Abstract
In a scene from an early episode of the popular American drama series Mad Men, the character Paul Kinsey warns: ‘A modern executive is a busy man. He leads a complicated life. He has family and leisure – and he’s supposed to keep all that straight.’1 The show follows the lives of a group of men and women working in the ruthless Madison Avenue advertising world during the 1960s (hence the name Mad Men) and is now well-known for its depiction of the merciless and aggressive competitiveness of the industry and its portrayal of heavy drinking and adultery – features which are said to have characterised 1960s corporate culture. Perhaps not so typical of the lives of ordinary men in Britain, the show nonetheless communicates a sense of some of the pressures facing men in a rapidly changing post-war world. The degree to which men actually succeeded in ‘keeping all that straight’ in Britain and the United States (US) during the period has recently become a topic for debate among social commentators, and academic historians.2 However, the ways in which men coped with professional and personal pressures are less well understood, and we know very little about the degree to which men suffered from emotional and psychological difficulties and how they dealt with them when they did.
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See for example: Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, third edition 2007);
Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of Modern Man (New York, W. Morrow and Co., 1999);
James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005);
Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York, Anchor/ Doubleday, 1983);
Michael Roper, Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984);
Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London and New York, Routledge, 1996);
and Frank Mort, ‘Social and symbolic fathers and sons in post-war Britain’, The Journal of British Studies (1999), 38 (3), 353–84.
It is generally accepted in medical circles that women are more likely than men to be ‘diagnosed’ with a mental health condition. This is a point discussed recently in Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman, The Stressed Sex: Uncovering the Truth about Men, Women and Mental Health (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).
For a discussion of these debates, see Ali Haggett, Desperate Housewives: Neuroses and the Domestic Environment 1945#x2013;1970 (London, Pickering and Chatto, 2012).
For recent discussion, see D. Wilkins, Untold Problems: A Review of the Essential Issues in the Mental Health of Men and Boys (Men’s Health Forum, 2009), p. 32. For historical data see
C. A. H. Watts, Depressive Disorders in the Community (Bristol, John Wright and Sons, 1966), p. 119.
See for example J. G. Bancroft and C. A. H. Watts, ‘A survey of patients with chronic illness in a general practice’, Journal of the College of General Practitioners (1959), 2, 338–45, statistics on 341. This subject is discussed more fully in Chapter 3 of this book.
These ideas are set out fully in Mark Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2008).
On neurasthenia, see Ruth E. Taylor, ‘Death of neurasthenia and its psychological reincarnation’, British Journal of Psychiatry (2001), 179, 550–7;
Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York, Free Press, 1992).
Gastric disorders during the Second World War are explored more thoroughly in Chapter 1 of this book. For war trauma, see Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, From Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War (Hove, Psychology Press, 2005);
Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–1930 (London, Bloomsbury, 2011);
Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914–1994 (London, Pimlico New Edition 2002);
and Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London, Reaktion, new edition 1999).
The theory of performativity is set out in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 1990) and developed further in
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 1993).
Edward Royle, ‘Trends in post-war British social history’, in James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall (eds), Understanding Post- War British Society (London, Routledge, 1994), pp. 9–18, on p. 12.
See Cynthia White, The Women’s Periodical Press in Britain 1946–1976: the Royal Commission on the Press (London, HMSO, 1977);
Cynthia White, Women’s Magazines 1963–1968 (London, Michael Joseph, 1970);
and Brian Henry (ed.), British Television Advertising: the First 30 Years (London, Century Benham, 1986).
Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 66.
For debates about the extent to which both systems were in fact ‘egalitarian’, see Michael Sanderson, ‘Education and social mobility’, in Paul Johnson (ed.), Twentieth Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change (Harlow, Addison Wesley Longman, 1998 edition), pp. 374–91.
James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall, ‘Introduction’, in James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall (eds), Understanding Post-War British Society’ (London, Routledge, 1994) pp. 1–8, on p. 1.
Chris Harris, ‘The family in post-war Britain’, in James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall (eds), Understanding Post-War British Society (London, Routledge, 1994) pp. 45–57, on p. 50.
Harris, ‘The family in post-war Britain’, p. 49. See Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957)
and Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Networks (London, Tavistock, 1957).
