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Gender and Modernity in Transnational Perspective: Hugo Münsterberg and the American Woman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

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Extract

In one of the first and best-known collections of cultural criticism in America, Civilization in the United States (1922), Harold Stearns begins his chapter on “The Intellectual Life” with this widely quoted passage:

When Professor Einstein roused the ire of the women's clubs by stating that “women dominate the entire life of America,” and that “there are cities with a million population, but cities suffering from terrible poverty – the poverty of intellectual things,” he was but repeating a criticism of our life now old enough to be almost a cliché. Hardly any intelligent foreigner has failed to observe and comment upon the extraordinary feminization of American social life, and oftenest he has coupled this observation with a few biting remarks concerning the intellectual anaemia or torpor that seems to accompany it.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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References

NOTES

1. Stearns, Harold E., “The Intellectual Life,” Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, ed. Stearns, Harold E. (1922; rept. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 135.Google Scholar

2. Not counting the biography by Münsterberg's daughter, Margaret, Hugo Münsterberg, His Life and Work (New York: D. Appleton, 1922)Google Scholar – most posthumous assessments of the man and his work date from the 1970s. Münsterberg's 1916 book on cinema, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, was reissued as The Film: A Psychological Study (1916; rept. New York: Dover, 1970)Google Scholar. Merle Moskowitz published an article reviewing Münsterberg's impact on applied psychology: “Hugo Münsterberg: A Study in the History of Applied Psychology,” American Psychologist 32 (10 1977): 824–42Google Scholar. Kuklick, Bruce's The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar outlined Münsterberg's place in philosophy's “golden age” at Harvard (196–214) and described his ostracism and untimely death prior to America's entry into the First World War (435–47). Keller, Phyllis's States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar presented a sympathetic psychobiography stressing Münsterberg's Jewish-German roots and his expatriate status in America (5–118). The fullest discussion of his life and thought appeared at the decade's end: Hale, Matthew, Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).Google Scholar

3. On “feminization,” see, for example, Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar; and Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. 221–26, 241–60.Google Scholar

4. Letter to Royce, Josiah, 06 22, 1892Google Scholar, in Perry, Ralph Barton, The Thought and Character of William James (1935; rept. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1973), 2: 141.Google Scholar

5. It is the central point of Hale's book that Münsterberg “typified the sort of social reformer who turned scientific expertise to traditional purposes and found in it support for established sources of authority” (8). For an early account of the professionalization of social science in late-19th- and early-20th-century America, see, for example, Beard, Charles A. and Beard, Mary R., The Rise of American Civilization, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 2: 786–88Google Scholar. On the more general relation between disciplines and social control, see Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 220–23.Google Scholar

6. Moskowitz, , “Hugo Munsterberg,” 824Google Scholar (emphasis in the original). According to Hale, Münsterberg's popular writings made him, by the time he died in 1916, “arguably the best-known psychologist in America” (3).

7. See Landy, Frank J., “Hugo Münsterberg: Victim or Visionary?Journal of Applied Psychology 77 (1992): 787802CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spillmann, Jutta and Spillmann, Lothar, “The Rise and Fall of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 29 (10 1993): 322–383.0.CO;2-1>CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schönpflug, Wolfgang, “The Road Not Taken: A False Start for Cognitive Psychology,” Psychological Review 101 (04 1994): 237–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McGuire, William J., “Uses of Historical Data in Psychology: Comments on Münsterberg (1899),” Psychological Review 101 (04 1994): 243–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. I will be citing the following editions: American Traits from the Point of View of a German (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901)Google Scholar; The Americans, trans. Holt, Edwin B. (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904)Google Scholar; American Problems from the Point of View of a Psychologist (1910; rept. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912)Google Scholar; American Patriotism and Other Social Studies (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1913)Google Scholar; and Psychology and Social Sanity (Garden City: Doubleday, Page, 1914)Google Scholar. Except for The Americans, virtually all of Münsterberg's other works in English were written by Münsterberg himself or, in some cases, translated by him from his own German original. Though I will cite The Americans in Holt's authorized translation, I will occasionally refer to the German text, Die Amerikaner, 2 vols. (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1904)Google Scholar. Works, by Munsterberg are cited parenthetically in the text.

