New and Improved: The Transformation of American Women's Emotional Culture (review)

New and Improved: The Transformation of American Women's Emotional Culture. By John C. Spurlock and Cynthia A. Magistro (New York, New York University Press, 1998) 213 pp. $35.00.

"I want to be modern and whicked [sic] and sophisticated," wrote fourteen-year-old Beth Twiggar in her diary in 1928 (17). Like many other young women in the early twentieth century, Twiggar was eager to enjoy the promise of a new, improved, modern world. As Spurlock and Magistro sensitively demonstrate, however, despite women's eagerness to dispense with Victorian traditions and exchange them for "modern . . . and sophisticated" ways, American women's emotional culture in the 1920s and 1930s was filled with contradictions. Using novels, psychology texts, and the diaries and autobiographies of fifty white, middle-class women, Spurlock and Magistro trace the outlines of women's ideals and lives in the early twentieth century. "Modern women," they explain, "expected fulfillment in marriage, companionship, or career" (3). Despite (or, perhaps, because of) their high expectations, however, women often found disappointment rather than fulfillment at every stage of life, from adolescence to middle age. The contrast between expectation and experience, the authors suggest, "was at the heart of the emotional experience of modern women" (16).

The "flaming youth" of the 1920s measured themselves by the standards of their peers: popularity, good looks, and personality. Rejecting their mothers' homosocial attachments and standards of morality, young women sought the admiration and the caresses of the opposite sex. "I want a boy friend," mourned Beth Twiggar. "I want to be cuddled . . . petted, necked and improperly delt [sic] with. . . . I want to be sought after caught often and generally popular" (42). Young women purchased popularity at the expense of individuality. At the University of North Carolina, a graduate student said of her dorm mates that "you could unscrew all these heads and screw them on again to other bodies without getting any difference in conversation, outlook or personality" (22).

Women in the early twentieth-century United States looked to marriage to provide them with sexual satisfaction, emotional fulfilment, and a sense of identity. When their expectations were not fulfilled, they blamed themselves. Winifred Willis described her wedding day as "the attainment of happiness and the beginning of life" (107). But when her marriage faltered, Willis worried that "my nerves, my habits, my selfishness" were to blame for the emotional distance that characterized her marriage. "If I am to change all this, to be glad and happy," she resolved, "there is only one course for me--I must deny my very self. I must not only learn rigid surface control; I must suffer a complete inner negation" (87-88). Despite Willis' attempts to reshape herself to her husband's desires, her marriage ended in divorce in 1928; she suffered a nervous breakdown a few months later (110).

Women looked to motherhood, as well as to marriage, for personal satisfaction and a sense of self. Although Gladys Bell Penrod "rebelled at first, cried a little and fretted a lot" when she discovered her pregnancy, she quickly decided that things had happened for the best. "I want to live now for my baby," she resolved (142). Although women looked to motherhood as a source of fulfilment and happiness, they also found that children could bring "hopeless discouragement, . . . terror and worry" (138). Modern mothers faithfully read the advice of child-rearing experts, attempting to regulate their emotions and their children's schedules to produce more autonomous, independent children. Many found, however, that love for their children conflicted with the strict system that child psychologists advised. "I don't think much of my ability to 'train up a child in the way he should go,'" worried Penrod. "I think I'm a failure" (144).

Spurlock and Magistro are careful to point out that "middle-class women did not only passively absorb emotional culture. Rather, they often appropriated cultural...