Joanne Meyerowitz

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Joanne Meyerowitz | "How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives": Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought | The Journal of American History, 96.4 | The History Cooperative

"How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives": Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought

Malinowski, Rivers,	Slowly we are learning,
Benedict and others	We at least know this much,
Show how common culture	That we have to unlearn
Shapes the separate lives:	Much that we were taught,
Matrilineal races	And are growing chary
Kill their mothers' brothers	Of emphatic dogmas;
In their dreams and turn their	Love like Matter is much
Sisters into wives....	Odder than we thought.
—From W. H. Auden, "Heavy Date," 1939

From the late 1920s into the early 1950s, a loose network of social scientists, known as the "culture-and-personality school," collaborated in an epistemic shift in social thought that reverberated through the rest of the twentieth century. They explicitly rejected biological theories of race and investigated instead how different "cultures" produced diverse patterns of human behavior. In the past two decades, some historians, including Elazar Barkan, Lee D. Baker, and John P. Jackson, have applauded the liberalism of the culture-and-personality vision of race, while others, including Peggy Pascoe, Daryl Michael Scott, and Alice O'Connor, have critiqued it. In either case, historians agree that the cultural approach shaped the intellectual and legal history of race and the civil rights movement. For example, culture-and-personality theorists had direct and indirect roles in the writing of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) statement on race (1950), and the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision (1954).¹

What is less well known, perhaps, is that culture-and-personality scholars also addressed many of the other issues of their day, including aggression, fascism, gender roles, criminality, and international relations. In all of these areas, they repudiated or downplayed biological theories of group difference and applied and popularized a culture-and-personality approach. Over several decades, from the late 1920s to the mid-1950s, they tried to explain differences in human behavior by looking to culture and then observing how specific groups transmitted culture from one generation to the next. In so doing, they forged a particular version of social constructionist thought in the mid-twentieth-century United States.

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