9. Except as noted, all citations of Münsterberg's articles will be to the versions reprinted in these collections. Münsterberg also published numerous uncollected essays in such periodicals as the New York Times, Century, Current Literature, Chautauquan, Outlook, Cosmopolitan, Independent, Everybody's Magazine, Reader Magazine, Science, and Scientific American Supplement.

10. Some of Münsterberg's colleagues in psychology at Harvard regarded his popular work as pseudoscience, and they resented his quest for the limelight. Even after they themselves had turned to applied psychology, “they continued to view his studies as vulgarizations mainly because Münsterberg himself was vulgar” (Kuklick, , Rise of American Philosophy, 211).Google Scholar

11. For an excellent early study that describes how gender biases permeated the work of these male “scientific conservatives,” see Trecker, Janice Law, “Sex, Science and Education,” American Quarterly 26 (10 1974): 352–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. See Kuklick, , Rise of American Philosophy, 211–12Google Scholar; and Hale, , Human Science, 6164.Google Scholar

13. For a list of works that scrutinize modernity and cultural modernism with special attention to matters of gender, see DeKoven, Marianne, Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 219 n.Google Scholar

17. Additional books on gender and modernity include Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990)Google Scholar, and Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991)Google Scholar; Clark, Suzanne, Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Ammons, Elizabeth, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Marshall, Barbara L., Engendering Modernity: Feminism, Social Theory and Social Change (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Rado, Lisa, ed., Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism (New York: Garland, 1994)Google Scholar; and Felski, Rita, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

14. I am thus aligning myself with Lisa Rado's call for modernist studies that “move in the direction of a more culturally based criticism, a more historical and interdisciplinary approach” (“Lost and Found: Remembering Modernism, Rethinking Feminism,” in Rereading Modernism, 12)Google Scholar and with Rita Felski's defense of literary-critical readings of sociological texts (Gender of Modernity, 3536).Google Scholar

15. For surveys of women's domestic and public activities at the time, see Riley, Glenda, Inventing the American Woman: A Perspective on Women's History (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1987), 153–81Google Scholar; and Evans, Sara M., “Women and Modernity 1890–1920,” in Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989), 145–73.Google Scholar

16. Schneider, Dorothy and Schneider, Carl J., American Women in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920 (New York: Anchor, 1994), 16Google Scholar. On later versions of the New Woman, see Brown, Dorothy, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 2947Google Scholar; and Freedman, Estelle B., “The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s,” Journal of American History 61 (09 1974): 372–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Michelle Perrot, quoted in Showalter, , Sexual Anarchy, 38.Google Scholar

18. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 245.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 246.

20. On his medical degree, see Münsterberg, Margaret, Hugo Münsterberg, 303–4Google Scholar. See also Moulden, Bernard and Renshaw, Judy, “The Münsterberg Illusion and ‘Irradiation,’Perception 8 (1979): 275301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21. Mancini, Elaine, “Hugo Münsterberg and the Early Films of D. W. Griffith,” New Orleans Review 10 (Summer-Fall 1983): 154.Google Scholar

22. Hansen, Miriam, “Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?” New German Critique no. 29 (Spring-Summer 1983): 153 n. 14.Google Scholar

23. Carroll, Noël, “Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (Summer 1988): 489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. In the first decade of the century, Münsterberg's intrusions into German–American relations led to rumors that he was a German spy and to a rebuke of his activities from Harvard's President Eliot (see Hale, , Human Science, 87–105).Google Scholar

25. Eight letters from Willa Cather to Münsterberg are contained in the Münsterberg Manuscript Collection at the Boston Public Library. In the end, Münsterberg's articles on Germany appeared elsewhere (see note 89).

