Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self -Control in Modern America

FIVE: Causation

| 107 || F I V E| Causation In many ways, the Victorian system of self-control functioned quite well for nearly a century, gaining precision and adherence with each decade from the 1760s to the 1870s. It helped define middle-class identity while providing some guidelines for the socialization of the American population more generally. It was compatible with rapid economic development , and some Victorian habits undoubtedly played a constructive role in motivating and shaping the industrial effort. Even though the system did not fully define real family life, it provided some important emphases. Certainly, it undergirded a successful effort at birth control . But the system put almost unbearable pressure on some people because it highlighted personal flaws rather than larger social and economic forces, and it could cause mental and psychosomatic disease. Whether these costs were higher than those associated with other systems of social control is debatable. The fact that opponents of the Victorian system later claimed peculiar repressiveness does not prove the case, in part because, as we have seen, the system permitted some relief. Its downfall was, therefore, by no means inevitable.1 This chapter explores those factors that help explain why the system changed. To date, most explanations have not been satisfactory. Furthermore , some accounts of change have not, in fact, assessed the causes at all (see chapter 2). In any case, no single factor predominated. Rather, this was a complex change containing a great deal of continuity and compensation, so it is not surprising that several different elements were involved, including some interesting countercurrents. Amid a host of contributing factors, however, some basic changes in the economic system can be identified as complicating and, in certain ways, undoing the Victorian approach. Causation| 108 | This chapter shows how several changes combined to redefine the middle-class system of self-restraint. Because major change cannot be replicated in the laboratory, it is difficult to assign precise weights to the principal factors. In addition, the redefinition was both substantial and incomplete, so the causes of continuity in the face of change are as important as the causes of the change itself. The turn-of-the-century decades saw several major alterations in American life, as historians have long noted. Government action was not a major player in redefining self-control, because while American government was growing stronger, the state was still comparatively weak, unlikely to affect private habits. The transition to a new system of selfcontrol did, however, have some relationship to Progressivism and, of course, to educational reform. The Progressives showed some of the same eagerness to invoke character while also regulating deficiencies that we see again today. The rapid growth of immigration and its new sources from southern and eastern Europe help explain why the middle class was anxious to reassert certain Victorian elements, lest American civilization be lost; this was one source of continuity within a rapidly fluctuating context. The nation’s growing world power was not a major factor in the redefinition of Victorianism, however, and even World War I, though exposing middle-class men to some novel habits, does not seem to have played a huge role in the American redefinition of Victorianism except in a few categories such as cigarette smoking and swearing . During these decades, the nation moved to industrial maturity, with a population that was more than half urban. Although this transition did not cause the introduction of a new system of self-control, it did provide a framework for it, and the new system was in turn part of the economic maturation process, the shift from a farmer-entrepreneurial to a corporate economy and from the predominance of production to that of consumerism.2 The principal factors that reshaped Victorian ideas about self-control were not transient. Rather, they continued to fuel the new system for many decades, indeed, until the present day. A new cultural climate, including new sources of behavioral expertise, was added to the fundamental changes in the economic system and its orientation. The specific factors included the change in disease concerns toward a greater preoccupation with degenerative ailments and the emergence of modern birth Causation| 109 | control technology. Nonetheless, devotion to a neo-Victorian moralism informed the American transition as well. A Civilizing Process As we have seen, once the process of control had begun, according to some theorists, the force of...