Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts : : Shyness, Power, and Intimacy in the United States, 1950-1995 / / Patricia McDaniel.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: McDaniel, Patricia,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2003]; ©2003
• Year of Publication: 2003
• Language: English
• Series: The American Social Experience ; 16
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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? In Shrinking Violets and Caspar Milquetoasts, Patricia McDaniel tells the story of shyness. Using popular self-help books and magazine articles 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 and maintain power differences between and among women and men.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter one. Introduction -- Chapter two. The Emotional Culture of Shyness from the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century -- Chapter three “Build Him a Dais” Shyness and Heterosexuality from the Roles of the Fifties to The Rules of the Nineties -- Chapter four. Assertive Women and Timid Men? Race, Heterosexuality, and Shyness -- Chapter five. Shyness from Nine to Five -- Chapter six “Intimacy Is a Difficult Art” The Changing Role of Shyness in Friendship -- Chapter seven. Conclusion -- Appendix A Data and Methods -- Appendix B Sampled Self-Help Books, Child-Rearing Manuals, and Magazine Articles -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Author