Eugenic Nation by Alexandra Minna Stern

Author:Alexandra Minna Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

Figure 9. Paul Popenoe pointing at a placard of the Johnson Temperament Analysis Test showing an example of test results. Photo courtesy of the Paul Bowman Popenoe Collection, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

Another client, a twenty-eight-year-old advertising agent with a successful career in Chicago participated in the Marriage Readiness Service. Miss M had serious problems: “Your score on Aggressive is also unusually high—you scored higher than 92% of all women.” Given her unbalanced temperament, it would be nearly impossible for Miss M to locate a “man aggressive enough that you could create a mutually satisfying relationship with him.” Mrs. Gene Benton, one of the institute’s many certified female counselors, explained Miss M’s problem as a form of gender distortion. This young woman needed to begin to emulate her intrinsic sex-gender identity: “Our desire for an aggressive male is deep, biologically rooted in centuries of evolution where the only survivors, the only producers of offspring, were those clever enough, fleet enough, or strong enough to protect their females during the young-bearing period.” In order to improve her chances of finding a man, Miss M was instructed to channel her aggressiveness into feminine behavior and, furthermore, to self-scrutinize: “from time to time when you are with a man, note what you are doing that you feel is aggressive.”158

In addition to hyperaggressiveness among women, the JTA often diagnosed frigidity, alerted by “improvement urgent” or “improvement desirable” on the Cordial-Cold axis. Mrs. P, for example, an “uninhibited” and handsome woman, with “strong-looking, capable and expressive hands,” sought expertise at the AIFR in 1952, where she was determined to be suffering from “possible frigidity.”159 Mrs. P was depicted as unmaternal, prone to puerile crushes, and reaching orgasm on very rare occasion. Once her JTA confirmed frigidity, she was given several AIFR pamphlets.160 Frigidity was found in another woman, a twenty-eight-year-old from Washington, who completed the Marriage Readiness Service.161 Her counselor encouraged her to celebrate sexual desire and view it as a physical and reproductive communion between two biological mates: “This is the deep, strong urge, so strong that only with the most powerful distortions can we possibly block or change it. This is the drive that insures the survival of the human race.”162 From the AIFR’s standpoint, frigidity was perhaps the most egregious form of gender distortion. It destabilized male-female relationships and jeopardized the perpetuation of the middle-class family.163

The AIFR implored women diagnosed with masculine protest and frigidity to embark on a course of self-transformation and reeducation involving therapeutic and behavioral techniques or sometimes simply to feign enjoyment for the sake of the marriage. Ideally, wives would be rewarded with more affection from their husbands and a richer sex life. Given his advocacy of incipient family values, we might expect that Popenoe’s gender conservatism would steer him away from frankly discussing sexuality and pleasure. But this was far from the case; he was a tireless advocate of the female orgasm and eroticism, as long as it occurred vaginally on the traditional marriage bed.164 He

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