The Feminization of American Culture, by Ann Douglas
Crutcher, Anne
BOOKS IN REVIEW - The Feminization of American Culture Ann Douglas / Knopf / $15.00 Ann Douglas is not only a formidably learned young woman; she is also a person. with original insights and the...
...As he has it, the hardliners believe incorrectly that the Soviet Union maniacally wants war, while he understands correctly that the "weight of defensive considerations in the total pattern of Soviet strategic-political thought" is overwhelming...
...So much so, in Emerson's case, that he left the ministry, saying that, under modern conditions, a clergyman could not be "a man quite whole...
...We apparently need not be willing and prepared to fight even for our vital interests, at least not against the Soviet Union...
...As she tells the story, it started when the Calvinist ginger went out of religion in the United States in the early part of the 19th century...
...Its main concern is to make sure it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power...
...It did mean making fun of female timidity and featherheadedness as well as exalting female delicacy of feeling and moral purity...
...Just a big "No...
...Yet this commitment to ourselves can never demand "direct Military involvement...
...And anti-capitalism...
...The general argument of those whom Kennan hopes to discredit is of course not that the Soviet Union seeks war or that war is inevitable, but rather that the Soviets believe, not unreasonably, that superior military strength would help them to achieve their objectives without being challenged militarily...
...Although Prof...
...But the distinction between "serious" and "vital" interests may not be crucial...
...Kennan's discussion of defense and military issues in this book on "Current Realities of American Foreign Policy" is carried on in the hushed tones that parents once used when discussing family scandals in front of the children...
...BOOK REVIEW The Feminization of American Culture Ann Douglas / Knopf / $15.00 Ann Douglas is not only a formidably learned young woman...
...As Douglas points out, the more intelligent and strong among them were unhappy about it...
...Furthermore, the female writers had a ready-made audience...
...The cruelest aspect of the process of oppression is the logic by which it forces its objects to be oppressive in turn, to do the dirty work of society in several senses," she says...
...The feminist chip is on the anticapitalist shoulder all the way...
...There is no political or ideological difference between the Soviet Union and the United States—nothing which either side would like, or would hope, to achieve at the expense of the other—that would be worth the risks and sacrifices of a military encounter...
...Men in mining camps and offices and clipper ships became rougher and tougher in competitive exercise of the characteristics generally associated with maleness...
...She resorts to Marcusian circularities of determinism...
...When the sense of miracle and judgment went out of religion, giving way to the rational and pragmatic emphases of science, the most powerfully masculine personalities were no longer attracted to careers in the ministry...
...This view is never alluded to by Kennan...
...The men, forced to overdevelop their enterprise, courage, ruthlessness, and attention to immediate purpose, had to leave it to the women to present and realize the other side of life and human nature—everything from social manners to artistic embellishments to the spiritual niceties...
...The unending need to maintain postures of fearless leadership and superiority before ill-comprehended and hostile subject peoples was enough to turn the men of Victorian Britain into another kind of caricature of masculinity, with a caricatured femininity as its complement...
...Whatever constellation of forces made it happen that way, it did: Religion lost its virility...
...Kennan asserts time and again that a concern for "military considerations" is inseparable from, and tantamount to, a conviction that war is inevitable...
...Now, at 35, having studied, taught, and written about 19th-century American history and literature at the best universities (Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Columbia), she has come out with her first book...
...Such men could not compete in macho terms with either the Indian fighters or the robber-baron, business tycoons the 19th-century challenges brought into being among males in the United States...
...Small wonder they turned to a female constituency to whom they could both appear manly and make the appeals of empathy...
...The Soviet leaders are far more concerned with "security" than 42 The American Spectator November 1977...
...It bred a horror of "going native...
...In any situation, the successful leader tends to be the one who finds out what people want to do and tells them to do it...
...each time Kennan is careful to add "the single reservation that it should not involve the dispatch and commitment of American armed forces...
...It's that kind of book—one to set off chains of speculation and further conclusion as well as to deliver its own messages...