26. Although the figure who most influenced Gertrude Stein during her Radcliffe years was William James, it should be remembered that Münsterberg also played a role in her development. By her own account, Stein and a young Harvard student “worked out a series of experiments in automatic writing under the direction of Münsterberg”; this led to her publishing the results of her own experiments in the Harvard Psychological Review. The report “was the first writing of hers ever to be printed. It is very interesting to read because the method of writing to be afterwards developed in Three Lives and Making of Americans already shows itself” (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas [New York: Random House, 1933], 7778).Google Scholar

27. See Landy, , “Hugo Münsterberg,” 794Google Scholar. Perhaps ironically (in view of my topic), one of Münsterberg's psychology students, William M. Marston, went on to create the comic strip figure of Wonder Woman (Hale, , Human Science, 120).Google Scholar

28. Margaret Münsterberg's biography reprints a glowing letter from Sunday (415). In his work Sex in Relation to Society (1910)Google Scholar, Havelock Ellis describes Münsterberg as a “distinguished psychologist” and an “impartial and competent critic of the American people” (Studies in the Psychology of Sex [New York: Random House, 1936], 2: 486, 459).Google Scholar

29. Because Münsterberg was a Danzig-born Jew, Keller finds it “questionable whether his credentials as a German national would have been as fully accepted in Germany as they were in America” (States of Belonging, 114)Google Scholar. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Münsterberg was warmly praised and decorated by the Kaiser.

30. Max Weber came to the United States, at Münsterberg's invitation, to speak at the Congress of Arts and Science at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. Afterward, he traveled for three months here, and his observations affected his later writings on capitalism and Protestantism, on bureaucracy, and on political organizations (see Coser, Lewis A., Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971], 239).Google Scholar

31. In English, the best book-length treatment of Amerikanismus is by Tower, Beeke Sell, Envisioning America: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs by George Grosz and his Contemporaries, 1915–1933 (Cambridge: Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 1990)Google Scholar. See also Hammond, Theresa Mayer, American Paradise: German Travel Literature from Duden to Kisch (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1980)Google Scholar, and Trommler, Frank's informative piece on Amerikanismus in the two-volume collection America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, ed. Trommler, Frank and McVeigh, Joseph (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 2: 332–42Google Scholar. With few exceptions, such as Lethen, Helmut, Neue Sachlichkeit 1924–1932: Studium zum Weiβen Sozialismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and American Paradise, neither German nor American studies have given more than passing attention to the important role played by gender within Amerikanismus and thus within the early-20th-century Americanization of Europe.

32. See Eberhardt, Fritz's bibliographical masterpiece, Amerika-Literatur: Die wichtigsten seit 1900 in deutscher Sprache erschienen Werke über Amerika (Leipzig: Verlag von Koehler und Volckmar, 1926).Google Scholar

33. Beck, Earl R., Germany Rediscovers America (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1968), 233.Google Scholar

34. Letter to Carl Stumpf, August 6, 1901, in Perry, , Thought and Character, 2: 200.Google Scholar

35. Albion Small, review of Die Amerikaner, by Münsterberg, Hugo, The American Journal of Sociology 10 (09 1904): 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Small was a major sociologist, a translator and exponent of the ideas of Georg Simmel.

36. “Muensterberg's Americans,” review of Die Amerikaner, by Münsterberg, Hugo, Nation 79 (08 25, 1904): 163–65.Google Scholar

37. The chapter “Women” in American Traits (1901)Google Scholar anticipates the discussion of women in The Americans (1904)Google Scholar. Both Münsterberg's German (in Die Amerikaner) and Holt's English versions owe something to Münsterberg's earlier account in English. Following Münsterberg's dialectic, I will therefore quote from both books, in the hope of achieving the “full plastic effect” of his reality.

38. Ellis, , Studies in the Psychology, 2: 486Google Scholar; and Commager, Henry Steele, ed., America in Perspective: The United States through Foreign Eyes (New York: Random House, 1947), 261.Google Scholar

39. Münsterberg's commitment to the idea of expertise – and his recognition of the need for what is known today as interdisciplinarity – may be seen in his program for the international academic conference of 1904 (see Münsterberg, “The Scientific Plan of the Congress,” in Congress of Arts and Science, Universal Exposition, St. Louis, 1904, ed. Rogers, Howard J., 8 vols. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 19051907], 1: 85134Google Scholar; see also Münsterberg's article “The St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences [sic],” Atlantic Monthly 91 [05 1903]: 671–84)Google Scholar. For an evaluation of Münsterberg's role in the conference, see Coats, A. W., “American Scholarship Comes of Age: The Louisiana Purchase Exposition 1904,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961): 404–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40. In Münsterberg's Die Amerikaner, the passage reads: “Das Weib ist widerspruchsvoll überall, und wenn die Amerikanerin anders ist als alle andern, so ist sie es dadurch, dass die Widersprüche in ihrem Antlitz moderner, verwickelter, unlösbarer erscheinen” (2: 261). Unlösbarer is perhaps stronger than Holt's “unfathomable” in its suggestion of “unresolvability.”

