[“Historian Elaine Tyler May has said of the 1950s that when the expansion of sexuality and consumerism in post-World War II America began to threaten the preservation of family life and marriage, Americans adopted a domestic version of diplomat George Kennan’s 1950s containment policy toward the Soviet Union, which involved forgoing any direct attempts to topple the USSR but aggressively combating any efforts to spread communist institutions or ideas. In family life, says May, domestic containment meant tolerance of sexual expression and the pursuit of individual happiness, before as well as during marriage, but aggressive efforts to channel those energies into marriage and to punish or quarantine personal behaviors that might serve as an alternative to marriage.
May’s analogy is extremely useful, but I think domestic containment began in the 1920s. Floyd Dell explained the rationale for it at the time, arguing that while the “excesses” of the early twentieth century had been necessary to tear down gender segregation and false modesty, the task now was to return people to a more moderate course, rejecting extreme ideas such as the right to engage in sex for pure “amusement.” In the same vein, encouraging women to work had “served an excellent social purpose in getting girls out of the dying patriarchal home,” wrote Dell. “But now that they are out of the old patriarchal home, the problem is for them to get back into the home on modern and self-respecting terms; and it does not help them to pretend otherwise.”
Sexuality was one arena where reformers consciously applied a policy of containment during the 1920s. While they encouraged “healthy” sexuality, they developed new ways of penalizing “unhealthy,” “precocious,” or “promiscuous” sexual behavior. Girls or young women who engaged in activities that reformers considered unhealthy were labeled “delinquent” and charged with “sex offenses” in the newly expanded juvenile court system.
Anxiety about sexual promiscuity converged with the emergence of the pseudoscience eugenics to fan fears that the lower and “unfit” classes were reproducing like rabbits while middle- and upper-class women were restricting their fertility. The eugenics movement, warning that this disparity would debase society’s gene pool, provided another tool for containment.
The virulently racist eugenics program of the Nazis during the 1930s is well known, but few people realize how popular the ideas of eugenics were in Western Europe and North America during the 1920s. Paul Popenoe, one of the movement’s leading advocates in the United States, estimated that on the basis of their IQ results, ten million Americans ought to be sterilized. In the late 1920s, before the Nazis came to power, California had the most extensive eugenics program in the world, performing more sterilizations than all other countries combined. Most of the men were sterilized because they were unable to perform the breadwinner role. Three-fourths of the sterilized women were “sex delinquents.”]
stephanie coontz, from marriage, a history: from obedience to intimacy, or how love conquered marriage, 2005
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