"SISSY" BOYS AND "UNHAPPY" GIRLS: CHILDREARING DURING THE COLD WAR
by Daniel Gomes
"The imprint of history is one of the most neglected facts in [human] development," notes sociologist Glen Elder. "Lives are shaped by the settings in which they are lived [as well as] by the timing of encounters with historical forces, whether depression or prosperity, peace or war."1 The children of the fifties, who influenced modern notions of gender and sexuality, are products of such forces, yet there are few accounts of their childhood that consider the setting in which socialization occurred. The present study, part of an investigation into the social and cultural history of childhood in mid-century America, surveys the advice psychologists and other child experts disseminated to white middle-class parents through mass circulation popular magazines published between 1943 and 1963. The data are drawn from 343 non-fiction articles found primarily in Parents' Magazine, the paid circulation of which rose steadily from 660,000 in 1943 to over 1.9 million in 1963, making it the foremost popular journal devoted solely to topics of childrearing. Articles from other mainstream periodicals include: women's magazines (Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and McCall's), journals aimed at the suburban home (American Home, Better Homes and Gardens, and Home and Garden), mass circulation news magazines (Life, Look, New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and Time), popular periodicals (The American Mercury, Coronet, and Saturday Evening Post), and one health magazine (Today's Health).
Beginning with a brief overview of the impact of the Depression and World War II on creating a climate more appreciative of children, child-care experts, suburban family culture, and postwar anxieties, I analyze how gender and sexual socialization of children, as portrayed in the popular literature, was influenced by nationalist concerns. Among those concerns was sexual deviance and, in particular, homosexuality, demonstrating how prescriptive literature contributed to the postwar discourse about (homo)sexuality by focusing on "unwanted" childhood behaviors--"sissiness" in boys and "unhappiness" in girls. Uncovering the reasons why middle-class Americans in the 1950s were so receptive to the recommendations of experts on a variety of childhood behaviors requires familiarity with the historical context that shaped cultural attitudes.
The Growth of Postwar Society and Anxiety
Strengthened by postwar prosperity, the rise of suburbs, and the growth of a consumer society, the new "family culture" became a feature of American life. The ideal homelife, as elaborated by historian Elaine Tyler May, was designed not only to curtail the participation of women in the work force, but to limit expressions of sexuality to heterosexual marital intercourse.2 In suburban America, having the requisite three to four children became the principal mode of "reconstituting and resocializing the American family."3 This new appreciation of children, while directly related to the limits on reproduction imposed by the Depression, was also the result of other factors. The combination of technological innovation and increasing female labor not only reduced the economic incentive for having children, particularly among the working class, but helped to reshape parents' perceptions of the children they already had.4 Previous anxiety about family stability and the falling birthrate also meant that by the early 1940s, the appreciation of children as children combined with increasing domestication of middle-class women to produce a greater sentimental attachment to family life.5 Television, movies, and magazines inundated Americans with images of the child-centered family.6 With the adoration of children among middle-class white Americans, the ideal of suburban culture found its emotional nucleus.
Fulfilling the goals and aspirations of the new family order in a prosperous society did not come without misgivings. While widespread affluence offered encouragement about the nation and its economic future, new apprehensions developed around the perceived threats to suburban domesticity posed by juvenile delinquency, working-class social mobility, and unbridled materialism. However, battling the Cold War spawned the greatest postwar anxiety. The United States defense budget, stimulated by fear of Soviet hostility, provided investments in new technologies and employment for many Americans. Nevertheless, fear of Communist domination, undergirded by the specter of atomic annihilation, generated new anxieties about preserving the American way of life.7
