular nature of the paternal contribution to the rearing of children. Combining sex-role sociology with Freudian ideas about Oedipal attraction, sociologists and psychologists argued that although girls identified directly with their mothers, their fathers served as an exemplar of the kind of man they would one day marry, and thus fathers should think of themselves as their daughters’ first boyfriend.²³

More important, the rise of psychoanalysis in the United States after the Second World War had a profound impact on ideas about the father-daughter relationship.²⁴ The insights of psychoanalysis went virtually unquestioned among social scientists during this era, its methods were respected if not revered among much of the literary and artistic intelligentsia, and psychoanalytic concepts were popularized and made glamorous in the mainstream media by journalists’ enamored portrayals of individual psychoanalysts.²⁵ So, in seeking to understand why the father-daughter relationship was eroticized in the 1950s, another obvious answer might be that the culture as a whole began to see parent-child relationships in Freudian terms. The psychoanalytic perspective, we might deduce, simply transformed the way in which human personality and family relationships were perceived, locating needs and conflicts in a dense web of projections, identifications, and subconscious fantasies, much of it stemming from the Oedipal drama. One might say that the father-daughter relationship was not so much eroticized during this period as perceived through the lens of the Oedipus complex.

To make such an interpretation, however, would be to mistake a complicated cultural shift in perceptions about the meaning of the father-adolescent daughter relationship in the 1940s and 1950s for the intellectual paradigm in which it took place. For postwar culture did not simply lift ideas about fathers and daughters wholesale from a bedrock of established psychoanalytic principles. Rather, social change, popular culture, and psychoanalytic theory influenced each other. Had psychoanalysts, playwrights, or screenwriters chosen to represent eroticism between mothers and sons in a manner that assumed its normalcy, they could have found the evidence they needed in early psychoanalytic literature. But they did not.

Indeed, postwar culture exhibited an anxiety about mother-son eroticism that, much like the new attitudes toward father-daughter eroticism, went beyond and ultimately transformed the prewar psychoanalytic perspective. Michael Rogin has argued that in the popular imagination maternal love for sons—often portrayed as entrapping and incestuous—was connected to primitive fears about boundary invasion and Communist infiltration. The movies My Son John (1952) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), he writes, located the threat to the free man less in the alien Communist state than in his loving mother.²⁶ As Rebecca Plant has also shown, sexual anxieties about the mother-son relationship were central to the peculiarly American problem of momism—as it was described within both the social sciences and popular culture—during the postwar period.²⁷ Unsurprisingly, in the psychoanalytic case histories of the postwar period, mother-son eroticism inevitably lead to neurosis on the part of the boy.²⁸ Fears about eroticism between mother and son may yet prove to be intimately bound up with the celebration of father-daughter eroticism during the 1940s and 1950s.

Though it was not often openly discussed, the question of paternal authority was necessarily a historical factor as well. In the 1940s and 1950s paternal authority was officially on the wane, if not extinct, in the United States. With anxieties about authoritarianism abroad and the rise of sexual liberalism at home, the postwar period has often been viewed as the end point in a process of the erosion of patriarchal power that began in the nineteenth century. The primacy of mothers, according to Mary Ryan, replaced that of fathers in the early nineteenth century when the corporate—and patriarchal—economy gradually gave way to market conditions that removed men from the home. Mother love, she writes, filled the vacuum left by paternal indifference as men became preoccupied with secular, economic concerns outside the household.²⁹ With the departure of men an emphasis on will-breaking and discipline was replaced with a commitment to tenderness and more gradual forms of socialization.³⁰ When at the turn of the century attempts were made to reinvigorate middle-class men’s relationship to their children, efforts were geared toward shared leisure, particularly activities that would channel boys’ energies into what Margaret Marsh has described as manly outlets such as sports and camping.³¹

Still, despite the growing ideal of masculine domesticity, men’s influence over their families, according to historians of fatherhood, continued to decline over the course of the twentieth century. The state expanded its power over children through the family court system, parent education movements aimed themselves almost exclusively at women, and consumer culture increasingly absorbed children’s energies and attention.³² Representations of bumbling fathers in comic strips and on television in the 1950s—if not the distraction of television itself—has been viewed as the final blow to paternal authority, the cultural genesis of the social reality of poor old dad.³³ Overwhelmed by such a panoply of forces, men supposedly ceded power over their children, as well as a stake in maintaining it. By the 1950s, fathers, it seems, had been firmly