Shrinking violets and Caspar Milquetoasts : shyness, power, and intimacy in the United States, 1950-1995 / Patricia A. McDaniel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McDaniel, Patricia (Patricia A.)

Series:

American social experience series

The American social experience series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bashfulness--History.

Bashfulness.

Bashfulness--Social aspects--United States.

Social aspects.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

viii, 215 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, [2003]

Summary:

Since World War II, Americans' attitudes towards shyness have changed. The women's movement and the sexual revolution raised questions about communication, self-expression, intimacy, and personality, leading to new concerns about shyness. At the same time, the growth of psychotherapy and the mental health industry brought shyness to the attention of professionals who began to regard it as an illness in need of a cure. But what is shyness? How is it related to gender, race, and class identities? And what does its stigmatization say about our culture?0In Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts, Patricia A. McDaniel tells the story of shyness. Using popular self-help books and magazine articles written for white and black Americans, she shows how prevailing attitudes toward shyness frequently work to disempower women. She draws on evidence as diverse as 1950s views of shyness as a womanly virtue to contemporary views of shyness as a barrier to intimacy to highlight how cultural standards governing shyness reproduce power differences between women and men.

Contents:

The emotional culture of shyness from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century

"Build him a dais" : shyness and heterosexuality from the roles of the fifties to the rules of the nineties

Assertive women and timid men? : race, heterosexuality, and shyness

Shyness from nine to five

"Intimacy is a difficult art" : the changing role of shyness

In friendship.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 189-209) and index.

ISBN:

0814756778

0814756786

OCLC:

52386320