otto
Public and Private in American History
E
d. Ba
ritono,
Frezza, Lorini, Vaudagna,
Vezzosi
€ 30.00 ISBN 88-87503-71-0
nova americana in english
otto editore
Public and Private in American History
State, Family, Subjectivity in
the Twentieth Century
edited by R. Baritono, D. Frezza, A. Lorini,
M. Vaudagna, E. Vezzosi
Isaac Kramnick, David W. Blight, Oliviero Bergamini, Marco Mariano, Alan Brinkley,
Stefano Rosso, Marcello Flores, Daria Frezza, Raffaella Baritono, Alessandra Lorini, Mario Corona, Sonia Di Loreto, Erminio Corti, Alessandra
Calanchi, Alice Kessler-Harris, Stephen Brier, Bruno Cartosio, Kenneth L. Kusmer, Mario Maffi, Ferdinando Fasce, Howell John Harris, Daniela Daniele, Alide Cagidemetrio, Simone Cinotto, Elisabetta Vezzosi, Maurizio Vaudagna, Maria Cristina Iuli
Books in the “Nova Americana” and “Nova Americana in English” series also appear in electronic format and can be found at the website www.otto.to.it.
This book is the result of a research network formed by historians and literary critics of the United States from different Italian universities, in cooperation with U.S. and European Americanists. The public/private distinction is notoriously difficult to operationalize in scholarly research because of its diverse implications. However, as in everyday language, multiplicity of meanings and gray, overlapping semantic areas are often potentially rich repositories of historical and cultural traces.
Authors in this book have focussed mainly on the issues of subjectivity, family, and affection and have examined the way they relate to different publics and different notions of publicity. Essays discuss how the subjective and emotional conditions of writers and intellectuals relate to the scientific community, the reading public, the cultural market. Social historians analyze the interaction between family, subjectivity and mental landscapes on the one hand, and the spatial configurations of the city, the territory, the community, and the home on the other. Students of politics connect the private dimension with the government, the administrative state and different definitions of democratic citizenship, or stress the impact of family metaphors on the language of public life. Essays devoted to memory examine the interaction between its individual dimension and the search for common perceptions and experience.Most essays pay attention to the notion of gender as fundamental to an analysis of public and private, which, while difficult, is however full of scholarly promise.
Public and Private in American History
State, Family, Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century
Edited by R. Baritono, D. Frezza, A. Lorini, M. Vaudagna, E. Vezzosi
Collana Nova Americana in English Comitato scientifi co:
Marco Bellingeri, Marcello Carmagnani, Maurizio Vaudagna
Prima edizione ottobre 2003 ©2003, OTTO editore – Torino mail@otto.to.it
http://www.otto.to.it ISBN 978-88-87503-70-8
È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuato, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzato.
Foreword 1
Introduction 3
POLITICSANDMEMORY
Isaac Kramnick 13
A Moral Republic: Public and Private in the Political Thought of the Founders
David W. Blight 31
Healing and Justice: Memory and the Problem of Reconciliation After the American Civil War
Oliviero Bergamini 57
Public and Private in the Thought of the New Republic Progressive Intellectuals
Marco Mariano 85
Gender and International History. Public and Private in Anne O’Hare McCormick’s Journalism (1921-1954)
Alan Brinkley 111
Public and Private in the Culture of the Sixties
Stefano Rosso 123
Public and Private in the Narration of the Vietnam War (and Environs)
Marcello Flores 147
Truth and History in Post-Dictatorial Argentina, Post-Communist Poland, and Post-Apartheid South Africa: Collective Memory between the Public Sphere and the Private Experience
GENDERANDTHEHISTORYOFSOCIALTHOUGHT
Daria Frezza 165
The Public Boundaries of the Private Sphere in the Discourse of Early Twentieth-Century Social Science
PUBLICANDPRIVATEINAMERICANHISTORY TABLEOFCONTENTS
Raffaella Baritono 185
“A Thin Red Line:” The Public and Private Spheres in the Democratic Reflection of American Women Social Scientists Between the Progressive Era and the 1920s
Alessandra Lorini 217
The Intersection of Public and Private Selves in the Lives of Two White Women Anthropologists: From the Maternalism of Alice Fletcher to the Feminism of Elsie Clews Parsons
SUBJECTIVITY, IDENTITY, ANDLITERARYEXPRESSION
Mario Corona 249
F. O. Matthiessen and Sarah Orne Jewett: The Beginnings of a Critical Career
Sonia Di Loreto 261
Going Public: Fanny Fern’s Writing in the Publishing World
Erminio Corti 275
Public Writing and Private Memory in the Poetry of Two Contemporary Chicano Authors
Alessandra Calanchi 309
Invisible Men: Subjectivity, Identity and Masculinity in United States Fictions, 1881-1987
SOCIALHISTORY
Alice Kessler-Harris 331
Home and Work: Reconfiguring the Private in the Context of the Public
Stephen Brier 351
The Personal Is Historical: Individual and Collective Memory in (Re)Constructing the History of Ordinary Americans
Bruno Cartosio 367
The Meaning of Memory: Individual and Collective, Public and Private in the History of the Oppressed Groups in the United States
Kenneth L. Kusmer 397
Private Lives and Public Space: The Homeless and the Working Class during the Industrial Era
Mario Maffi 415 The Parlor and the Street: Private and Public Spaces on New York’s Lower
East Side
Ferdinando Fasce 435
Family, Big Business, Public Sphere: Public Relations at Du Pont in the Interwar Years
Howell John Harris 459
Industrial Paternalism and Welfare Capitalism: “Where’s the Beef?” - or “Show Me The Money!”
FAMILYHISTORY
Daniela Daniele 485
One of the Family: Louisa May Alcott and the Private and Public Work of Domestic Help in Victorian America
Alide Cagidemetrio 509
The Age of Consent: The Drama of the Modern Adolescent and Henry James’
The Awkward Age
Simone Cinotto 531
“We Ate as a Family:” The Social Significance of Food in Italian Harlem, 1920-1940
Elisabetta Vezzosi 555
Talking with the State. Mothers Write to the Children’s Bureau
Maurizio Vaudagna 573
Victorian Virility, Democratic Emotionalism and Patriotic Citizenship in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats
Maria Cristina Iuli 609
The Public/Private Writing of Gregory Bateson: Family History, Epistemology, and the Metalogues
GENDER AND INTERNATIONAL HISTORY. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE IN ANNE O’HARE MCCORMICK’S JOURNALISM (1921-1954)*
MARCOMARIANO
Anne O’Hare McCormick was one of the greatest American women journalists of the twentieth century. She was born in 1882 in England, grew up in the Irish commu-nity of Columbus, Ohio and, although she did not get any college education and did not have any connection with the North-Eastern Protestant élites, she was able to enter the New York Times and to establish herself in foreign correspondence, an inhospitable profession at a time when women journalists were frequently confi ned to the women’s pages of second-rank magazines. McCormick was a prominent observer of the interna-tional scene until she died in May, 1954.1 She started her career working as a free lance
correspondent in the 1910s and 1920s and later became a foreign affairs commentator of the New York Times for almost twenty years. She was the fi rst woman to be appointed a member of the editorial board of the New York Times (1936) and to receive the Pulitzer prize for journalism (1937).
