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1 Home, Family, Citizenship: Shaping the Boyhood Ideal 1 T he popular and professional ideas on boyhood in the late 1940s and the 1950s took shape in a social and political context impacted by dislocations and upheavals in marital and familial relations brought on by Depression era and wartime conditions. Out of this social and political turbulence came a mixture of uncertainty and danger, fear and change, which in turn generated a search for social, political, and economic stability, security, and “normalcy.” One prominent social manifestation of the search for a “healthy normalcy” was a rush to “reconstruct” the patriarchal family and its attendant “familialist ideology.”1 This point was put into sharp relief in an August 1955 article in the Toronto Star. Its author, Elijah Adlow, an American judge, exclaimed that “the only hope for the future lies in the resurgence of the home as the basic institution of the modern world.”2 Social commentators routinely made efforts to normalize the white, middle-class, heterosexual, nuclear family, and by extension an appropriate masculinity, as the basis upon which to safeguard and fulfill the promise of a better postwar Ontario.3 From this basis of familial “normalcy” and shaped by gendered concerns about a safe and secure future came a particular kind of boy. He was assumed to be white and heterosexual and to have well-adjusted, Canadian-born, happy and healthy parents whose task it was to ensure social stability by developing appropriate gender identities in their children. His masculine father was the breadwinner and was not weak, nor was he dominated by his wife, since this latter state would mean that the mother dominated the boy as she did the husband. At the same time, mothers were told not to be overprotective, the fear being that this would turn boys into “sissies” and by extension raise the postwar spectre of homosexuality. The normal boy’s mother stayed at home and cared for him and as his primary caregiver handled everyday child care issues, such as communicating with teachers. There was considerable concern about families ONTARIO BOYS 2 in which mothers worked outside the home or were divorced and heading fatherless, single-mother families.4 Some commentators wondered aloud if a “return to normal” was even possible in light of the “postwar divorce epidemic” and its “deplorable” effects on children.5 In short, shaped by efforts to reconstruct patriarchal and heterosexist relations, the boy and his family were rigidly defined, equated with normalcy, and used to fight off fears of insecurity and instability, and this ideological work was done through the rhetoric found in child care advice columns and in the psychological and academic literature. Employing its methods of normalcy, psychological discourse helped foster the idea that normal, secure, happy, healthy boys came from good, stable homes located in good, middle-class neighborhoods. It was thought that “poor housing conditions” made the “establishing of good health habits difficult”; conversely, a clean and attractive neighbourhood with adequate space and nearby recreational facilities contributed to the development of better, happier, and “more normal individuals.”6 It was fancied that in these “purer social spaces,” children, and boys in particular, would have more opportunities to develop good habits and traits such as honesty, helpfulness, teamwork, and a spirit of fair play.7 By contrast, as one professor of psychology suggested in the May 1951 issue of Parents’ Magazine, the home of the maladjusted boy was filled with social ills and family disunity: “You’re twice as likely to find alcoholism, emotional disturbance, criminal behaviour and mental defects as in the families of the other boys who come from the same part of town. There’s a double chance, too, that his parents do not get along and that his home has been or will be broken by separation, desertion or divorce.”8 Thus, poorer neighbourhoods were viewed as threatening state security because they undermined the domestic ideal; they were also seen as delinquency -producing areas that generated maladjusted, defective boys. Franca Iacovetta has found that poor, immigrant adult males were constructed by social commentators, including psychologists, as more likely to be emotionally disturbed and to engage in criminal behaviour—tendencies that would produce abnormal boyhoods in their sons.9 In this respect, postwar popular thought constructed and normalized the idea that normal, well-adjusted boys did not come from poverty-stricken immigrant backgrounds, nor did they have neglectful, separated, or divorced parents.10 The inherent risks to the neglected boy were allegorized...

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