of overall emotional style is not unprecedented, but it is hardly commonplace. Despite the relative novelty of historical study of emotion, three approaches to the subject have emerged to date. The first involves examining another topic that includes emotional components; emotions history was partially launched by histories of familial relationships in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that inevitably extended to claims about emotional change.12 The second approach more explicitly focuses on emotional standards and their periodization but limits itself to individual emotions like love or anger. This approach has produced the clearest advances to date in the historical understanding of emotion, defining the causes and effects of change and the relationship between cultural construction and natural and invariant emotional impulses. But the third approach, which this study is intended to further, involves an effort at larger synthesis. Still focused explicitly on emotional standards and their results, this approach seeks to determine larger consistencies in emotional norms that relate specific emotional standards to a broader style. The Victorians had such a style, though it has often been erroneously characterized in terms of blanket repression. The middle class in the twentieth-century United States gradually but definitely revisited that style, producing a new amalgam. This book examines this sweeping, partially unwitting process.
The idea of a major twentieth-century emotionological transition follows from, and relates to, several widely accepted findings about American social and cultural experience. This study builds on these findings, though it modifies them while dramatically extending their scope.
It is generally accepted that a significant difference existed between the social patterns that began to emerge in the United States during the 1920s and those that had predominated through the later nineteenth century. Some have indeed dubbed the 1920s “the end of Victorianism.” Change is of course both constant and cumulative, which makes any effort to identify particularly crucial transition decades difficult and contestable. Nevertheless, this study is by no means unique in claiming that the 1920s formed a point at which several varied trends converged. By the 1920s the United States had become predominantly urban, shifting focus away from the classic small town. Classic individual entrepreneurship was also increasingly replaced with corporate management, and consumer values were increasingly glorified. New approaches to sexuality and a growing emphasis on personality over character constitute two other trends identified with the 1920s that are still more closely related to a redefinition of emotional standards. Recent work explaining the 1920s rise of the Ku Klux Klan according to an inchoate realization of how much was changing, of what desperate efforts might be necessary to recapture older values, identifies this transition decade from yet another, but clearly related, vantage point.13
My exploration of change in middle-class emotional style did not begin as an attempt to flesh out yet another aspect of the 1920s turn away from Victorianism. Indeed, whereas existing periodization schemas tend to posit a sudden Victorian collapse in the 1920s, this study treats the decade as the beginning of a more extended transition. The significant break in emotional culture coincided with changes in other areas, for this break reflected these changes, thus illustrating the kind of functional causation that social constructionists have characteristically claimed without always providing historically precise illustration. Emotional change, in other words, resulted from new social needs, and it also helped promote change, turning this transition into a still more extensive reevaluation of nineteenth-century conventions that reverberated into subsequent decades.
The idea of a major change in emotional style stems most directly from findings about shifts in specific emotional standards. My own earlier studies, several of them collaborative, of anger, jealousy, and fear all identified the 1920s as the point when Victorian signals were reconsidered, in a process that extended for several decades.14 In approaching anger, my first venture into emotions history, my coauthor and I had initially expected to see the more decisive changes later in the twentieth century, associated for example with the heralded rise of permissive childrearing. In fact, however, we found that the central new themes began earlier. A subsequent investigation of jealousy uncovered a very similar chronology though with many different specifics. Other emotion or emotion-related histories that had focused largely on the nineteenth century produced similar (if not always fully explored) claims that something different began to take shape by the early twentieth century.15 This was particularly true of several studies of love, both those directed to heterosexual romantic love and those focused on the decline of the peculiar nineteenth-century fascination with motherlove as a familial emotional icon.
My exploration of the transition in emotional style thus synthesizes a variety of existing findings about explicit emotional change. Owing a great debt to the many historians, sociologists, and social psychologists who have identified the basic ingredients, this study seeks to retain the advantages of the relative precision of these focused inquiries while also ranging more broadly into general threads of change and tying the origins of specific shifts to the origins of a novel overall emotionological framework.
It is important to note that a small number of specific emotions studies devoted to the United States have shunned an overall twentiethcentury periodization in favor of much smaller chunks of time that coincide with specific childrearing fads16 or other short cycles. My study argues that while shorter-term variations can be usefully identified, they should not obscure the larger style shift. Indeed, by identifying part of the nature and much of the timing of the twentieth-century transition in emotional culture, inquiries into shorter-term variations have made the need for a larger synthesis increasingly obvious. This synthesis identifies the general themes previously identified while also extending into other emotional domains less fully explored, such as grief.17 The challenge of the specific studies is clear: what are the underlying ingredients that appear, along with other, more limited attributes, in redefinitions as varied as a new concern about anger at work and a growing aversion, in middle-class men’s culture, to Victorian standards of romantic love?
A number of imaginative researchers have already ventured into the challenging area of overall emotional styles and their alterations from one period to the next. The best-developed case for a sea change in emotional style focuses not on the twentieth century, however, but on the eighteenth. Its analogy to the present effort will help clarify my intent, and its content relates to the Victorian baseline as well.
There are two principal formulas applied to an eighteenth-century emotional transition, both of which connect to more familiar aspects of cultural change in the period. Norbert Elias’s civilization-of-manners schema, recently applied to the nineteenth-century United States as an extension of its West European point of origin, emphasizes an increasing discipline of emotions and bodily functions alike. Starting with the upper classes, people learned new and more rigorous forms of impulse control. Applied to emotions, the schema helps explain not only a general set of goals but also more specific and measurable redefinitions, such as disgust as an emotional reaction to “uncivilized” sanitary habits and personal manners; a growing hostility to emotional spontaneity, manifested in disapproval of excesses in traditional popular festivals and religious behaviors; attacks on crude uses of fear in religion and childrearing; and a growing revulsion against emotionally charged vengeance in punishment and unwonted anger in both public and familial settings.18 Emotional self-control, in sum, underlay and united a number of changes in particular emotional goals, many of which have been explored in their own right.
A second schema, compatible with the idea of emotional control but supplementing and complicating it in important respects, involves a concomitant reevaluation of the emotional functions of the family, which also took shape in Western Europe and North America in the eighteenth century or a bit earlier. The family began to extend into areas beyond economic production and material welfare, and family relationships gained new priority over community ties and other friendships. This was another reason why anger and fear were reevaluated, with particular emphasis on the need for control in parent-child contacts, as part of an effort