In the course of her career, she met and got acquainted with three American presi-dents: Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt – with whom she became a close acquain-tance – and Dwight Eisenhower. Also, she interviewed leading fi gures of twentieth-cen-tury world history, such as Winston Churchill, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini, whom she interviewed several times. In 1942, the deputy Secretary of State Sumner Welles, knowing about her solid reputation among experts and policymakers, appointed her to join the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, a body created by the State Department to provide guidelines on the postwar political, economic, and strategic world issues. She was the only woman and the only journalist among infl uential diplomats, scholars, and businessmen. McCormick’s career is of some interest to scholars of both women’s history and international history.
1.GENDERANDINTERNATIONALHISTORY
During the last ten years, the study of foreign relations has entered a methodological debate that is still under way. The theoretical interest in different ideas of culture that has spread across the humanities has recently opened the way to new methodologies in historical studies; traditional approaches that emphasized the role of power and economics in historical explanation have been revised in light of the new “cultural” issues. Conse-quently, scholars have broadened their fi eld of inquiry to the analysis of non-governmental actors (individuals, private groups and organizations seen as able to infl uence interna-tional relations through informal channels) and to the history of mutual representations
among nations and their importance in the shaping of international political relations. Especially in the United States, diplomatic history has broadened its scope, thus laying the ground for the creation of a new sub-discipline: international history. Historian Akira Iriye has written that
a growing body of literature explores the ideological or intellectual underpinnings of a nation’s behavior toward others....By focusing on what Bernard Bailyn calls “interior world views – shared attitudes and responses and ‘mindsets’’’ – it will become possible to raise serious questions about a country’s behavior and attitudes toward others. For instance, the question of mutual understand-ing or antagonism among nations cannot be fully examined so long as one focuses exclusively on security or trade issues; one will also have to consider the mindsets of leaders and people across national boundaries. In a sense, one will then be exploring the human qualities, not just the geo-political or economic realities, that defi ne a country’s position in the world.2
The widening of the fi eld of historical inquiry is leading to a reconsideration of the international role of women, thereby introducing into historical analysis a subject long excluded from diplomatic circles and equally ignored by historians, who focused mostly on policy-makers. Again, this methodological trend has taken place mainly in the United States, thanks both to the emphasis on gender provided by recent American historiography, and to the importance of the women’s movement in American history.
In outline, the methodological reorientation of international history along gender lines has developed around three approaches. The fi rst approach was set by early works that dealt with the way in which women – for instance little-known nineteenth century-pacifi sts as well as prominent fi gures like Eleanor Roosevelt – participated directly in American foreign policy. While such studies deserve attention for having rescued from oblivion forgotten or overlooked women’s stories, they have nonetheless confi rmed that women did not play a major role as policy-makers in foreign affairs. Also, they have suggested that American women who were successful as actors in the international arena owed their success to the fact that they were “atypical” specimens of their sex, and eager to embrace or conform to male expectations.
The second approach is represented by scholars who have explored new issues in international history and focused on women who played a role in the redefi ned fi eld of foreign affairs by carrying out traditionally female activities: as nurses, missionaries, social workers or pacifi st activists of the women’s movement. By relying on the idea of “separate spheres,” this approach re-elaborates the notion of gender difference, usually associated with social policies, in order to apply it to new issues, such as the peace vs. war dichotomy.
Finally, historians infl uenced by the methodology of literary studies have studied discourses related to gender as indicators of symbolic systems and cultural assumptions that underlie given policies, interpretations of international affairs, and perceptions of events taking place abroad. According to Emily Rosenberg,
MARCOMARIANO
discourses related to gender may provide deeper understanding of the cultural assumptions from which foreign policies spring....At particular times in United States relations with weaker nations, gendered imagery helped convert stories about foreign affairs into mythic tales.3
At various times in U.S. history both the policymaking élite and popular culture have produced feminized images of regions of Latin America, Asia, and Europe which refl ected given perceptions of power relationships in specifi c historical periods.
Of course this threefold classifi cation is frequently obscured in empirical research where, for example, the very concept of gender difference can be seen as part of a specifi c discourse related to gender. In the present study, both the second and the third of the three above-mentioned approaches are taken into account, as they frequently overlap.
2.ANNEO’HAREMCCORMICKANDTHE “IDEAOFTRUEWOMANHOOD”
While McCormick did not play a prominent role in the formulation of American foreign policy, her career as a journalist is extremely interesting to scholars of interna-tional history. By writing, over thirty-fi ve years, thousands of articles for the New York
Times, which was the most infl uential American newspaper, and simply “the paper” for
generations of offi cials of the State Department, she became an almost daily reference for a small but crucial sector of the American public opinion, providing interpretations, evaluations, descriptions, and images of Europe, and sometimes of America. In the pro-cess, she also conveyed something both of her private and professional life, and of her political culture.
She always tried to disclaim the label of “female journalist,” which at the time could have harmed her career as a foreign correspondent. In 1936, when Arthur H. Sulzberger, who had replaced Adolph Ochs as the publisher of the New York Times, urged her to emphasize her profi le as a “woman journalist,” she replied:
While I am quite willing to do as much, or as little, public speaking etc. as necessary to show that the Times has a woman on the staff, I hope you won’t expect me to revert to ‘woman’s-point-of-view’ stuff.4
Dorothy Thompson, arguably the most famous female commentator of foreign affairs in twentieth-century America, said of McCormick that
she is extraordinarily objective and completely refutes the often-uttered criticism that women are always ‘personal.’ No American journalist is more impersonal than Mrs. McCormick.5
However, when she died, the New York Times published in her column “Abroad” a tribute that revealed its deeply-rooted assumptions and stressed the feminine peculiarity of her journalism:
In spite of her genius for seeing, understanding and reporting, she was also a deeply feminine person and could not help being so and would not have wished not to be so. She had a great
tenderness for people. She had a great compassion for those who suffered. War to her was not something abstract that destroyed nations. War was the thing that destroyed individuals. War was the thing that wrecked houses in which real people lived, that left children hungry and mothers hopeless. She saw beneath the surface of the great striding events of the day and saw the effect of those events on families, on the old, on the young, on the sick.6
The present essay deals with the relationship between gender and international affairs in McCormick’s journalism. It pursues two different, but often intertwined paths. On the one hand, it takes into account those elements of her writings that articulate a vision of gender difference on important issues (democracy vs. autocracy, peace vs. war, voting patterns) and that discuss specifi c moral values and political orientations as typical of women. Here the focus is on the way in which McCormick’s idea of gender difference changes vis à vis the changes of both the interests and the “ideology” of American foreign policy.7 On the other hand, it argues that McCormick’s discourse related to gender is
grafted into symbolic systems that are instrumental to power relationships within single countries (e.g. Fascist Italy) and between different countries (e.g. the United States and Fascist Italy). The categories of public and private are used here to describe how McCormick’s vision of gender difference readjusts to different historical contexts and how her discourse related to gender is connected to the ideology of American foreign policy. In particular, I discuss the maternalist view of the relationship between public and private, which was widely shared among white middle-class women like McCormick. However, I shall also relate that view to the authoritarian version of the public-private relationship developed within Fascist paternalism.