...The educative role of women as mothers, and as teachers after they came to monopolize American schools, she dismisses bysaying "Such an educator provides, no matter how unwillingly, merely window-dressing for the forces that control his society...
...It's too bad...
...Indeed, Kennan tells us, "the belief that stronger powers dominate over weaker ones and dictate terms to them simply by the possession of superior military force, or by demands placed under threat of the use of such force, has extremely slender support in historical experience...
...They tended to be sickly, they had powerful attachments to their mothers, and they felt more than they thought...
...Bloomington, Indiana The American Spectator November 1977 41 Stail as a monster of ego drive with a mind more like a battering ram than a rapier...
...To make this splendid analysis of an overlooked cultural current and then say it goes to show how capitalism and patriarchy have been in collusion to keep women down—really...
...A lot about the Victorian era in Victoria's country can be explained in terms of constant confrontations with primitive and/or alien cultures...
...And Kennan now stresses the importance of "defensive considerations" for the Soviet Union...
...We'd like to believe a woman who can do what Ann Douglas has done in this book can see it all...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...What's a feminist to do...
...The women, meanwhile, were doing their version of the same thing...
...Cause and effect are hard to disentangle, but Douglas notes that it coincided with the clergy's loss of material power and security through official disestablishment...
...For them, the new frontier of radically changing economic structures that went with the industrial revolution combined with colonizations and conquests around the world...
...As might be expected, it has a lot to offer in the way of new interpretations buttressed by strong scholarship...
...And we have a "commitment not to the Israelis but to ourselves" to see that this does not happen to Israel...
...Which is to say, it is a book to inspire admiration and gratitude...
...A "reasonable sense of national dignity," for which Kennan appeals, does William Kristol is a graduate student in government at Harvard...
...The women they dreamed about became, in the yearning reveries of absence, softer, daintier, more tender than real life...
...Kennan never explains his reasons for this single categorical reservation...
...The experience stiffened British Britishness—remember the jokes about dressing for dinner in the jungle...
...The intellectual force of the great 17th and 18th-century men of religion was, in 19th-century America, watered down into the frivolous showmanship of a Henry Ward Beecher...
...For "above all, the needs of national defense must not be presented to the American public in such a way as to suggest that a military outcome of our differences with the Russians is the most likely one, and military considerations are overriding in Soviet-American relations...
...Because both sides realize or should realize this, "military considerations" are not or need not be "overriding" in Soviet-American relations...
...And writing was work that could be done at home, without challenging male dominance of the marketplace...
...the gentle, the sweet, the cozy, the dainty, the safe, as opposed to the heroic, adventurous, bloody, and tragic...
...But "extremely slender support" is not no support...
...Certainly one has a sense of the same humorless and professorish quality in each of these strong-minded women...
...The American hardliners whose influence Kennan fears believe, according to Kennan, that the Soviets want to "unleash a new world war" or a "major war," or believe at least that "an ultimate showdown on the basis of armed strength" is inevitable...
...What Ann Douglas has done is to show an all too holy alliance of ladies and increasingly ladylike Protestant clergymen that gave 19th-century American society the patina of kitschy religiosity 20th-century American society has spent so much energy trying to get rid of...
...The last part of the book is devoted to two long essays, one on Margaret Fuller and the other on Melville, both of whom Douglas admires as talents running counter to the sentimental religiosity so pervasive in 19th-century American intellectual life...
...Everything the men were doing out on those battle lines of political and economic expansion forced the women to use their leverage to produce mass society, consumerism, imperialism, and, the rest...
...It could be argued, too, that the frontiers 19th-century Americans were up against made such extreme demands on men's masculine qualities that there was no room in most psyches for anything else...
...Anne Crutcher homesteading and the power frontier of aggressive, individualistic business development drew the masculine element of the society away from the realms of intellect and religion and applied it to the world of action and here-and-now concern with the tangible...
...This unfair and unintelligent caricature of his opponents' views suggests the extent to which Kennan's civility of manner and care in argument, evident where he deals with issues other than defense and Soviet-American relations, fade away as he turns to the "cloud of danger" of nuclear weapons and the "catastrophe we all fear" of a showdown between the U.S...