The family became a source of concern as it became endowed with new importance in the postwar era. As a buffer shielding individuals from a world threatened by communism and nuclear destruction, family stability became imperative. Yet, in 1948 and 1953 sexual theorist Alfred Kinsey alerted Americans to the prevalence among family members of premarital intercourse, homosexual experiences, and extramarital sex. Such practices deviated from the heterosexual, sexually exclusive, marital intercourse on which family stability was based.8 Concern about deviance was also fed by the sex crimes panic of the late 1940s and 1950s. So intense were fears about "sexual deviants" that anyone who did not embrace marriage and parenthood risked being perceived as "perverted, immoral, unpatriotic, and pathological" by therapists and others. Even the United States Senate became involved, defining as "perverts" people who engaged in same-sex consensual relationships as well as violent criminals who raped and murdered children. Espionage, too, was seen as a danger since homosexuals were perceived as vulnerable to blackmail. Accordingly, suspected homosexuals were purged from the armed forces, investigated by Congress, disbarred from federal jobs, spied on by the FBI, branded by state sexual psychopath laws, harassed by urban police forces, and defamed by headlines warning readers of the sexual deviants in their midst.9 By the mid-1950s, the suppression of gays and lesbians reached the point where "gay baiting rivaled red-baiting in its ferocity." Americans now saw this threat to the new family order as one which severely tested their ability to create the ideal home life. Such a challenge required the advice of experts.10
Child-Care Experts and Advice
Having assumed positions of cultural authority and institutional power, experts in the fields of child welfare, developmental psychology, and pediatrics became the primary source of wisdom in the art of raising children by the mid-1940s. 11 At the same time, experts had moved away from the rigid behavioralist theories of psychologist John B. Watson and adopted Freudian-based theories of childhood development. It was not until 1945, however, that more permissive childrearing methods found their master disseminator with the publication by Dr. Benjamin Spock of Baby and Child Care. This overnight best-seller became the child-care "Bible," as an estimated 22 million readers pored over chapters urging parents to combine love and respect with sensitivity and honesty.12
The Spockian school of childrearing saturated American popular culture during the Atomic Age, reaching its apogee in 1953 on the I Love Lucy show. While having their first baby, Lucy and Ricky resolved their endless concerns regarding "what to do about the baby" with the comment, "Well, let's see what Spock says." "What Dr. Spock says"13 reached an even broader audience as mass circulation magazines introduced "theories" of permissiveness to the suburban middle class. The Ladies Home Journal presented a regular column entitled "Dr. Spock Talks to Mothers," while other popular women's and news magazines constantly published articles on virtually every aspect of childrearing. Even the New York Times Magazine succumbed to the trend, featuring a section called "Parent and Child" where experts reviewed the full range of contemporary material on childrearing. It was Parents' Magazine, however, which had as its raison d'etre publication of the most up-to-date Spockian advice.
Raising Well-Adjusted Children
A survey of articles in mass-circulated magazines provides a vehicle for analyzing how Americans approached childhood socialization. The expectation that children grow into happy, mature, independent, productive, procreative "well-adjusted" adults permeated the literature. Experts insisted that childhood was a critical period in the emotional adjustment of children to their surroundings and that each child was an individual requiring unique and personalized attention. The great "task" of parents was to see that their child's individuality developed naturally, "without harm to himself or to society." Beneath the insistence on creating a positive and healthy environment to foster children's individual growth and social development was a concern over the nation's future. "The disturbed, hostile, and rebellious child," contended one expert, "is a danger to himself and to the community, and a poor risk as a future citizen." The real challenge then, was to teach youngsters how to fit into the postwar world. Otherwise, Americans risked the possibility of raising social misfits.14
In the status-conscious world of the 1950s, experts advised that children had to learn to give, share, and be thoughtful and considerate of others if they wanted to make themselves socially attractive, establish friendships, and achieve popularity. The central idea was that "being part of a group--a family, a class, a team, a society" was considered an accurate gauge of one's acceptance in postwar America. With the proper training, well-adjusted children would eventually come to acquire an array of social skills that included manners, self-confidence, and in-group popularity.15 Creating well adjusted, sociable team players also meant adherence to traditional gender norms.