41. This passage neatly illustrates the thought process analyzed by Luce Irigaray in her Speculum, de l'autre femme, the thought process that attempts (in Jonathan Culler's succinct restatement of Irigaray) “to relegate the feminine to a position of subordination and to reduce the radical Otherness of woman to a specular relation: woman is either ignored or seen as man's opposite” (Culler, , “Reading as a Woman,” in On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982], 58Google Scholar; see also Irigaray, , Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gill, Gillian C. [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985]).Google Scholar

42. For a further discussion of Münsterberg's organicism, see Hale, (Human Science, 5669).Google Scholar

43. The term essentialism and the validity of the concept(s) implied by the term remain matters of debate. According to some writers, women's mental, moral, and personal attributes really are different from those of men, and a true feminist position would respect these essential differences. For the best-known examples of this view, see Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Belenky, Mary Field et al. , Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic, 1986)Google Scholar. For more recent discussions of gender essentialism, see, for example, Schor, Naomi and Weed, Elizabeth, eds., The Essential Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Marshall, , Engendering ModernityGoogle Scholar. On gender essentialism in relation to modernity, see especially Felski, , Gender of Modernity, 3560Google Scholar. For a recent discussion of racial and national essentialism in early-20th-century America, see Michaels, Walter Benn, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

44. See Ehrenreich, Barbara and English, Deirdre, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Experts' Advice to Women (New York: Anchor, 1979).Google Scholar

45. Gilkeson, John, “Culture and the Americans: The Diffusion of the Anthropological Concept of Culture in the United States, 1887–1939,” Cañon: Journal of the Rocky Mountains American Studies Association 2 (Spring 1995): 18.Google Scholar

46. Katherine Faull, Introduction to Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. Faull, Katherine (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 11.Google Scholar

47. See, for example, Weininger, Otto, Sex and Character (London: Heinemann, 1906)Google Scholar; and Simmel, Georg, George Simmel: On Women, Sexuality, and Love, trans. Oakes, Guy (New Haven: Yale University Press 1984).Google Scholar

48. This point is made by Guy Oakes in his Introduction to Georg Simmel (54) and is the starting point for Felski's discussion of Simmel (Gender of Modernity, 38).Google Scholar

49. Felski, , Gender of Modernity, 4647.Google Scholar

50. Quoted by Riley, , Inventing the American Woman, 160.Google Scholar

51. According to Trecker, the interest of “scientific conservatives” in women's education probably stemmed from education being the area in which the “feminist challenge to the old ways of thinking” had made its greatest advances (“Sex, Science and Education,” 355Google Scholar). Views similar to Münsterberg's were common in social science of the time. See, for example, the chapter “Adolescent Girls and their Education,” in Hall, G. Stanley's major study, Adolescence (New York: D. Appleton, 1905), 2: 561647.Google Scholar

52. Studies of women in higher education during this period include Gordon, Lynn D., “The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women's Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920,” American Quarterly 39 (Summer 1987): 211–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Solomon, Barbara Miller, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 43156Google Scholar. The elite schools where Munsterberg received his first enchanting introduction to educated American women (American Traits, 131–32Google Scholar) are studied in Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984).Google Scholar

53. In Germany, he had admitted women as regular students in his laboratory (American Traits, 132Google Scholar). In America, he argued (unsuccessfully) that Harvard should award a Ph.D. to the eminently qualified Mary Whiton Calkins. On Calkins, see Münsterberg, Margaret, Hugo Münsterberg, 76Google Scholar; and Kuklick, , Rise of American Philosophy, 590–91.Google Scholar

54. This article, “College and the Household Sciences,” appeared first in Good Housekeeping (January 1913) and was reprinted in American Patriotism (1913)Google Scholar as “Household Sciences.”