...It is intensely disappointing to find that the brilliant Ann Douglas is also an uncritical transmitter of the most tortuous follies of contemporary thinking about women and society...
...Both the geographical frontier and the economic frontier tended to separate men from women, with the result that the qualities of each became exaggerated by a kind of distillation process...
...Douglas recognizes how much power women had over the minds and moral values of the community in 19th-century America...
...This is fortunate...
...Exalting women, it exalted motherhood, 40 The American Spectator November 1977 which, in turn, meant exalting children and domesticity...
...the girls left at home while their brothers were at Harvard and Bowdoin loved reading...
...Church was what 19th-century women had instead of universities to explain the world to them...
...Since the concept is not allowed to appear, one cannot say that Kennan explicitly disavows containment...
...The reply took in the fact that Napoleon constantly fled Madame de Stael's presence because he couldn't stand her...
...Kennan does not openly reject that understanding here...
...Douglas does not go intoit, the expanding empire created a version of the same process for the 19th-century British...
...Prof...
...To give some idea of how far the 19th-century clergymen went in feminizing Jesus, Douglas quotes Horace Bushnell, a Connecticut Congregationalist, as saying Christ's suffering should be "nothing strange to us" because we see such sacrifice daily in the response of a mother to her child...
...BOOK REVIEW The Cloud of Danger: Current Realities of American Foreign Policy George F. Kennan / Little, Brown / $8.95 William Kristol Three times in The Cloud of Danger George Kennan reminds us that the United States has "a commitment to do all in our power...to assure that Israel continues to exist...
...It was also as a reinforcement of their ties with men that they went so far to fit their behavior into the men's idealizations...
...Should we be willing to fight only for our "vital" interests...
...It was an assertion of their individuality as people different from men when they began exaggerating the qualities in themselves that differentiated them from men...
...Similarly, Douglas' failure to say anything about the central strain of homosexuality in Melville's personality and writing suggests serious blind spots about the way masculinity and femininity really manifest themselves in history...
...Douglas' susceptibility to such dogma would appear to reflect areas of conflict and uncertainty within herself about male and female qualities...
...At a time when childbirth took as many lives as it did in the 19th century, it was a short step from sentimentalizing maternity to sentimentalizing death...
...But he does deplore "the madness of universal involvement" of the postwar period, as well as "the extreme militarization of thinking about the Cold War" that followed Korea...
...Men and women alike longed for a milieu of pianos and beautiful clothes, courtesies and elevated sentiments as a counterweight to the callouses on their hands, the mud on their boots, the coarseness of their pleasures, and the cut-throat things they found themselves doing to survive...
...She is constantly oscillating between expressions of contempt for the soft and feminine qualities attributed to women and resentment of what are considered male ways and values...
...As Douglas observes, "It is not just that God wants to become man, he wants to become woman...
...Kennan knows that peoples can be "destroyed, enslaved, or driven into the sea by hostile" and presumably stronger neighbors...
...Freedom of religion in the young United States meant proliferating sects and competition between religion and irreligion as well as competition between church and church...
...One suspects that she identifies more with Margaret Fuller than with just about anybody else...
...It took a woman to get the last celestial teardrop out of the subject...
...Instead he presents us with a simple choice: "one road leading to a total militarization of policy and an ultimate showdown on the basis of armed strength, the other to an effort to break out of the strait jacket of military rivalry and to strike through to a more constructive and hopeful vision of America's future and the world's...
...The physical frontier of western Anne Crutcher is an editorial writer for the Washington Star...
...Kennan's 1947 understanding of the Soviet leaders—that they will take what they can get, and what they will try to take will in large measure depend on what we allow them to think they can get—has more or less governed American foreign policy for three decades...
...Ironically, she ends up doing less than justice to the richness of Margaret Fuller'sconsciousness by giving so little evidence of understanding Fuller's feminine yearnings and fulfillments...
