identifying timing can we address causes and consequences.
4. The informalization model, while more right than wrong, simply does not capture the full substance of the emotional culture that emerged from the decline of Victorianism in the United States. Despite its attractive caution and complexity, it overdoes the liberating elements and, still more important, downplays the vital corollary of growing informality itself: the growing aversion to emotional intensity that such informality requires. It is the very un-Victorian suspicion of intense emotional experience, far more than a simple renunciation of Victorian repression, that forms the essence of the transition in American emotional culture. This is what must be explained. Emotional restraint must be seen as itself a causal force that has reshaped various relationships in contemporary social life. Even more than the informalization proponents have realized, fundamental features of the emotional culture that emerged from the ashes of Victorianism are counterintuitive, involving actual emotional constraints of which many middle-class Americans have remained unaware.
Source materials for this book cluster primarily, though not exclusively, in what is generally known as prescriptive literature. Victorian popularizers, and their readers, felt a need for guidance in various aspects of emotional socialization, and the popularity of the numerous manuals directed at parents and youth has been well documented. Then, in the 1920s, a new set of popularizing authorities entered the marketplace The audience their work achieved forms one index of middle-class Americans’ quest for some real innovation in emotional guidelines.
For the Victorian period the manuals referred to above form a vital starting point. Most of them addressed various kinds of emotional standards.25 Popular short stories—particularly those with a strong moral purpose as featured in Godey’s Ladies Book, Peterson’s, and the Ladies Home Journal—etiquette books, and hortative stories for older children and youth add to the prescriptive mix.26 Many of these genres continued in the transition decades of the twentieth century, although the youthadvice literature began to decline rapidly, and stories aimed at children shifted toward escapism (which itself reveals a new emotional tone).27 Marital advice manuals and popular magazines for men as well as for women increased in volume and utility, while childrearing advice in various forms remained essential. Also vital for twentieth-century emotionology was the burgeoning prescriptive literature focused on emotional standards at work. The cumulation of this various material, combined with many other studies that provide additional evidence on key points—such as recent interview and questionnaire data and private letters from the Victorian period—yields a fairly full picture of emotional culture and the range of its audience. The same material also provides suggestive evidence about causation, when used in combination with information about larger social and cultural trends available from existing historiography for both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and from additional research in areas such as popular health attitudes. Supplemented by a more disparate range of materials, including several key interview studies from the 1930s onward,28 this body of evidence enables us to venture some conclusions about actual internalization of the recommended standards and about the larger impact of these standards in all areas of life, from leisure to law.
One final point, which no introduction should be without: So what? What is the point of attending to emotional culture at all? Emotional culture is hard to study, yet the game is worth the candle, and not only because the quest is intrinsically challenging. In the first place, the study of emotional culture makes an essential contribution to other kinds of emotions research, aiding scholars who seek to understand what emotions are and what roles they play. Emotions study is on the upswing of late. Cognitive psychologists, even researchers on artificial intelligence, probe links between emotional reactions and other forms of thought; though typically interested in formulas yielding high generalization, and thus often partisans of the idea of inherent, basic emotions, they are not immune to an interest in cultural change as a variable. Social psychologists, dealing with emotions in a collective context, have contributed directly to historical study and have examined various categories of emotional standards and behaviors that may or may not be open to historical change. A growing group of sociologists, and some anthropologists, includes the most articulate advocates of the idea of social or cultural construction, in which emotional standards and even internal behaviors respond at least in part to evolving functional needs. Yet it remains true that reasonably general, reasonably precise, and reasonably analytical tests of the idea of basic emotional change are not numerous. The present study contributes additional substance to the constructionist venture and links with other kinds of inquiries into the relationship between emotion and variations (including changes) in social context.
Emotions research also adds new and important dimensions to historians’ examination of several familiar developments, and it helps connect these developments. Here, an example quite relevant to this study will serve better than a general formulation. The concept of consumerism is a staple in American social and cultural history. We all know that new passions for acquisition had flamed by the 1920s; though it can be argued that basic changes occurred somewhat earlier, important discussions of precise timing need not obscure the basic point that growing numbers of Americans, headed by the middle class, developed a new relationship to goods and the process of obtaining them. We know also, if in fairly general terms, that the rise of consumerism, as distinct from earlier, more subsistence-based forms of acquisition, promoted or reflected broader changes in outlook.29 But we are far from knowing the full effects of growing commitment to consumerist behavior. A study that explores the emotional corollaries of this trend, which is what this book is in part, thus adds considerably to our grasp of the human meaning of a familiar new social pattern. It is hardly surprising that increased interest in acquiring nonessential goods had emotional consequences, so that other kinds of emotional contacts changed as people put more emotional energy into consumption. But these ramifications have rarely been examined. Catching the connection as it took shape—that is, treating the connection historically—is an essential step in improving understanding. Further, growing consumerism was connected to other developments, familiar in themselves and coincident in time, such as changing religious values. By looking at the larger framework for measurable shifts in emotions culture—by looking beyond a single major factor such as consumerism—emotions history can reveal how concomitant changes were brought home to real people in that substantial segment of their lives pervaded by emotional reactions and evaluations.
Emotions history does not, however, simply measure the results of other changes in human terms. It also adds to the explanation of change. Emotions research, particularly in the constructionist school, tends to downplay this vital facet of emotion, looking mainly at the context for emotional standards and at the ways standards shape individual lives. Emotions are treated either as isolated phenomena or as dependent variables; their own impacts are not assessed. From the historical side, much social history has focused on emphasizing the rationality of various groupings. One of the first claims in social history, for example, was that lower-class rioters were not impelled by blind passion, that they chose targets carefully according to well-defined goals. These goals certainly differed from modern, middle-class goals; there was no disputing the importance of cultural context. But within this context cool rationality prevailed. Only recently have social historians developed any real interest in going beyond rationalism to look at other kinds of reactions and relationships. But their probes remain tentative and characteristically confined to family patterns and other private behaviors. The potential for examining the wider consequences of emotional change—for taking emotions seriously as a source of social behaviors, within families to be sure but also in a variety of other, more public settings—has not been tapped. This kind of emotions history is not, it must quickly be noted, in conflict with rationalist social history. Emotions are not irrational; they relate to the cognitive process in that they involve thinking about one’s own impulses and evaluating them as an intrinsic part of the emotional experience itself.30