55. Home economics was already taught at most universities but was resisted by the elite women's colleges until after World War One (Solomon, , In the Company, 8587Google Scholar). On the Euthenics movement at Vassar, see Horowitz, . Alma Mater, 295302Google Scholar. See also Weigley, Emma Seifrit, “It Might Have Been Euthenics: The Lake Placid Conferences and the Home Economics Movement,” American Quarterly 26 (03 1974): 7996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

56. Münsterberg, Hugo, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. See, for example, Riley, , Inventing the American Woman, 153–63Google Scholar; and Schneider, and Schneider, , American Women, 93113Google Scholar. On the politicization of women's “literary” clubs, see Blair, Karen J., The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meyer, 1980)Google Scholar. On the work of early socialist feminists, see, for example, Schwarz, Judith, Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912–1940 (Lebanon, N.H.: New Victoria, 1982).Google Scholar

58. According to Blair, the more conservative women's clubs initially contained upper class, racist, nativist, and antifeminist elements, but these came to be challenged by the turn of the century (Clubwoman as Feminist, 108–19).Google Scholar

59. In his essay “Race Decadence” (1911)Google Scholar, Theodore Roosevelt explained that Germany at least did not show the “decadence” of “wilful [sic] sterility” (Literary Essays [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926], 187–88).Google Scholar

60. Claiming to have first coined the term race suicide in 1901, Edward A. Ross boasted that it was later “given wide currency by President Roosevelt” (Foundations of Sociology, 5th ed. [New York: Macmillan, 1926], 383 n. 1Google Scholar). On the connection between low birthrates among college women and “race suicide,” see Solomon, , In the Company, 119–21Google Scholar. For a contemporary analysis that questions, on statistical grounds, such attempts to link college training and lower birthrates, see Emerick, Charles Franklin, “College Women and Race Suicide,” Political Science Quarterly 24 (06 1909): 269–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. In his essay “The German Woman,” Münsterberg derides German women radicals whose time has passed (American Patriotism, 145Google Scholar). On German feminism at the turn of the century, see, for example, Frevert, Ute, Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation, trans. McKinnon-Evans, Stuart (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 107–30.Google Scholar

62. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency declares that psychology should “be placed at the service of commerce and industry” (3). For a Marxist attack on the way Münsterberg's “efficiency” would harm workers, see Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review, 1974), 141–43.Google Scholar

63. On the gendered dimensions of spiritualism, see Moore, R. Laurence, “The Spiritualist Medium: A Study of Female Professionalism in Victorian America,” American Quarterly 27 (05 1975): 200–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64. The essay “The Mind of the Juryman” first appeared in Century Magazine (09 1913)Google Scholar. Not surprisingly, it provoked attacks from women lawyers, jury forewomen, and suffragists. For examples of these comments, see Münsterberg, Margaret, Hugo Münsterberg, 433–36.Google Scholar

65. William James, letter to Münsterberg, August 27,1909, quoted by Münsterberg, Margaret, Hugo Münsterberg, 413Google Scholar; and Editorial, “No Reason for ‘Nerves,’” New York Times, 08 20, 1909, 6.Google Scholar

66. On neurasthenia, see Lears, , No Place of Grace, 4957Google Scholar; Herndl, Diane Price, Invalid Women: Figuring Feminine Illness in American Fiction and Culture, 1840–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 114–22Google Scholar; and Lutz, Tom, American Nervousness, 1903 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 419Google Scholar. On the contribution of “New Thought” to discussions about nervousness, see Moskowitz, Eva, “The Therapeutic Gospel: Religious Medicine and the Birth of Pop Psychology, 1850–1910,” Prospects 20 (1995): 57–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67. See Radway, Janice, “On the Gender of the Middlebrow Consumer and the Threat of the Culturally Fraudulent Female,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (Fall 1994): 871–93.Google Scholar

68. On the “sexual revolution” or “New Morality” of the Progressive Era, see, for example, McGovern, James R., “The American Woman's Pre-World War I Freedom in Manners and Morals,” Journal of American History 55 (09 1968): 315–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Burnham, John C., “The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes Toward Sex,” Journal of American History 59 (03 1973): 885908CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On sexual attitudes in Germany at this time, see Frevert, , Women in German History, 131–37.Google Scholar