Raymond Firth, Two Studies of Kinship (London, London School of Economics, 1956)
and Peter Willmott and Michael Young, Family and Class in a London Suburb (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).
See also Peter Townsend, The Family Life of Old People (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957).
See J. H. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood, F. Bechhofer and J. Platt, The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968a);
J. H. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood, F. Bechhofer and J. Platt, The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behaviour (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968b);
J. H. Goldthorpe, D. Lockwood, F. Bechhofer and J. Platt, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969).
See Stephen Taylor and Sidney Chave, ‘Mental health in Harlow New Town’, Journal of Psychosomatic Research (1966), 10, 38–44
and E. H. Hare and G. K. Shaw, Mental Health on a New Housing Estate: A Comparative Study of Health in Two Districts of Croydon (London, Oxford University Press, 1965).
See for example: Judith Huback, Wives Who Went to College (London, William Heinemann, 1957);
Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956);
and Viola Klein, Britain’s Married Women Workers (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).
John Sutherland, Reading the Decades: Fifty Years of the Nation’s Bestselling Books (London, BBC, 2002), p. 14.
For a detailed account of representations of masculinity in British and film, see Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London, I B Tauris, 2001). Spicer argues that male stereotypes can be categorised into cultural ‘types’ – some that arise during a particular historical moment (such as the ‘angry young men’) and others that are overarching archetypes (such as the ‘fool’ and the ‘rogue’ whose cultural histories are extensive).
See also Stella Bruzzi, Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood (London, British Film Institute, 2005).
Helen Mayer Hacker, ‘The new burdens of masculinity’, Marriage and Family Living (1957), 19, 227–33, on 227.
Ruth Hartley, ‘Sex-role pressures in the socialisation of the child’, Psychological Reports (1959), 5, 457–69.
Sidney M. Jourard, ‘Some lethal aspects of the male role’, in Joseph H. Pleck and Jack Sawyer (eds), Men and Masculinity (New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 1974), pp. 21–9, on p. 22.
Victor J. Seidler, The Achilles Heel Reader: Men, Sexual Politics and Socialism (London, Routledge, 1991), p. ix.
For a full analysis of men’s liberation groups, see Michael A. Messner, ‘The limits of the male sex role: An analysis of the men’s liberation and men’s rights movements discourse’, Gender and Society (1998), 12 (3), 255–76. Messner notes that the men’s movement broadly split between those who emphasised ‘men’s rights’ and were opposed to feminist claims that patriarchy benefited men at women’s expense, and those who aligned themselves with feminists to confront patriarchy.
Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim, A Sociology of Health and Illness (Maidenhead, Open University Press, fourth edition, 2010), Chapter 4.
John A. Ryle, ‘Aetiology: A plea for wider concepts and new study’, Lancet, 11 July 1942, 29–30. See also John A. Ryle, Changing Disciplines: Lectures on the History, Method and Motives of Social Pathology (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1948).
J. L. Halliday, Psychosocial Medicine: A Study of the Sick Society (London: William Heinemann, 1948). For a full account of Halliday’s theories, and his use of National Insurance claims as ‘psychological documents’, see Hayward, The Transformation of the Psyche, Chapter 3.
Mark Jackson, The Age of Stress, Science and the Search for Stability (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013).
Dorothy Porter, ‘Introduction’, to John A. Ryle, Changing Disciplines (New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction, 1994 edition), p. xxxi.
See also Dorothy Porter, ‘The decline of social medicine in Britain in the 1960s’, in Dorothy Porter (ed.), Social Medicine and Medical Sociology in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam, Editions Rodopi, 1997), pp. 97–119. Important developments nonetheless include research into the links between smoking and lung cancer by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill, and research into coronary heart disease by J. N. Morris.
See J. Pemberton, ‘Origins and early history of the Society for Social Medicine in the UK and Ireland’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (2002), 54, 342–46.
H. J. Walton, ‘Effect of the doctor’s personality on his style of practice’, Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners (1969), 17, 82, supplement 3, 6–17, on 6.
A problem discussed in C. Gordon, A. R. Emerson and D. S. Pugh, ‘Patterns of sickness absence in a railway population’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine (1959), 16, 230–43. See also Jackson, The Age of Stress, p. 200.