Gender Role Socialization
According to childrearing experts, firm gender identification was a natural component of childhood. From the age of two or three, a child knew whether he or she was a boy or girl. Perceiving that he or she belonged "to this half of the human race," children's choice of playmates reflected their awareness of their sexual identity: girls played with girls and boys with boys. In his weekly column, Dr. Spock wrote: The girl at this age realizes that it is her destiny to be a woman, and this makes it particularly exciting and challenging for her to try to be like her mother and other women.... In caring for her dolls, she takes that very same attitude and tone of voice her mother uses toward children. She absorbs her mother's point of view toward men and boys. By the age of three a boy is beginning to realize more clearly that he is a boy and will grow up to be a man like his father.... In his play he concentrates on propelling toy trucks, trains and planes, pretending his tricycle is a car, being a policeman or fireman, making deliveries, building houses and bridges. He is preparing himself to play a man's part in the world.16
"Quantitative differences" of gender existed at birth, parents were told. For example, infant boys are "restless and insistent from the start" and naturally apt to express aggression. Girls, on the other hand, noted Spock, "take life as it comes even in the bassinet" and do not usually "express excitement with as much violence as boys do." Questions about the differences between the sexes usually arose by the age of five or six, a discovery that was frequently a problem for the little girl, who sometimes expressed concern that boys had something which she lacked. To help daughters accept this distinction, it was best to reassure them that "all little girls and mothers are like she is and that all boys and fathers are like her little brother and daddy."17
Implying that boys were already privileged, the magazines advised that care should be taken to provide younger girls with as many privileges as their brothers had or "she will tend to protest against her feminine role to her later unhappiness." Yet, ironically, the journals themselves perpetuated the perception that boys deserved entitlement. In almost ninety percent of this sampling, male names, the masculine pronoun "him," or its derivations are used in the articles. Unless girls are the primary players in a story, they are rarely visible in discussions of children and childrearing. Despite the rhetoric about giving girls equal attention, the representation of boys in the popular magazines underscored the view that middle-class families "unconsciously expect[ed]" children to conform to gender roles that were asymmetrical in value and prestige.18
Gender role stereotyping was implicit in discussions of children's activities and behavior. Boys played outdoors with bulldozers or engaged in combat over a toy; little girls played in the kitchen with paintbrushes and enjoyed shopping. Articles on the division of labor reinforced stereotypical gender expectations: "girls are supposed to help with the dishes, but boys are excused." Consistent with such advice, most middle-class parents socialized girls and boys differently, according to Ladies Home Journal. Girls were taught to be sweet, polite, and submissive; boys were socialized to be manly, proud, and aggressive. The postwar assumptions that boys were rough, loud, and independent and that girls were neat, reserved, and helpless preserved widely accepted gender ideals that defined men as wage-earners and women as happy homemakers. 19
Children were socialized to appreciate the distinctions between men and women, and "to think and act as members of their own sex are expected to think and act" in marriage. The importance of developing the skills needed to build strong and happy marriages was stressed in articles like: "How to Raise Better Husbands" and "Raise Your Girl to be A Wife," which argued that it was important to raise boys and girls who would grow to be well-adjusted husbands and wives, and fathers and mothers. For girls, especially, marriage was the yardstick by which they were expected to measure achievement. The experts maintained that the criterion of success for a daughter was "whether or not she got [and kept] her man." For women who did work, career options themselves remained narrow and gendered; the idea that "women should be teachers because they have the ability to be good teachers" was frequently endorsed.20
Sexual Socialization
At the same time that the war temporarily transformed gender roles, new attitudes emerged toward human sexuality, based strongly on Freud's theories about infant sexuality, fantasy, the unconscious, the oedipal conflict, and the toll taken by underlying anxieties, hates, fears, and guilts. The impact of Freudianism on child care and on parent-child relationships was especially evident in questions of sexual development. Inquisitiveness, which was "part of the raw material of the future personality," was a natural part of this development, according to the neo-Freudians. Children who were not curious about whether other boys and girls were designed the same way were abnormal. Rather than telling parents that their child's interest in sex was a matter for concern, popular magazines counseled them to deal with it constructively. When children were caught "playing house," parents should not scold or punish them since these behaviors were neither wicked nor even unusual. There were limits, however, to children's sexual activity. For example, a mother who found her six-year-old daughter beneath a blanket indulging in sexual play with a boy of the same age should not ignore the situation, according to Parents' Magazine. Rather, she should warn her child that such conduct is not always appropriate. The experts agreed that some concern was warranted when boys or girls were overly interested in sex play; but they also argued that controlled sexual exploration was normal and wholesome, not "bad" as was previously believed.21