69. A similar view was expressed by Repplier, Agnes in her widely quoted article, “The Repeal of Reticence,” Atlantic Monthly 113 (03 1914): 297304Google Scholar. See also the somewhat later essay by Mencken, H. L., “The Blushful Mystery,” in Prejudices: First Series (New York: Knopf, 1919), 195207.Google Scholar

70. Jacobs, Deborah F., “Feminist Criticism/Cultural Studies/Modernist Texts: A Manifesto for the '90s,”Google Scholar in Rado, , Rereading Modernism, 278.Google Scholar

71. Huyssen, Andreas, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Modleski, Tania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 191Google Scholar. Although some recent scholarship suggests that the split between popular and high culture was less than absolute — see, for example, Chinitz, David, “T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide,” PMLA 110 (1995): 236–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar — Huyssen's application of gender polarities to this division remains widely accepted.

72. See, for example, Carey, John, The Intellectuals & the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (New York: St. Martin's, 1992), 34.Google Scholar

73. Regarding a “crisis of masculinity” and the call for remasculinization of America, see, for example, Dabakis, Melissa, “Douglas Tilden's Mechanics Fountain: Labor and the ‘Crisis of Masculinity’ in the 1890s,” American Quarterly 47 (06 1995): 204–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Green, Harvey, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society (New York: Pantheon, 1986)Google Scholar; and Lears, , No Place of Grace, 98139.Google Scholar

74. Lears, , No Place of Grace, 107–8.Google Scholar

75. A decade later, Münsterberg was still repeating this theme in print and in public speeches. After he addressed the New York City Boost Club, the New York Times ran a long article with this headline: “Finds Our Culture in Women's Hands: Business Man Too Tired to Do More Than See Comic Opera, Says Prof. Muensterberg” (January 29, 1910, 5).

76. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage, 1954), 2: 225Google Scholar; Löwenstein, Isidore, “A Savant from Austria,” in This Was America: True Accounts of People and Places, Manners and Customs, as Recorded by European Travelers to the Western Shore in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Handlin, Oscar (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949), 181Google Scholar. The idea is also repeated in Stearns, Harold's “The Intellectual Life,” esp. 136–43.Google Scholar

77. Hofstadter, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), 186.Google Scholar

78. Henry James, quoted by Hedrick, Joan D., Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 350.Google Scholar

79. Clark, , Sentimental Modernism, 1.Google Scholar

80. In addition to Stearns, 's “The Intellectual Life,”Google Scholar see his “America and the Young Intellectual,” Bookman 53 (03 1921): 4248Google Scholar; see also Hergesheimer, Joseph, “The Feminine Nuisance in American Literature,” Yale Review n.s. 10 (07 1921): 716–25.Google Scholar For replies by women, see, for example, Hart, Frances Noyes, “The Feminine Nuisance Replies,” Bookman 54 (09 1921): 3134Google Scholar, and Austin, Mary, “American Women and the Intellectual Life,” Bookman 53 (08 1921): 481–85.Google Scholar

81. Stearns, , “Intellectual Life,” 143.Google Scholar

82. Ibid., 145, 142.

83. Ibid., 144 (emphasis in the original).

84. Ibid.

85. Ibid.

86. Three years earlier, T. S. Eliot, another Harvard man, had famously called for impersonality in poetry (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” [1919], Selected Essays [New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960], 1011).Google Scholar

87. Guy Reynolds has recently identified in the writings of Van Wyck Brooks, H. L. Mencken, Harold Stearns, Joseph Hergesheimer, Lionel Trilling, and Ernest Hemingway a gender-specific “series of oppositions” of feminine and masculine characteristics whose terms are “based on the terms used by American critics during the approximate period 1915–22” (Willa Gather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire [New York: St. Martin's, 1996], 43).Google Scholar Reynolds provides a table of oppositions that aligns the “feminine” with “neurosis,” “uprootedness,” the “utilitarian,” “‘low’ art,” the “corruption of culture,” and “gentility”; the “masculine,” by contrast, is aligned with “health,” the “usable past,” the “disinterested,” “high art,” “renewal of culture,” and a “new ‘earthy’ writing.”