At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century the major-ity of the American women’s movement identifi ed with a maternalist political culture that had grown during the nineteenth century and that was characterized by the exten-sion to public life of the domestic virtues attributed to women. On the one hand, the nineteenth-century idea of “true womanhood” established the separation between the private (female) sphere and the public (male) sphere; on the other, it defi ned women as naturally inclined toward virtue, compassion, and peace and therefore morally superior to men. It was by claiming such superiority that the women’s movement built its social and political role. As historian Paula Baker wrote in her description of the transforma-tions in women’s political culture at the turn of the century,
ideas about womanhood and separate spheres...gave women’s political activity a new prominence. But that female sphere had now grown. Men and women would probably have agreed that the “home” in a balanced social order was the place for women and children. But this defi nition had become an expansive doctrine: home was anywhere women and children were....[Women] expanded the profession of motherhood to include all of society, an argument that stressed the benefi cial results that an application of feminine qualities had on society as a whole.8
MARCOMARIANO
American maternalism provides an apt historical exemplifi cation of the theoretical transformation of the public-private relationship – from dichotomy to contamination.9
Furthermore, my focus on maternalist political culture is due to the fact that its vision of a public (male) sphere dominated by selfi shness and inhospitable to domestic (female) virtues, fi tted McCormick’s personal experience. During her junior year of high school in a Catholic school of Columbus, Ohio, her father, a manager in an insurance company, abandoned his family and never returned. This emotional trauma caused great mate-rial problems and led her mother to try various businesses, until she joined the weekly
Catholic Universe, based in Cleveland; once out of high school McCormick would join
her mother, thus beginning her career in journalism.10
3.ITALIANWOMENANDFASCISM
Rome was the spiritual center of McCormick’s world. In 1907 McCormick’s fi rst European trip brought her, together with her mother and other women from the Cleveland East End Parish of Saint Agnes, to Rome and Assisi, and later to France and Ireland. Her fi rst foreign correspondence for the Catholic Universe illustrates her fascina-tion with and her puzzlement about Rome, “the terrible city,” “the sentinel of history” immune to the passing of time, that celebrated “the triumphs of Ceasar and Peter” with remote indifference.11
Symbols from classic mythology and Catholic spirituality appeared frequently in her articles about Rome and Italy, although the informal training she received at the New York
Times and her subtlety and talent as a political commentator would eventually help her
to develop a more sober writing style. McCormick frequently returned to Italy after the end of World War I and began to build her career in journalism by writing on the Italian political events of the early 1920s: her interviews with Mussolini and her stories on the rise and the early years of the Fascist regime, usually published in the Sunday Magazine, drew the attention of editors at the New York Times when she was still a free lance writer traveling across Europe with her husband on business trips.
Fascism was generally well received in America, both in political circles and by public opinion at large. On the whole, the press portrayed Mussolini in a favorable light until the early 1930s, although authoritative newspapers like the New York Times were more cautious than large circulation magazines like the Saturday Evening Post.12 McCormick was among
the American journalists who were more enthusiastic about the advent of Mussolini and the establishment of his regime, and who turned a blind eye to its authoritarianism and expansionism until the late 1930s, when its international prestige was decidedly declin-ing. From 1921, her articles outlined an analysis of Italian politics and society that was consistent with the policies of the Republican administrations of the 1920s.
Paralyzed by chronically unstable governments and by strenuous and sometimes violent social confl icts, Italy was seen in Washington as an unruly country held hostage
by left-wing subversion, and on the verge of a Communist revolution, although the strength of the radical left was already declining before Mussolini’s rise to power. The Harding administration put aside Wilsonian internationalism, the most recent trade-mark of American foreign policy, and instead put a strong emphasis on the restoration of order and political stability as the preconditions for the economic recovery of Europe, which had been devastated by World War I. Such a recovery would, in turn, hinder the expansion of Bolshevism and enable American banks and corporations to invest in a safe, reliable European market. For the United States, Italy was an opportunity to try this new strategy. A collateral effect of its implementation was America’s indifference toward the agony of coalitions led by pre-war liberal and conservative leaders, and its support for the authoritarian rule of Mussolini, the strong man who seemed to be the right solution for a country not yet ready for self-government. Such an attitude toward right-wing autocracy took shape in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and would mark American foreign policy before and during the Cold War.13
McCormick’s feature stories refl ected the prevailing American view of Italian politics. When she returned to Rome in April, 1921, she portrayed it as a city where
there is hardly a wall of a church or public building...under the eyes of Pope and King and Parlia-ment and more soldiers than appear in any place in Europe, that is not blackened with slogans extolling the revolution and the advent of the Socialist republic.
By contrast, the Fascists stood for the Italians who “rebel against rebellion.” While anti-Fascist Dorothy Thompson visited factories occupied by workers on strike in Rome and Genoa, and in the process almost fl irted with an Italian trade union leader,14
Mc-Cormick wrote:
Italians are the people who have taken into their own hands the fi ght against disruption and anarchy. Last fall the traveler in Italy who was impeded by constant strikes, cut off from either going or staying by a paralysis based on almost any pretext – a protest against the imprisonment of a Socialist leader or a punishment for some military “insult” to a member of the proleta-riat – was apt to be in constant state of irritation against a feeble Government and a complaisant people....“We’ll let them go as far as we can” was the common comment at a common occurrence, like a general strike that tied up a whole city. “But some day they will go too far, and then we’ll do something.”
The people seem at last to have reached the point of doing something. They have begun to shout “Basta” in no weak or uncertain voice. Represented by the Fascisti, a league of combatants something like the American Legion, they are defying both the Government and the Communists in their drastic determination that their country shall not be dragged into the chaos of Bolshevism.15
In the following years, the restoration of both traditional – and Catholic – values, which, according to McCormick, had long been endangered in liberal Italy, and “law and order” as a measure against left-wing parties and trade unions was a recurrent theme of
MARCOMARIANO
her usually benevolent, and sometimes celebratory, accounts of Fascism. She also showed a passionate personal admiration for Mussolini as a metonymy for and embodiment of the Italian character, and the fi rm belief that Fascism was a modernizing force sensitive to the “social question” and to the needs of Italian men and women.16 These themes merged
into a narration that was, especially in her earlier writings, partly travelogue and partly political analysis, and that displayed an enduring inclination for remarks on everyday life and portraits of “average Italians.”
Women usually enter the scene of McCormick’s articles in these pieces of local color. She described them as mothers of young male Fascists, as fervent supporters of Fascism and moved by its appeal to virility, as subjects excluded from or barely tolerated at the margins of the public arena, a traditionally masculine space, and – above all – as grateful to the Duce for freeing them from an age-old domestic seclusion. References to women are generally related to the private sphere (motherhood, the family), but have political implications.