Contrary to the old Watsonian philosophies, which advocated that parents tape their children's genitals at bedtime or tie their hands to the sides of the bed, the postwar experts maintained that masturbation was a natural part of human growth. For a four-year-old, it meant he was just "passing through a normal phase of his development" ; for a nine-year-old boy it had "a totally difference significance." Although it was not easy to accept the notion that a young boy or girl had sexual feelings, or that by handling their sex organs they derived a mild form of sexual pleasure, parents were instructed not to give their children the idea that they or their genitals were bad or "dirty." Rather, youngsters should grow up "with a wholesome and natural feeling about [their] whole body" and not be "shamed about this interest or punished for it." Parents were reassured that masturbation did not physically weaken, stunt growth, or cause nervous or sexual disorders: "the truth is...that masturbation has never been known to make any youngster sick or crazy or ruin his chances of marriage." In order for children to become adults who could enjoy a happy marriage and a satisfactory sex life, they must develop healthy attitudes toward their sexuality during childhood, the experts insisted, since it was the mystery in their minds about sexual matters that made children curious. Therefore, if offered the full facts, "the mystery--and with it the curiosity" would vanish.22
Consistent with such attitudes, experts argued for sex education in the United States by the late 1940s. Articles with such titles as "What to Say About Sex to Preschool Children" and "Father to Son/Mother to Daughter" filled the pages of America's popular magazines. Their message, the importance of teaching sex education to children in the home, was prompted by the perceived reluctance among parents to openly communicate with their children about sex. Informing children about sex and developing healthy attitudes toward it was one of the most difficult tasks for parents, especially those of the G.I. Generation who, experts acknowledged, were unable to even mention the word "sex" for "fear that it will be put to harmful uses, or that it will inspire unnatural sex activity." Parents were told that "straight, honest sex teaching no matter what its source" is reassuring, quieting, stabilizing, and will help children along the road to normal sexual growth. Sex education should not be a one time event but a "continuous experience" in which children were taught the truth in terms that addressed specific issues at various ages, beginning in early childhood.23
Open and honest sex education had the added advantage of preventing "smut" from inhibiting children's healthy sexual attitudes. Sexual expletives, parents were reminded, were uttered by children who often did not know what they were saying and who were merely repeating what they heard. The extent to which parents displayed "good-natured understanding" through the "dirty-story" stage of childhood determined the degree of confidence with which children would later turn to their parents for crucial help and advice in the years when they fully explored sex. "Dirty" words innocently repeated were not the same as pornography which, experts acknowledged, was capable of seducing young children into unnatural and criminal acts and causing schoolgirl pregnancies24 In the 1940s and 1950s, sex education in the home became a means of ensuring that American children learned to understand their sexuality without becoming sexually deviant.25
Sexual Deviants: "Sissy" Boys and "Unhappy" Girls
The distinction between "normal" sexuality and sexual "deviance" was critical for postwar Americans shocked by the revelations of "The Kinsey Report." The childrearing magazines reinforced the belief that masculinity, femininity, and normal heterosexuality were essential traits in healthy, well-adjusted boys and girls. Using their ability to define sexual normalcy, the experts warned that homosexuality did not just "afflict" adults, but that such deviant traits as "sissiness" in boys and "unhappiness" in girls appeared in childhood, and should be detected and corrected by alert, informed parents. This assumption was consistent with the then prevalent notion that homosexuality was a disease that, as psychologist Edmund Bergler reminded his readers, can be cured before it "embraces the entire personality." With such high-profile attention on homosexuals and the fervent emphasis on their cure, it is hardly surprising that popular notions about homosexuality were reflected in middle-class parenting magazines.26
Experts agreed that "the true sissy" was easily recognized by a shortage of the aggression associated with initiative, enterprise, and healthy competitiveness, all of which prepared boys to solve problems and overcome obstacles. Backing out of fist fights, avoiding all rugged sports or horseplay, and seeking much younger playmates were tell-tale signs. Because the "sissy" lacked a normal amount of aggressiveness and courage, he almost always suffered constant teasing from other boys and adults. Sissiness, which began in boys as young as three, was almost without exception a psychological, not a physical problem. Size, the experts insisted, had no actual correlation to timidity; often a smaller boy overcompensates for his size by becoming more aggressive. Behind the growing concern over raising a cowardly little boy who failed to embrace such necessary masculine traits as confidence, courage, self-esteem, and aggression was the fear that the child's feelings of inferiority and inadequacy about being male would lead him "to pursue feminine interests" and "at best, make him an indecisive and ineffectual person, and at worst may even lead to homosexuality or impotence."27
To counter the possibility of sissyhood, experts advised that unmasculine tendencies could be cured "by proper parental attention alone," since parents were partly responsible for their sons' sissiness.28 Some mothers are so overprotective that their son "never learns that he is not helpless," while some fathers fail to provide "a picture of what it means to be a man." Both parents sometimes set conflicting standards of behavior by "civilizing the small boy" and making him excessively polite, orderly, and gentle when he was also expected to be loud, rowdy and aggressive. Parents could change such behavior, psychologists counseled, if they thoroughly informed themselves on the problem, learned its "source" and followed practical and tested methods to replace their boy's low self-esteem with self-confidence to develop his latent masculine traits. Giving the boy a dog, having him join an organized group, encouraging him to engage in individual sports, and sending him to a summer camp would help him overcome his inferior feelings by giving him new skills, a new sense of achievement, self-esteem, and a feeling of protection from and a position with other boys.