The lack of attention paid to the influence of social and emotional factors on health at work is examined by R. Jenkins in ‘Minor psychiatric morbidity in employed young men and women and its contribution to sickness absence’, British Journal of Industrial Medicine (1985), 42, 147–54, on 150. For a polemic debate about the new social theory,
see James Le Fanu, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine (London, Abacus, 2000 edition).
This debate, its history and contemporary relevance is discussed in James Colgrove, ‘The McKeown thesis: A historical controversy and its enduring influence’, American Journal of Public Health (2002), 92 (5), 725–9.
Arthur Kleinman, ‘Depression, somatisation and the “new cross-cultural psychiatry”’, Social Science and Medicine (1977), 11 (3), 3–10, on 3.
Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition (New York, Basic Books, 1988), p. xiii.
A point made by Elisabeth Hsu in Elisabeth Hsu, ‘“Holism” and the medicalisation of emotion: The case of anger in Chinese medicine’, in Peregrine Horden and Elisabeth Hsu (eds), The Body in Balance: Humoral Medicines in Practice (New York and Oxford, Berghan, 2013), pp. 197–217, on 200.
John F. Kihlstrom and Lucy Canter Kihlstrom, ‘Somatisation as illness behaviour’, Advances in Mind-Body Medicine (2001), 17, 240–3, on 243.
George L. Engel, ‘The need for a new medical model: A challenge for bio-medicine’, Science (1977), 196, 129–36, on 133.
S. Nassir Ghaemi, ‘The biopsychosocial model in psychiatry: a critique’, Existenz (2011), 6 (1), 1–8, on 3.
The basic argument put forward in N. McLaren, ‘A critical review of the biopsychosocial model’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (1998), 32, 86–92.
Suman Fernando, Mental Health, Race and Culture (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 edition), p. 42. My emphasis.
John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2005), p. 2.
Joan Scott, ‘Gender: A useful category of historical analysis’, in Joan Scott (ed.), Feminism and History (Oxford, 1996), pp. 152–80. Originally published in The American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053–75.
Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, Columbia University, 1999), p. 6.
See Stephen Whitehead, ‘Masculinity: Shutting out the nasty bits’, Gender, Work and Organization (2000), 7 (2), 133–7.
See also John Tosh, ‘What should historians do with masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century Britain’, History Workshop Journal (1994), 38, 179–202.
See Maria Lohan, ‘Developing a critical men’s health debate in academic scholarship’, in Brendan Gough and Steve Robertson (eds), Men, Masculinities and Health: Critical Perspectives (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 11–29, on p. 12.
Steve Robertson and Robert Williams, ‘The importance of retaining a focus on masculinities in future studies on men and health’, in Giles Tremblay and François-Olivier Bernard (eds), Future Perspectives for Intervention, Policy and Research on Men and Masculinities: An International Forum (Harriman TN, Men’s Studies Press, 2012), pp. 119–33, on pp. 121, 123.
See also J. Hearne, ‘Is masculinity dead?: A critique of the concept of masculinity/ masculinities’, in M. Mac an Ghaill (ed.), Understanding Masculinities (Buckingham, Open University Press, 1996)
and K. Clatterbaugh, Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women and Politics in Modern Society (Oxford, Westview, 2nd edition 1997).
Michael Roper, ‘Slipping out of view: Subjectivity and emotion in gender history’, History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), 57–72, on 62.
Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, ‘What have historians done with masculinity? Reflections on five centuries of British History, 1500–1950’, Journal of British Studies, (2005), 44, 274–80, on 277.
Steve Robertson and Robert Williams, ‘Men, public health and health promotion: Towards a critically structural and embodied understanding’, in Brendan Gough and Steve Robertson (eds), Men, Masculinities and Health:Critical Perspectives (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) , pp. 48–66, on p. 59.
For the history of psychiatric services in Britain, see K. Jones, A History of the Mental Health Services (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972);
Andy Bell and Peter Lindley, Beyond the Water Towers: The Unfinished Revolution in Mental Health Services 1985–2005 (London, The Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, 2005);
and Helen Gilburt and Edward Peck, Service Transformation: Lessons from Mental Health (London, The King’s Fund, 2014).
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Haggett, A. (2015). Introduction. In: A History of Male Psychological Disorders in Britain, 1945–1980. Mental Health in Historical Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448880_1
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