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Engineering Masculinity: Veterans and Prosthetics after World War Two
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1 Engineering Masculinity Veterans and Prosthetics afterWorldWarTwo David Serlin THE EVENTS OF World War Two straddled an uncomfortably unstable period in United States history between the desperate 1930s and the arrogant 1950s. Before the booming economy and unbridled prosperity normally associated with the mid-1950s Pax Americana, many Americans spent the first years of the postwar period recovering slowly from the disruption that wartime had generated in their daily lives.1 The historian William Graebner has called the decade of the 1940s a “culture of contingency,” a time when the chaos of daily life fueled social awkwardness in the face of mass death and destruction.2 While this culture of contingency undoubtedly existed in earlier periods , especially right after World War One, no previous war had called upon so many mental and material resources to create so much technological power capable of so much death. Writing in the late 1950s, Norman Mailer accurately described the previous decade’s sense of contingency as a form of existential anxiety: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.”3 To a large degree, this sense of contingency or uncertainty experienced by survivors of the concentration camps and Hiroshima and Nagasaki was shared in the United States by the thousands of wounded, disfigured, and traumatized war veterans returning to civilian life after 1945. 45 Many disabled veterans who returned home after wartime service were amputees and, in many cases, also prosthesis wearers who worked hard to integrate these new artificial body parts into their civilian lives. One of the foremost concerns of the era was what effect trauma and disability would have on veterans’ sense of self-worth, especially in a competitive economy defined by able-bodied men. Social workers, advice columnists, physical therapists, and policy makers during and after World War Two turned their attention to the perceived crisis of the American veteran, much as they had done after the Great War some thirty years earlier. As Susan Hartmann has written, “By 1944, as public attention began to focus on the postwar period, large numbers of writers and speakers . . . awakened readers to the social problems of demobilization, described the specific adjustments facing ex-servicemen, and prescribed appropriate behavior and attitudes for civilians.”4 For many, the return of tens of thousands of male amputees and prosthesis wearers signaled an altogether different kind of social response . In the 1930s, conservative critics had already sounded a note of fear over what they perceived to be the erosion of masculinity among American men during the work shortages of the Great Depression. Similar anxieties about American manhood crystallized after the war effort began in 1941 with the new sexual divisions of labor that occurred on the civilian home front. The mobilization of hundreds of thousands of women in the wartime labor force, in combination with the prolonged absence of men from traditional positions of familial and community authority, gave a new shape to civilian domestic culture. In the best-selling Generation of Vipers (1942), for example, Philip Wylie coined the phrase “Momism” to describe what he perceived to be the emasculating effects of “aggressive” mothers and wives on the behavior of passive husbands and sons. Veterans of the war came back to a country where, among other changes they encountered, gender roles had been turned upside down. How, then, did postwar society make sense of veterans and their prostheses, given contemporary hostilities toward “aggressive ” women, and given the cultural mandate to readjust veterans to become physically and psychologically “whole” men, made to assume the idealized stature of “real” American men? This essay explores the significance of prostheses during the late 1940s and early 1950s in the context of the emphasis that postwar U.S. society placed on certain normative models of masculinity. In particu46 DAVID SERLIN [3.236.18.23] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:51 GMT) lar, the essay examines the design and representation of post–World War Two prostheses developed for veterans as neglected components of the historical reconstruction of gender roles and heterosexual male archetypes in early Cold War culture. Like artificial body parts created for victims of war and industrial accidents after the Civil War and World War One, prosthetics developed during the 1940s and 1950s were linked explicitly to the fragile politics of labor, employment, and self-worth for disabled veterans.5 But...