The relationship between public and private on the one hand illuminates the way in which elements of American maternalism – taken out of their original context and re-elaborated by McCormick, who was more sensitive to and interested in the “social question” than in democratic procedures – blended and overlapped with an authoritarian political culture like “Fascist patriarchism.”17 On the other, it exposes a gender-related
discourse that reveals the cultural assumptions of not only McCormick’s view of Italy and Fascism, but also of the general American view of Italian events.
In one article of May 1923 about the international suffragist parade that took place in Rome, McCormick provided an example of the interaction of political and gender-related discourses. The article also offers an example of how McCormick readjusted her
domestic maternalist culture to Italy. It describes Italian women as the cornerstone of a
traditional, backward society which relegates women to reproduction and domesticity: “This Italy...is pre-eminently a land of mothers.” Their only power lies in the control of the “purse strings,” while they do not take part in any public life whatsoever. According to McCormick, not only were Italian women aware of embodying a traditional model of womanhood, but they proudly vindicated it. Their distance from women’s “radicalism” in more modern countries like the United States led them strongly to oppose, for example, public family allowances for the support of children:
It is absurd as well as shocking, this idea of making a family a business – a female university professor reportedly told her – A woman cannot be paid to be a mother, it is a pagan theory....I know we are conservative and very backward and unorganized compared to the women of your country....It is better that we of the Latin races remain conservative in order to be the saving leaven in the loaf.18
Leaving aside the reference to the ethnic connotation of Italian conservatism, which frequently recurs in McCormick’s remarks on the alleged characteristically Italian nature
of Fascism, here it must be stressed how she transfers such conservatism from the private sphere of motherhood to the public one. First, the Italian woman is indifferent to change (“New inventions do not modernize even her admirable old-fashioned domesticity,” wrote McCormick in a rather satisfi ed tone) and remains fi rm in the midst of the social upheaval of the time; second, and consequently, she cannot but take sides with the defenders of old-fashioned private and public values, the Fascists:
Fascismo [sic] at its inception was not politics, it was merely human anger against destruction. It was the outraged impulse to resist invasion of a kind that would most outrage Italian women – the invasion of authority, security, tradition, all the old entrenchments that protected the home. It was a conservative movement...and in an old country like this women are the fi rst and fi nal conservatives....Women understand the old fashioned, masterful sort of government which [Mus-solini] re-establishes. They rally to the old fashioned hierarchies of religion, authority, obedience which he restores.19
The orientation of Italian women, however, is not expressed through participation in political life, but through motherhood. In McCormick’s article, the outraged Italian women are the mothers of the young male Fascists who “rebel against rebellion”:
The boys who fl ocked to the Fascists banners must have come fresh from some mother’s hand....The long-smoldering exasperation that pushed these boys out of middle class homes to rebel against rebellion was very notably the exasperation of women.20
This is not to say that McCormick’s view of gender and women’s issues was a reason for her support for Fascism – although Fascist traditionalism, applied to a backward country like Italy, undoubtedly contributed to justify such support – or, conversely, that her sympathy for Fascism led her to embrace a given gender ideology. In order to understand the relations between gender issues and institutional discourse we must take into account Emily Rosenberg’s argument that
discursive analysis...is not concerned with labeling “cause” and “effect” but with highlighting symbolic interrelationships among seemingly unrelated institutions and assumptions in order to understand the boundaries of what constitutes “knowledge” and what seems taken for granted as “natural.”….Discourses about one thing can then stand, invisibly, for discourses about something else, helping to make the obvious and the submerged subject seem “natural.”21
In this light, we can see that, in McCormick’s view, Italian women’s reaction against “disorder” – a pattern of behavior related to the maternalist idea of gender difference – is expressed privately and naturally through motherhood; such a reaction is assumed as the symbolic and moral basis of her political analysis of Fascism which, in turn, was instrumental in American policy toward Italy in the 1920s. Furthermore, McCormick’s image of Italian women – as virtuous custodians of traditional values, secluded in their homes, uninterested in political participation and unable to react on their own to the “anarchy” disrupting public life – is a metaphor of the way in which Americans saw and
MARCOMARIANO
idealized Italy: a land rich in cultural and religious treasures (especially for the Catholic and Italophile McCormick), but unfi t for self-government and in need of a strong man. If possible, this strong man had to be as ostensibly virile as Mussolini claimed to be, “the only man in Italy strong enough to seize the Government and make it go.” As a matter of fact, McCormick shared American idealizations and stereotypes of Italy, and to some extent her view of Italian affairs was infl uenced by the idea of a “hierarchy of race,”22
which Anglo-Saxonism had popularized at the turn of the century and which before and after the 1920s shaped the way in which America dealt with other peoples. For example, she wrote on the relationship between Italians and democracy that
they have always fl ourished under a strong hand, whether Caesar’s or Hildebrand’s, Cavour’s or Crispi’s. That is because they are not a people like ourselves or the English or the Germans, loving order and regulation and government for their own sake....When his critics accuse [Mussolini] of unconstitutionality they only recommend him the more to a highly civilized but naturally lawless people.23
While imbued with the values of American maternalism, McCormick’s view of the gender difference – women as naturally opposed to disorder in defense of traditional val-ues – was also consistent with different political cultures, and therefore could be adapted to different historical contexts. Before providing further examples of how the categories of public and private enable us to grasp the political implications of both McCormick’s vision of gender difference and her discourse related to gender, it must be pointed out that in later articles on Italy she revised gender issues according to values that had nothing to do with the democratic, progressive thrust of maternalist political culture.
To be sure, McCormick did apply categories derived from maternalist political culture to the Italian situation: by emphasizing motherhood as the vehicle of Italian women’s participation in public life, she reproposed the old idea of the extension to public life of the domestic virtues attributed to women. The belief in the moral and civic meaning of motherhood, deeply rooted among middle-class white women, was a legacy of the revolutionary era. According to historian Paula Baker, in the early nineteenth century,
women combined political activity, domesticity and republican thought through motherhood. Although outside of formal politics, mothering was crucial: by raising civic-minded, virtuous sons, they insured the survival of the republic.24
At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, this belief became one of the cornerstones of the legitimacy of the American women’s movement. However, this was not the case in Italy: according to McCormick the Italian woman “belongs to a type already nearly obsolete with us – the womanly type idealized by the Victorians”; therefore, her situation was comparable to that experienced by American women more than a century before.
McCormick was indeed well aware of the gulf dividing American and Italian women; and she outlined basic polarities that implicitly informed many of her articles in terms of it. Among these, public commitment vs. familism, social and political rights vs. exclu-sion, and, ultimately, modernity vs. tradition. In the United States, the infl uential and well-organized feminist movement had shaped its own distinct and widely-shared politi-cal culture through decades of activism, had just obtained the right to vote for women, was in the vanguard of the Progressive Era, and was a legitimate actor on the scene of American democracy. By contrast, Italian women had never played any role in public life (“The [Italian] women workers have never had time to indulge either in revolution or reaction”) and now, according to the free lance McCormick, they expressed their support for an authoritarian regime through motherhood. “Progress, supposing it means anything, means a different thing in every climate,”25 wrote McCormick in 1923. In her attempt to
adjust to a different context, she departed from her maternalist moderate progressivism and absorbed elements of “Fascist patriarchism,” again appealing to a discourse related to gender that symbolized and reinforced existing power relationships.
