Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

While the outside world was decreasing its differential treatment of children on a sexual basis by treating boys and girls more and more alike (and that treatment was better adapted to girls than to boys) within the middle-class home, the growing emotional frustrations of the mother were leading to an increasing distinction on a sexual basis in her emotional treatment of her children.

The earliest feeling of sensual reassurance and comfort any child experiences is against the body of its mother. To a boy baby this is a heterosexual relationship, while to the girl it is a relationship with the same sex. In most cases the little girl avoids any undesirable persistence of this homosexual tendency by shifting her admiration and attention to some available male, usually her father. Thus by the age of six or eight, a daughter has become “Daddy’s girl,” awaiting his return from work to communicate the news of the day, getting his slippers and newspaper, and hoping that he will read her a story or share her viewing of a favorite television program before she must go to bed. By the age of twelve, in a normal girl, this interest in male creatures has begun to shift to some boy in her class at school. With a boy baby the transference is later and less gradual. The undesirable aspects of his love for his mother are avoided by the powerful social pressures of the incest taboo, but this merely means that the sexual element in his concern for the opposite sex is suppressed and is undeveloped. Thus there is a natural, we might almost say biological, tendency in our society for the sexual development of the boy to be delayed and for the girl to be free from this retarding influence.

In the American middle-class family of today, these influences have been extraordinarily exaggerated. Because the middle-class marriage is based on social rather than personal attraction, the emotional relation of the wife to her husband is insecure, and the more her husband buries himself in his work, hobbies, or outside interests, the more insecure and unsatisfactory it becomes for his wife. Part of the wife’s unused emotional energy begins to be expended in her love for her son. At the same time, because of the emotional insecurity in the mother’s relationship with her husband, the daughter may come to be regarded as an emotional rival for the husband’s affection. This resentment of the daughter is most likely to occur when there is some other cause of disturbance in the mother’s psychology, especially if this cause is associated with her relationship to her own father. For example, as female domination becomes, generation by generation, a more distinctive feature of American family life, the daughter’s shift of attention to her father becomes less complete, and, by adolescence, she tends to pity him rather than to admire him and may become relatively ambivalent in her feelings toward both her father and mother, sometimes hating the latter for dominating her father and despising his weakness in allowing it. In such a case, the whole development of which we speak is accelerated and intensified in the next generation, and the daughter’s relatively ambivalent feelings toward her parents are repeated in her relatively ambivalent feelings toward her husband. This serves to intensify both her emotional smothering and overprotection of her son and her tendency toward emotional rejection of her daughter as a potential danger to the relatively precarious emotional relationship between husband and wife.

As a consequence of this situation, the frustrated wife has a tendency to cling to her son by keeping him dependent and immature as long as possible and to seek to hasten the maturing of her daughter in order to edge her out of the family circle as soon as possible. The chief consequence of this is the increasingly late maturity, the weakness, under-sexuality, and dependence of American boys and American men of middle-class origins and the increasingly early maturing, aggressiveness, oversexuality, and independence of American middle-class girls. The mother’s alienation of the daughter (which often reaches an acute condition of mutual hatred) may begin in childhood or even at birth (especially if the girl baby is beautiful, is not nursed by the mother, and is welcomed with excessive joy by the husband). It usually becomes acute when the daughter reaches puberty and may become very acute if the mother, about the same time, is approaching her menopause (which she often mistakenly feels will reduce her attraction as a woman to her husband).

During this whole period, the mother’s rejection of her daughter appears chiefly in her efforts to force her to grow up rapidly, and leads to premature exposure of the daughter to such modern monstrosities as pre-teen “mixed parties,” training bras, access to overly “sophisticated” movies, books, and conversations, and the practice of leaving daughters unchaperoned in the house with boy classmates, on the early high school or even junior high school level. Such experiences and the increasingly frequent clashes of temperament between mother and daughter lead a surprisingly large percentage of middle-class girls to move from the home before the age of twenty. And whether she leaves or not, sexual and emotional maturity comes to the American middle-class girl earlier and earlier, not only in comparison with the middle-class boy but even in absolute terms. We are told, for example, that the onset of puberty among American girls (an event which can be dated exactly by the first menstrual period) has been occurring at an earlier age by about nine months for each passing decade. As a result, this milestone is reached by American girls today up to three years earlier than with American girls of the early twentieth century.

Over the same period, the American middle-class boy has been moving in the opposite direction, although the physiological element cannot be documented. Indeed, it need not be. More significant is the changing relationship between the arrival of sexual awareness and of emotional readiness to accept sex. There can be no doubt that the American child today, especially in a middle-class family, becomes aware of sex much earlier than he did a generation or two ago, and long before he is emotionally ready to face the fact of his own sexuality. In the nineteenth century three things came fairly close together in the fifteen to seventeen age bracket: (1) sexual awareness; (2) emotional readiness for sex; and (3) the ending of education and the opportunity to seek economic independence from parents. Today sexual awareness comes very early for all, perhaps around the age of ten. Emotional readiness to face the fact of one’s own sexuality comes earlier and earlier for the girl today, but later and later for the boy, chiefly because the middle-class mother forces independence and recognition of the fact that she is a woman upon her daughter but forces dependence and blindness to the fact that he is a man upon her son. And the date for the ending of education and seeking economic independence from parents gets somewhat later for girls but immensely later for men (a process that becomes increasingly extravagant).

One result of this is that the much greater (sometimes indefinitely postponed) delay for a boy of emotional readiness after sexual awareness leaves the boy emotionally desexed for so long that it affects his sexuality and emotional maturity adversely and to an increasingly advanced age. But the opposite is true for a girl, because of the shorter and decreasing lag of her emotional readiness after her sexual awareness. Lolita, who is not as rare as the readers of that novel wanted to imagine, becomes increasingly frequent, and cannot be satisfied by boys of her own age; consequently she seeks for many reasons, including financial resources and greater emotional maturity, her sex companions among older men.