Conversely, the experts contended that girls who expressed masculine characteristics and behaviors would not achieve any form of satisfaction in their adult lives, most especially personal fulfillment as wives and mothers. If a little girl knocked a playmate down in a fit of rage, she was quickly admonished that it was behavior befitting boys and destructive to her "ladylike" development. Because of their too aggressive, athletic, competitive, and intelligent tendencies, such "unhappy" girls would became "angular, masculine-looking business women." Instead, girls needed to learn a "feminine orientation toward life and the tender, caring-for feelings that go with it." Parents were discouraged from raising "tomboys" who "gave up their femininity," and instead were encouraged to develop "inner patterns of femininity" in their daughters, since it is "inside her where she thinks and feels she is either happy to be a woman or she is not." Moreover, to ensure that their daughters grew into "happy" heterosexual women who really want to get married, parents needed to be tolerant and understanding of their early interest in boys. This required that parents encourage their daughters to see "physical beauty as an attribute especially hers and especially valued." The successful "feminine woman" was pictured as "a pretty young maiden, immersed in domesticity and the problem of keeping herself and her kitchen floor beautiful." 29
Avoidance of the "destructive menace" of homosexuality was implicit in the statement that well-adjusted children grow "not through denials and restrictions, not through ignorance and prohibitions, but through a sincere effort, on our part, to provide those biologic and psychic needs which will preserve the integrity of their sexual natures and bring them to full and constructive maturity."30 Educating children about sex was thus intended to do more than enlighten them on issues of procreation; it was expected to regulate their expressions of sexuality so that boys remained masculine and not "sissies" and girls projected femininity and not "unhappiness."
Throughout the fifties the Spockian model, widely endorsed by experts and adopted by the suburban middle class, played a major role in the historical evolution of American society and culture. The preeminence of postwar America seemed to be offset by problems the baby boom was shaded by juvenile delinquency, economic growth was accompanied by challenges to middle-class status, consumer abundance was tainted by unabashed self-indulgence. Middle-class hegemony, shaken by the emergence of an economically and socially mobile working class, reinforced permissive child-care advice; since the working class had traditionally been hostile to childrearing experts, raising children according to the Spockian model reaffirmed middle-class distinctiveness. It also required of the mother a commitment of time and energy that effectively usurped any leisure time women may have had, and precluded work-force participation. Middle-class mothers of the 1950s worked in the home between sixty and eighty hours per week, tending not only to housework but to the never-ending needs of their children. Spockian ideals thus reinforced a culture of domesticity designed to keep women out of the labor market.
Domestic containment, Elaine Tyler May reminds us, was designed not only to curtail female work force participation but to limit expressions of sexuality to heterosexual marital intercourse. Popular parenting literature affirms that the postwar impetus to educate children about sex was intended to regulate childhood and adolescent expressions of sexuality. Evident in the experts' insistence that boys remained masculine and not "sissies" and that girls projected femininity and not "unhappiness" was the national preoccupation with homosexuality. "Sissy" boys and "unhappy" girls were perceived to be potential homosexuals and therefore potential threats to national security. The portrayal of the sissy and the tomboy in parenting magazines and the importance attached to correcting early behavior thought to be symptomatic of homosexuality thus served as an integral component of domestic containment. Like prosperity, suburbia, and domesticity, confident, well-behaved "sexually-well-adjusted" children not only symbolized American virtue but were part of its Cold War arsenal.30 The assumption that the nation's greatest resource was its children thus took on new meaning in the Cold War context.
Notes
1. Elder, Glen H., "Social History and Life Experience," Present and Past in Middle Life, ed. Dorothy Eichorn. NY: Academic Press, 1974, 3.
2. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988, 117; Lears, Jackson. "A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass-Consumption Society," Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War, ed. Lary May. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989, 43.
3. May, Homeward Bound, 16-17.
4. On the changing value of children, see Zelizer, Vivianna A., Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. NY: Basic Books, 1985, 7-10; Katz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. NY: Basic Books, 1986, 116-117.
5. Parrish, Michael E. Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941. NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992, 415.
6. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room For TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. (Chicago:U of Chicago P, 1992), 42-44, 59, 92.