While post-Risorgimento liberal Italy, oriented to a rigid economic and social laissez
faire, had been largely indifferent to women’s and family issues, Fascism implemented
a set of policies, the best-known being those aimed at increasing the birthrate. These policies stemmed from a patriarchal vision based on the hierarchical difference between men and women, and on the repression of the latter both in the private sphere (sexuality, reproduction) and in the public sphere (work, political rights). Historian Victoria De Grazia has written that Fascist familism was “an ideology of domesticity that emphasized the commonality of the family, paternal authority, and women’s limitless devotion to family for the good of the party and the State.”26 On the one hand Fascism prescribed women’s
seclusion in the home, in their traditional roles of mothers, nurturers, and custodians of the family, that sacred and indivisible outpost of the nation. On the other, it intruded into the private space of the family on behalf of the needs of the nation by mobilizing husbands and wives, sons and daughters in mass organizations, by enforcing extended army recruiting; in so doing, Fascism assigned a new patriotic mission to women and unwittingly made them more conscious of their public role. This paradox, although marked by woman’s subordination in the family and by autocracy, is somehow reminiscent of the tension between public and private typical of American maternalism.
McCormick must have seen Fascist patriarchism as a convincing adjustment to the Italian situation of her maternalist assumptions, at a time when the weak Italian women’s movement based its claims to civil rights and social recognition on familism and national-istic patriotism.27 Furthermore, that patriarchism replaced the indifference toward women
and family of the pre-Fascist era, whose leaders McCormick never held in great esteem. Finally, it defi ned family as the pillar of an orderly and hierarchical society which, unlike the social tension-ridden society of post-World War I Italy, responded to McCormick's
MARCOMARIANO
hopes and expectations: her organicistic Catholic culture, socially concerned but strongly anti-Marxist, led her to consider social confl ict as a threat to civilization.28
McCormick’s articles constantly stressed women’s support for Mussolini. He was portrayed as the leader who understood Italian mothers’ need for discipline and put an end to their domestic seclusion by giving them access to public life, although not through participation in democratic life, but through the channels of authoritarian mobilization. By means of her discourse related to women and gender and her view of gender differ-ence, McCormick provided an interpretation of Fascism as a healthily conservative but strongly modernizing political force that in America would command the attention both of the public opinion and of political, diplomatic, and business circles.
In April 1921, McCormick wrote an article describing Fascism as a generational turn, and defi ning Fascist rhetoric of vitalism in gendered terms: “A demonstration of Fascisti is as stirring as a furious football rush.” The protagonists of that parade were young men from all over the country who shared “the same aspect of prosperity, of virility, of strength ready to spring.” In the article, McCormick focuses less on the few women who took part in the parade than on those cheering enthusiastically from the windows of their homes:
The starry-eyed little Italian woman whose window I hung out of...nearly fell into the street in her patriotic excitement when she saw a delegation from a Northern city she knew.29
This sort of telling image of male agency and female subordination played a crucial role in McCormick’s defi nition of Fascism as a modernizing force in Italian society. Two years later, again commenting on the international suffragist demonstration in Rome, she wrote of the women who took part in the Fascist parade of April 1921, stressing that
the handful of girls paraders in that outpouring were not feminists. They were Fascisti....They were not, and are not, concerned with the vote or the rights of women....There is no signifi cance in their appearance as adjuncts to a parade of men other than the profound signifi cance of the fact that Fascismo has been able to draw women who do not desire the vote out of a domesticity deeper than that of any women in Europe.30
As Ataturk did in Turkey, with his commitment to accelerate the modernization of the nation through the liberation of women (“Women’s suffrage drags out of the harems terrifi ed veiled creatures who have no idea what it means”31), so Mussolini was doing
in Italy with his commitment to free the female sphere from its age-old seclusion. The fact that women did not ask for it and that the process was unilaterally triggered by the public (male) sphere was, for the journalist, a further proof of the ability of the Duce to lead Italy.
In later years, when the regime strengthened its control of Italy, McCormick provided arguments and symbols showing solid pro-Fascist inclinations among women, while
her references to gender difference usually emphasized women’s ability to overcome hard times.
In 1926, during the 700th anniversary of St. Francis’ death, McCormick was moved by the Fascist celebration of Franciscan virtues, and portrayed a new Italy oriented to ascetism and frugality, and where women eagerly adopted a simpler style in fashion.32
However, many years later she would single out women’s discontent at the hardships of everyday life in Europe during the post-World War II reconstruction as the reason for a potentially dissenting female voting pattern.
McCormick’s support to Fascist patriarchism culminated during the Ethiopian War of 1935-1936, when the popular consensus toward the regime reached its peak. Mussolini mobilized women against the sanctions imposed by the League of Nations and launched a campaign to collect gold and jewels to sustain the war effort: following the example of Queen Elena and Donna Rachele, Mussolini’s wife, Italian mothers, wives, and widows were urged to donate their wedding rings, thus deserving the dictator’s praise for making of every family a fortress against sanctions.33 According to McCormick’s report, however,
the wedding-rings campaign had been started by the women of a country village who spontaneously decided to offer their rings, thus proving their patriotism and inducing their fellow countrywomen to show their willingness to sacrifi ce: “Women who gathered today in Rome to organize the home front,” she wrote with the inevitable classic tinge, “show the fi ercely sacrifi cial spirit of the mothers of the Gracchi. ‘If the men weaken we will fi ght on’ said one.”34
To conclude, the way in which McCormick’s defi nition of gender difference changed according to different contexts and political contingencies suggests that its relationship with the ideology of American foreign policy concerned not only the classic polarity war vs. peace, but also the polarity democracy vs. autocracy. Furthermore, the focus on the relations between public and private in McCormick’s discourse related to gender reveals that she provided a symbolic system for American foreign policy at a time when its ambivalence toward democracy was clear: while strongly opposed to communism, it favored Fascist authoritarianism until it became a destabilizing factor on the European scene. In 1928 McCormick visited the Soviet Union and described Russian women as the perfect example of “proletarian despots,” marvellous and inhuman machines; by contrast, Rome, its colors, and the elegant people strolling in Piazza Colonna were reas-suring and “familiar.”35
4.ITALY, WAR, ANDPEACE
McCormick’s passionate account of Italian women’s mobilization in favor of the Etiopian War seems to imply her endorsement of a kind of patriotism inclined to mili-tarism and expansionism. However, when she dealt with the issue of war and peace, one
MARCOMARIANO
of the main concerns of the American women’s movement, the maternalist infl uence clearly resurfaced.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the notion of “separate spheres” within the women’s movement was meant to express the natural, peaceful morality of women in contrast to male evil, exemplifi ed by war. In 1869, the feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton remarked that, “the male element is a destructive force, stern, selfi sh, aggrandizing, loving war, conquest, acquisition, breeding...discord, disorder, disease, and death.”36 Many
feminist organizations assumed the connection between motherhood and world peace: on the verge of World War I, Carrie Chapman Catt, President of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, participated in the International Women’s Conference of The Hague and claimed a platform for “the mother half of humanity.” In 1915, the Women’s Peace Party was founded. Two years later, Jeanette Rankin, the only woman in Congress, voted against the American intervention in the world war. But in the meanwhile the climate of opinion had changed: wartime mobilization had made dissent rather less acceptable, and women’s organizations decided to support the war effort in order not to jeopardize the decades-long struggle for suffrage.
