⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I'm going to be labelling the books I'm using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these.

Very well researched! ( )

Cuordileone writes, “The great retreat into private life was accompanied by chronic worries about the psychological effects of consumerism, materialism, suburbanization, leisure, and self-indulgence on the American character” (98). Cuordileone explains that the rise of mass culture had resulted in a preoccupation with neuroses. Addressing gender, Cuordileone writes,
If the mid-century self was so frail, so was the gender identity upon which the self rested. The crisis of the self in the 1950s was distinct from, but overlapped in significant ways with the “crisis of masculinity” that was expressed both explicitly and implicitly in so many cultural productions in the 1940s and 1950s. Insofar as most male critics assumed women didn’t have a self in any meaningful sense, at least an autonomous one in need of rehabilitation, most of the fretting about conformity of thought was about men. If women had a place in the crisis of masculinity discourse at all, it was as the oppositionaly archetype against which a healthy autonomous male self could be measured, or as the purveyor of feminizing values and forces that emasculated the culture or crushed the male ego (104).
Cuordileone writes, “As women increasingly become ‘peer-groupers themselves,’ consumers of ‘aids to romance,’ and, with men, ‘pionerrs’ on the ‘frontier of sex,’ [David] Riesman observed that ‘the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the woman also grows’” (121). Now that men could no longer rely on their authority to ignore their partner’s needs, they directed anxieties around performance issues inward. Cuordileone gives further examples of writers in the 1950s who believed that women were “feminizing” American cultural history by exercising purchasing power on domestic products or being more involved in raising sons than their husbands. Psychologists wrote about the “dangers” of young boys identifying with their mothers and many felt this led to later conformity culture, associated with communism. ( )