7. John Patrick Diggins. The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941-1960. (NY: Norton, 1989), 187-188.
8. May, Homeward Bound, 117; Jackson Lears, "A Matter of Taste: Corporate Cultural Hegemony in a Mass-Consumption Society," in May, Recasting America, 43.
9. May, Homeward Bound, 19, 53, 88, 91, 94-96; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983, 57; John D'Emilio, "Gay Politics and Community in San Francisco Since World War II," in Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus and George Chauncy, Jr., Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (NY: New American Books, 1989), 459.
10. Mary Beth Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker," Quarterly Review of Films and Videos, 1989, 72; William M. Tuttle, "Daddy's Gone to War:" The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (NY: Oxford UP, 1993), 255-256.
11. Ernest R. Hilgard, Fifty Years of Psychology: Essays In Honor of Floyd Ruch (Boston: Scott, Foreman and Co., 1988), 10.
12. Benjamin Spock, Spock on Spock: A Memoir of Growing Up With the Century, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 135.
13. Ibid., 137.
14. George J. Hecht, "1950 to 1960 The Children's Decade," Parent's Magazine, January 1950, 18; Constance J. Foster and O. Spurgeon English, "What Kind of Discipline?" Parents' Magazine, May 1955, 48; Eliasberg, 63; Ardis Whitman, "If Your Child Is Different," Better Homes and Gardens, November 1953, 216, 265.
15. Foster, 39; Puner, 30, 90; Amy Vanderbilt, "Manners for Children Haven't Changed," Better Homes and Gardens, May 1952, 222; Benjamin Spock, "Are American Parents Over Permissive?" Ladies Home Journal, November 1960, 29.
16. Benjamin Spock, "A Child's World," Ladies Home Journal, June 1960, 50.
17. Luther E. Woodward, "Basic Training," Parents' Magazine, October 1946, 151.
18. Woodward, 151; Betty Hannah Hoffman, "Which Are Easier to Raise, Boys or Girls?" Ladies Home Journal, May 1962, 118; Neils Giles Ahern, "How to Teach Your Boy or Girl Good Manners," Better Homes and Gardens, March 1949, 175; Catherine Chilman, "Is It A Problem of Just A Stage?" Parents' Magazine, November 1963, 66-68.
19. D'Emilio, "Gay Politics and Community in San Francisco Since World War II," 459. Baritz, 185; May, Homeward Bound, 19, 88, 99.
20. May, Homeward Bound, 102, 133-134; Elizabeth B. Hurlock, "Children Need the Masculine Touch," Today's Health, August 1957, 62.
21. Clara Savage Littledale, "Then and Know," Parents' Magazine, October 1946, 134; Amy Selwyn, "What Should You Do About Children's Sex Play?" Better Homes and Gardens, May 1950, 175.
22. Selwyn, 178-180; Woodward, 49; Henry, 17.
23. George A. W. Stouffer, "Just What Is Problem Behavior?" Parents' Magazine, September 1961, 58, 124; Francis Bruce Strain, "Sex Education at Different Ages, Parent's Magazine, January 1943, 146, 151.
24. Omer Henry, "Sex in the School Yard," The American Mercury, June 1956, 16.
25. Edmund Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life? (New York: Hill and Wang, 1956), 298-302; D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, 2, 63.
26. Margaret Albrecht, "Why a Boy or Girl Needs a Gang," Parents' Magazine, December 1957, 89; O. Spurgeon English and Constance J. Foster, "How to Raise Better Husbands," Parents' Magazine, November 1948, 22.
27. Leonard Wallace Robinson, "If the Boy Turns Out to be A Sissy," Good Housekeeping, June 1959, 51, 163, 165, 166; Maryland Newcomb, "Civilizing the Small Boy," Good Housekeeping, February 1948, 93.
28. Marie L. Coleman, "What they Think about Boys," Parents' Magazine, December 1949, 96; Elizabeth M. Drew, "Our Gifted Girls!" Parents' Magazine, June 1960, 112, 113; Constance Foster, "Raise Your Girl to Be A Wife," Parents' Magazine, September 1956, 113.
29. Marynia F. Farnham, "Helping Boys to be Boys ... Girls to be Girls," Parents' Magazine, January 1953, 62.
30. Rhoda Bachmeister, "There is a Pattern for Love," Parents' Magazine, April 1950, 48, 112; Schultz, 207; May, Homeward Bound, 89, 109, 113-34; Sidney Blau, "Help Your Child Like Himself," Parents' Magazine, December 1963, 84.