After the end of the war, many American feminists argued again that the typically female awareness of the value of life should act as a brake on the masculine use of force. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and the more moderate National Conference on the Cause and Cure of War were active participants in 1920s American political life, and effective supporters of the Briand-Kellogg Pact (1928), an international agreement repudiating the use of force in international crises.37 These organizations were
energetically active in the 1930s, when Eleanor Roosevelt, who shared the same maternal-ist assumptions common to most white, middle-class women, was also engaged in favor of peace. However, when the United States got involved in the European crisis that led to World War II, the majority of the female pacifi st movement endorsed the war once again. This endorsement was due less to political calculation than to the moral meaning of the war: the aggressive expansionism of Nazi Germany, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the news regarding the anti-Jewish persecution and, later, the Holocaust, made World War II a “just war” justifi ed, for many American women, by solid humanitarian reasons. The First Lady, a long-standing internationalist, together with Carrie Chapman Catt and eight of the nine Congresswomen endorsed American intervention. As for public opinion, polls revealed that a gender gap about peace and war really existed even after Pearl Harbor: compared to men, women were “less bloodthirsty,” more open to peace talks with Germany, and more favorable to a defensive war against Japan. These data were kept secret precisely because they confi rmed President Roosevelt’s fears about the “emotional pacifi sm” of “wives and mothers.”38
McCormick had never been active in the women’s movement, but she came closer to it during the 1930s and became acquainted with the moderate Chapman Catt. Her
stories for the Sunday Magazine and, from the mid-1930s, her comments on the editorial page of the New York Times reveal both the private sources of women’s attitudes toward peace and how those attitudes changed in intensity in relation to American foreign policy from the early 1920s to the aftermath of World War II. They also contain, again, gendered symbols that are part of a discursive strategy instrumental to American foreign policy.
In an article about the international role of Great Britain in post-World War I Europe and its problems vis-à-vis the rising anti-colonial tensions, McCormick wrote:
The new States of Europe are as prematurely grown up and bent on living their own lives as the self-governing dominions within the empire. It is a time of national fl apperdom as disturbing and confusing to mother countries and political guardians as it is to individual mothers and offi cial chaperons.39
The polarities peace vs. war and order vs. disorder have noteworthy analogies and often overlap in the international arena (although there might be wars to impose order, or just wars.) While youth is a symbol of “unruliness,” motherhood is a symbol of peace, defi ned as the kind of natural and hierarchical order typical of the family. Family order, when transferred to international affairs, takes on a conservative and ethnocentric meaning that seems inconsistent with the American anti-colonial tradition, but is instrumental to the preservation of an anti-Soviet order in 1920s Europe.
Fragments of the maternalist view of war and peace appear in several of McCormick’s articles in the years leading up to World War II. In 1937, the alliance between Italy and Germany displayed its determination to military action by supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Ethiopian War had already strained the relationship between Washington and Rome, and the Italian involvement in Spain was a further proof of Mussolini’s inclination to undertake international destabilization. McCormick began to criticize his “propaganda” and stressed the growing discontent among Italians:
As the casualties on the Spanish front become known in a country where parental love is a pas-sion, they are deeply resented. It is one thing to sacrifi ce sons in the defense of your own country, even to win needed territory for your country. It is quite another thing to offer them up for some one else’s country.40
Again, McCormick appealed to a maternalist code in her comments on an address, given by Mussolini in April 1939, in which he adopted one of his periodic pro-peace stances, only to strengthen Italy’s subordination to Germany in the following months. At a time when American diplomacy was working to keep Italy away from a war alliance with Germany, McCormick emphasized the relief of Italian women:
In Florence the discourse was broadcast in the barrack as mothers and sweethearts crowded around the gates to say good-bye to the latest batch of recruits. As it ended the weeping and gloom gave place to wild cheers. ‘Never mind, boys’ shouted one woman, ‘you are not going to war after all!’41
MARCOMARIANO
However, the beginning of the war reduced the opportunities for expressing such maternalist views on war and peace. Maternalist rhetoric became an asset for isolationist and socially conservative women’s groups like the America First movement (not to be confused with the America First Committee); they were hostile to liberal international-ism as well as to the New Deal, which they considered as a threat to good old-fashioned Americanism based, among other things, on traditional gender roles.42 McCormick had
never been a pacifi st tout court and, as a longstanding internationalist, was very vocal in her support of American intervention in the war. Still, her writings contained references to the private sphere (the home, the family) symbolizing peace and order. In January 1940, when Italy was a “non-belligerent” nation and the United States still hoped to keep it out of the war, McCormick chose “the home” – the place of private virtues – as the metaphor to describe with relief what she saw as Mussolini’s growing attention to “domestic problems” in a country which was showing signs of renewal “like a house re-furnished in the Italian style.” But later, events took a different course: the United States and Italy would remain on opposite sides until the armistice of September 1943, which in McCormick’s words marked the return of Rome to its natural collocation, that is, the “European family, of which [it] was long the sign and leader.”43
When the war was coming to an end, however, she again emphasized the pecu-liar attitude of women toward peace and war in a column entitled “Bulldozer and the Woman With a Broom”: when Europe was devastated by “destruction” – which maternal-ist political culture associated with the male sphere – women provided the fi rst engine of reconstruction through their daily domestic work. Reporting on a visit by General De Gaulle to Normandy, McCormick quoted a woman working in the middle of the ruins caused by the bombings as replying her: “Who’s to save the cabbage and onions if I don’t?....Somebody has to begin clearing away this mess.” Italy offered her a similar picture: on a farm in the countryside around Rome, “the farmer, who had lost a hand in a minefi eld, looked at us with hopeless eyes; but the woman kept on sweeping, clearing a little space in the wreckage to begin life anew.” In the early 1920s, she had already voiced her belief in the decisive role of women in post-war reconstruction in France; now, more than twenty years later, she explicitly stressed the public meaning and the evoca-tive power of gestures related to domesticity: “women instincevoca-tively seize their brooms in this futile, age-old gesture of cleaning up the mess the men have made.” At the same time, the article provides a feminized image of Europe, which, in the aftermath of the war, proved its determination to implement recovery, but depended on the alliance with the United States, which was fi ttingly coded as male in much of the American popular culture of the time.44
Finally, here McCormick claimed a role for women in the postwar international organizations, thus echoing the American women’s movement, which considered such organizations as an instrument for resolving international crises peacefully. A few
weeks before the San Francisco conference, which gave birth to the United Nations the journalist, while not mentioning Eleanor Roosevelt, greeted women’s participation and wrote: “Whether they could do better than the men is a question, but they are somehow angrier over destruction, and at least there’s not much danger of doing worse.”45
5.VOTERSANDCONSUMERS
After World War II McCormick continued to articulate both her vision of gender difference and a discourse related to gender whose undertones were instrumental to the international role of the United States, which had now become a world power.