88. Münsterberg, Hugo, The Americans, trans. Holt, Edwin B. (1904; rept. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1914).Google Scholar

89. Praise for German women appears in Münsterberg, 's “The New Germany,”Google Scholar which appeared in North American Review (02 1912)Google Scholar and was reprinted in American Patriotism (1913)Google Scholar as “The Germany of To-day.” Also reprinted in that collection is his more ambivalent essay, “The German Woman,” which was first published in Atlantic Monthly (04 1912).Google Scholar

90. It was only Münsterberg's untimely death that kept him from witnessing the sexual reforms of the Weimar Republic (and the suppression of those reforms under the Nazis). On the “New Woman” in the Weimar Republic, see the following three essays by Grossman, Atina: “The Americanization of Weimar Sex Reformers: New Women in Exile,” in Dancing on the Volcano: Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic, ed. Kniesche, Thomas W. and Brockmann, Stephen (Columbia: Camden House, 1994), 195208Google Scholar; Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female: A New Woman in Weimar Germany?” in Women in Culture and Politics, ed. Friedlander, Judith et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 6280Google Scholar; and “The New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimar Germany,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New York: Monthly Review, 1983), 153–71.Google Scholar

91. “Hugo Muensterberg,” New York Times, 12 17, 1916, sec. 7, p. 2.Google Scholar

92. Landy, , “Hugo Münsterberg,” 787.Google Scholar Landy attributes Münsterberg's “fall from grace” to a variety of causes: transitions and debates within the field of psychology; cultural and political tensions between Germany and America; Münsterberg's personal arrogance and vanity; Münsterberg, 's untimely death (794–96).Google Scholar

93. Griffith, Richard, “Foreword to the Dover Edition,”Google Scholar in Münsterberg, , The Film, vi.Google Scholar

94. Writing in 1993, Jutta and Lothar Spillmann offer a current German opinion: “the time finally has come for Hugo Münsterberg to be vindicated” (“Rise and Fall,” 334).Google Scholar

95. Foucault, Michel, “What Is an Author?” in Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Bouchard, Donald F., trans. Bouchard, Donald F. and Simon, Sherry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 138Google Scholar.

96. On “antimodern modernism,” see Lears, , No Place of Grace, esp. 286–97.Google Scholar On “reactionary modernism,” see Herf, Jeffrey, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

97. Hale, , Human Science, 8.Google Scholar Contrasting Münsterberg's views with those of more pessimistic German social theorists, such as Friedrich Tönnies, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber, Hale traces Münsterberg's “optimism” to his philosophical synthesis in which “principles of efficiency and scientific management did not destroy the natural order but allowed its fruition” (8) — principles that Münsterberg, in my view, clearly associated with male control.

98. Just as a warning can be taken as praise, the converse is also true. According to Beck, the American traits that Münsterberg praised in Die Amerikaner (self-direction, self-realization, self-perfection, self-assertion) were taken up by critical postwar German writers who restated them “in such exaggerated terms that the positive connotations were virtually lost” (Germany Rediscovers America, 234).Google Scholar

99. See von Polenz, Wilhelm, Dos, Land der Zukunft (Berlin: F. Fontane, 1903)Google Scholar; Holitscher, Arthur, Amerika: Heute und Morgen (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 1912)Google Scholar; Voechting, Fritz, Über den amerikanischen Frauenkult (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1913)Google Scholar; Schmidt, Annalise, Der amerikanische Mensch: Vom Wesen Amerikas und des Amerikaners (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft für Politik und Geschichte, 1920)Google Scholar; Rohrbach, Paul, Amerika und Wir: Reisebetrachtungen von Paul Rohrbach (Berlin: Buchenau und Reichert Verlag, 1926)Google Scholar; and Halfeld, Adolf, Amerika und der Amerikanismus: Kritische Betrachtungen eines Deutschen und Europäers (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1927).Google Scholar For an overview of some of these writers, see Beck, , Germany Rediscovers AmericaGoogle Scholar; see also Markham, Sara, Workers, Women, and Afro-Americans: Images of the United States in German Travel Literature from 1923 to 1933 (New York: Peter Lang, 1986).Google Scholar