...Not socialism or anarchism or any positive utopian formulation...
...She doesn't like what they did with it...
...The more the men had to suppress the softer .side of themselves to make it in situations demanding ever greater toughness from them, the more they projected the suppressed qualities onto women, for both better and worse...
...Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa Alcott and Sara Josepha Hale just about had to take pen in hand...
...It wasn't the compliment Douglas seems to think it was...
...But if it finds unassailable barriers in its path, it accepts them philosophically and accomodates itself to them...
...he ignores it, presumably to avoid having to confront it...
...The clergy was on the defensive, forced to follow popular taste more than command it...
...The question is which of many strains of interest and desire a particular leader will connect with—a mysterious equation at best, and always easier to explain after the fact than to predict...
...It also took in Talleyrand's own well-documented attitude toward Madame de There is opportunity in America...
...He isn't as brave," said Talleyrand...
...These are of course Kennan's words, from his famous analris of Soviet conduct published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs...
...And so began the 19th-century cultivation of deathbed scenes which reached its zenith when Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva joined the angels...
...with original insights and the boldness to follow through on them...
...Kennan writes as if no one has ever made an argument such as the following: [The Soviet Union's) political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal...
...At any rate, in both America and Britain, circumstances conspired to make a second-class male of the clergyman...
...Ann Douglas does not examine the way the protean quality of culture in a frontier democracy tended to encourage such enterprise, but her book stimulates thinking about it...
...If only that were all there is to be said about it...
...In other words, women can't win for winning...
...Perhaps the explanation lies in his decision that Israel, though a "serious" interest for us, is not a "vital" one...
...and the USSR...
...As Douglas points out, Uncle Tom's Cabin was more a revivalist sermon than anything else...
...And it made almost intolerable demands on the traits usually associated with maleness...
...This is simply false...
...And, more and more, they came to the fore, as writers whose fiction fleshed out the pronouncements of the ministers...
...The main thing is that there should always be pressure, increasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal...
...This book is intended to refute those politicians and analysts who give excessive weight to military considerations...
...For men of lesser vision and integrity than Emerson's, survival instincts led to a courtship of the ladies that, like any courtship, involved quite a bit of flattery...
...for everything an agile intellect can stigmatize as the cultural fallout of 19th-century economic development in the United States...
...Although these leanings wreak their distortions, the core of the book is still arrestingly individual and filled with observations worth thinking about...
...The only thing that keeps it from being a really first-rate work is that the Douglas brains and knowledge and imaginative grasp are so often subservient to a couple of negative ideologies...
...For if honoring our commitments required us to consider fighting for them, we should have to take military matters seriously, and this unseemly attention to "military considerations" would "run a strong risk" of causing the very war that we should be concerned to avoid...
...Yes, feminism, of the complaining, rationalizing, self-justifying sort...
...It worried the ministers, who felt competition on their own turf...
...It is nowhere more perfectly illustrated than in Douglas' failure to get the nuances of the familiar story about Madame de Stael asking Talleyrand if Napoleon was as intelligent as she...
...not require a reasonable willingness to commit armed forces if necessary to honor our commitments to ourselves...
...It was not surprising that there should be ministerial murmurings about women writers trying to usurp the pulpit...
...Douglas does not say so, but the thought glances off what she does say that 'the polarization had a lot to do with frontier longings for what might be called simply civilization: a pattern of institutions and physical surroundings to transcend the brute struggle of so much becoming...
...Pretty soon, there was a trinity to match, with God turned into a strict but kindly Papa and Jesus into something so close to a pensive girl that there were occasional rebellions against the image—foreshadowings of the Jesus-as-football-player concepts with which early 20th-century evangelicals tried to win back a public sick of spiritual pabulum...
...If I am not mistaken, neither the word nor the concept of "containment" appears in Kennan's new book...
...Douglas, who has organized her study around analyses of the careers and personalities of 30 American Protestant ministers and 30 women of the 19th century, shows the pulpit of that time occupied almost exclusively by men of a somewhat feminized type...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