As a commentator on international affairs for the New York Times, she followed closely the restoration of democracy in Europe and, in particular, the elections in countries of vital importance to American interests. In these comments her maternalist assumptions combined with two facts of great signifi cance for European women’s public role: their numerical majority in many countries with heavy male war casualties; and the conces-sion of the right to vote in important countries like France and Italy. From 1946 to 1950 McCormick wrote frequently about female voting orientation and its meaning in the international context; while her remarks about Italy were sparse and impressionistic, she wrote more extensively about countries where women’s public role was weightier (Germany, Great Britain).
Germany and Italy were two critical cases for the United States: both had been defeated during the war; both were trying to rebuild their economies and their democratic institutions; and both had to deal with the strong infl uence of the Cold War on their domestic political life. As for Italy, McCormick updated her belief in the innate conservatism of Italian women to the new political framework. Commenting on the elections of June 1946 for the formation of the Constitutional Assembly she described the long lines of voters as an indistinct crowd engaged in a “struggle…toward democracy” and singled out only the women who, “weak from undernourishment, fainted in the heat.” Such image of female sacrifi ce seems to be a metaphor for the weakness of Italy, devastated by war and dependent on its allies, but determined to do its part for democracy. In March 1948, a few weeks before the elections that marked the culmination of American anti-Communist intervention in postwar Italy, this metaphor was replaced by the actual description of the “clash of civilizations” that was occurring in Italy: now McCormick’s column presented Italy itself as “weak,” and therefore chosen by Moscow “for the fi rst all-out attack” while Italian Communists were “scaring the peasant women and the wives of industrial workers to keep them away from the polls” and, she continued, “the armed forces of Luigi Longo, commander of the secret Communist party, [were] mobilized in many places and put on the alert.” Finally, in an article published the day before the elections, she included “the organized groups of women,” with no further specifi cations, among the major actors of the anti-Communist mobilization, together with the moderate
MARCOMARIANO
parties and the Catholic priests.46 Again, as in the early 1920s, Italian women were defi ned
mainly as opponents of the moral and political threat of pro-Soviet subversion, rather than as actors committed to the struggle toward progress and democracy.
Unlike the Italians, German women, according to McCormick, were fundamental for the reconstruction of democracy. Since Nazism had almost totally destroyed old political institutions, for the Allies the reconstruction of democracy was much more important than the containment of a virtually non-existent internal Communist threat. Not surprisingly, McCormick dedicated two articles to women’s political role in postwar Germany; they intertwine her maternalist assumptions with the political implications of women’s numerical preponderance. She described Berlin in 1948 by adapting the symbol of the woman with a broom:
the outsider gazing at the antlike activity in the rubble is more struck than ever by the proof that reconstruction is a woman’s job. Fifty thousand women, mostly old, are still grubbing in the debris, cleaning bricks and gathering up stones and dusk.
Women more than men were hit by dictatorship and have learned the lesson of German defeat:
their talk is of pan-Europe and of peace.…They do not have a very clear comprehension of the real meaning of democracy or of its methods and responsibilities, but they do have an apprecia-tion of its benefi ts and its results [and therefore they] are better oriented to reconstrucapprecia-tion on a democratic basis than the men.
Furthermore, in Germany men made up only one third of all voters: “All affairs in Germany are women’s affairs...Their interests cannot be segregated” wrote McCormick, again combining an idea of gender difference rooted in the idea of the “separate spheres” with her preference for female political participation, which put an end to such separa-tion. Finally, she emphasized the importance of female participation in the framework of the Cold War: while the Soviets were promoting specifi c policies and propaganda activities, Western democracies in Berlin hesitated and the American military administra-tion – she concluded bitterly – shut “American wives and families in compounds labeled dependents’ quarters.”47
At a time when the Cold War was reaching its peak, McCormick reformulated gender difference and made it a weapon in the struggle for Western civilization: virtues traditionally defi ned as feminine now overlapped with the ideals and the interests of American policy in Europe although, according to the journalist, the Truman administration did not seem to be fully aware of that. However, her references to women and gender cannot be assessed only through the lens of Cold War ideological warfare. By re-discovering gender difference and placing it in the context of post-World War II European elections, she made a contribution to the recognition of a distinctive female voting pattern. The term
in politics grew and polls became more sophisticated, but typically female voting pat-terns already existed. McCormick’s interest in the connection between gender difference and voting patterns is all the more signifi cant because journalists and the media played an important role in the recognition of the gender gap, which is now among the major factors in the analysis of elections in America.48
While her comments on postwar Italy and Germany show fragments of the mater-nalist idea of gender difference, she outlined an articulated idea of that difference – again instrumental to the cultural climate and the political needs of the Cold War – while commenting on Great Britain and comparing it with the United States. Here she de-fi ned women as housewives and protagonists of a domestic life exemplide-fi ed by American middle-class families, which owned their suburban homes complete with the most recent electric appliances.
The title of an article she wrote in 1949, “The Housewives’ Part in the Great Politi-cal Debate,” illustrated her belief that it was a woman’s domestic role that legitimated her participation in public life. During World War II the great increase in the number of women in clerical and blue-collar jobs had generated fears of the spread of a new woman-hood, far from the traditional roles of mother and wife. The propaganda of governmental agencies like the Offi ce of War Information stressed that the break away from domestic-ity was a temporary emergency due to war mobilization; by the same token Hollywood offered movies like This Is the Army (1943), starring Ronald Reagan, in which the male lead, a young soldier, ends up being persuaded by his girlfriend, an army nurse, to marry her before he goes overseas.49 In the aftermath of the war, a stronger emphasis was placed
in American society on the return to separate male/public and female/private spheres and on the re-establishment of men as breadwinners and women as homemakers. Again popular culture massively circulated such prescriptions: movies portrayed dependable and responsible women deprived of their predatory sexuality of the 1930s, while women’s magazines urged their readers to adjust to the needs of their husbands returning from war and to accept subordination:
Will you be like the ideal the boys carried in their hearts when they were overseas, a girl softly feminine, wistful and gay? – asked Photoplay of its readers at the end of 1946 – Serenity is the wellspring of the romantic look....This Christmas, with your men home, surely we should know serenity. So let us look happy and contented and starry-eyed.50
This emphasis on women’s return to domesticity had strong normative connotations and was instrumental in maintaining given class and race relationships; historian Wendy Kozol has pointed out that “examining the role of the family in news about the public sphere reveals...how family portraits visualized ‘bonds of affection’ based on a politics of exclusion and privilege.”51 However, a great increase in weddings and births was actually
under way in America between 1940 and 1960. The return to the ideology of domesticity was made possible by post-depression prosperity, but it also refl ected the widespread need
MARCOMARIANO
for “security” caused by economic and social changes and by the new responsibilities of the United States in the world.
Ex-GIs coming home had to re-adjust to family life and civil society; there were fears that their possible sense of alienation could in turn generate a crisis of masculinity, with potentially disruptive consequences for American society. Therefore, the nuclear family based on the distinction between male breadwinner and female homemaker and on women’s subordination could contribute to the restoration of male authority after the war years. Furthermore, a large part of the middle class who had just begun to enjoy affl uence feared a new depression due to the reconversion of the war economy. And in the early 1950s the advent of corporate economy was turning blue collars as well as white collars into “organization men” lacking identity and emotional gratifi cation in the workplace. Finally, the United States’ role as a world power, Cold War tensions, and the beginning of the atomic age, generated new anxieties and a need for security, with consequences for the private and emotional life of many Americans. The home and the nuclear family based on male authority and female domesticity provided a private shelter and, as symbols of the American way of life, were associated with patriotism.52
When McCormick, commenting on postwar Great Britain, pointed out that “the benefi ts and burdens of the Labor program are felt by women more than by men,” she referred to the housewife, “who has to stand in queues, stretch the ration to feed a fam-ily, do without the conveniences, utensils and replacements that would lighten her daily grind.” She contrasted the austerity imposed by Labour governments in Great Britain and Australia to the affl uence of American families:
The difference is that we have a moltitude of mechanical servants – electric dishwashers, refrigera-tors, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, oil eaters, et cetera. These are among the ‘incentives’ which Labor governments, dedicated to “sharing the wealth” have not yet been able to offer the workers’ wives...‘American gadgets’ are regarded by most other people as the fruits that grow on the capitalist tree. And though they are sometimes referred to with disdain, the tools that reduce human drudgery are never really despised. Not in the kitchen anyway.
In the Anglo-Saxon world, solidly liberal-democratic and immune from pro-Soviet fi fth columns, McCormick defi ned gender difference by stressing not women’s instinctive conservatism, but women’s roles as housewives and consumers.
Men, on the whole, are the political theorizers, but Mrs. England, Mrs. Australia and Mrs. America work out the theories on the fl oor level....A miner’s wife in Lancashire assured the writer that a new kitchen stove would mean far more in her life than owning the mines,
and this could determine her vote. It is a new articulation of the gender gap, based on a view of women’s peculiarity – their inclination to domestic consumerism – which is again instrumental to the ideology and the interests of American foreign policy.53
This interaction between public and private – which McCormick referred to in order to illustrate the virtues of the American model based on free enterprise as opposed to the strong state intervention in countries governed by the democratic left – was one of the main topics of Cold War rhetoric. The so-called Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Kruschev at the inauguration of the American National Exhibition in 1959 in Moscow is the most famous example of how private affl uence was utilized as a proof of the superiority of American consumerism over the Soviet system. In that heated controversy, both the American Vice-President and the Soviet leader extolled the virtues of the economic and social system they represented on the grounds of the quantity and quality of appliances available to average families in their respective countries. Historian Elaine Tyler May has pointed out that
Since much of the Cold War was waged in propaganda battles, this vision of domesticity was a powerful weapon. Although they may have been unwitting soldiers, women who marched off the nation’s shopping centers to equip their new homes joined the ranks of American cold warriors.
The fact that McCormick articulated the commodity gap as a development of the gender gap is telling about the importance of the public-private relationship for the study of Cold War culture.54
On the other hand, the promotion of this ideal of suburban domesticity was instru-mental not only to the success of the American Century abroad, but also to the centrist national consensus of which McCormick was part. While advertising the American Way of Life in Moscow, Nixon remarked that it was available to Americans of all classes; the spread of home-ownership enabled America to reduce class distinctions and prevent class warfare. Furthermore, the increase in domestic consumption was considered virtuous as it benefi ted both families based on traditional gender roles and American companies that produced such appliances.55 McCormick had reiterated her social conservatism in
1946, when she defi ned American miners’ strikes as a desertion comparable to neutrality in wartime. In the late 1940s and early 1950s – when many American women perceived a lack of “security” in view of the growing international tensions – her endorsement of toughness against the Soviet Union, of military build-up, and of U.S. cooperation with autocratic regimes in Spain and Portugal stressed her affi nities with the culture of the National Security State.56
6. CONCLUSIONS
We have focused on the gender-related discourse in McCormick’s stories and editorial comments for the New York Times from the early 1920s to the early 1950s. The categories of public and private help to illustrate how that discourse, far from being a negligible aspect of her writings on international affairs, provided a set of arguments, images, and
MARCOMARIANO
symbols that were instrumental to the changing goals and vital interests of American foreign policy, and were therefore part of its ideology.
By a discourse related to gender I mean both a set of symbolic references to gender relations and family life and, more specifi cally, the idea of gender difference, which Mc-Cormick articulated in very different ways according to the contexts she was writing about. While reporting on Fascist Italy in the early 1920s and afterwards she departed from her maternalist political culture and embraced Fascist paternalism. She portrayed Italian women as the guardians of the way of life and traditions of a poor country allegedly stricken by social turmoil and on the verge of Communist subversion (implicitly coded as male). Unlike their American counterparts, they did not have access to the public arena – as a matter of fact they didn’t even claim it – and expressed their “instinctive” conservatism through the private experience of motherhood. Finally, according to McCormick, they supported Fascism, including its emphasis on virility, as a modernizing factor in Italian society. She selectively assumed elements of the maternalist view of gender difference – such as women’s natural morality and hostility to “destruction” – and blended them with the idea of gender roles of authoritarian patriarchism. This peculiar blend – with women as genuinely opposed to “disorder” and subject to male authoritarian agency – allowed her to emphasize the alleged women’s support for the Fascist regime, which in turn legitimated both her own enthusiasm and America’s support for Mussolini’s rise to power. The American attitude toward Italian affairs also refl ected the skepticism of American policy-makers about the viability of democratic self-government in Italy; Mc-Cormick unquestionably shared that skepticism.
American policy toward Italy changed after the Ethiopian War of 1935, followed by the Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The aggressive attitude of the Fascist regime and its partnership with Germany worried Roosevelt, who in the late 1930s tried to engage Mussolini in negotiations for peace in Europe and later was strongly commit-ted to keeping Italy out of the war. While commenting on the European instability of the interwar years and the crisis that led to World War II, McCormick rediscovered her maternalist background: in some of her articles peace and post-war reconstuction were referred to as something related to the virtues of womanhood and the private sphere (motherhood, the home, the family); on the other hand, war was represented as male. However, she did not embrace pacifi sm and, when World War II broke out, she followed the pro-war turn of the American women’s movement and strongly supported Roosevelt’s interventionism. The focus on the categories of public and private illustrates the twofold meaning of McCormick’s maternalist language: on the one hand, it voiced her genuine concern for peace and for the future of Italy within the boundaries of her hierarchical vision of the social compact; on the other, it fl uctuated in intensity according to the ba-sic needs and orientations of American foreign policy and it almost disappeared during
