| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

New and Improved: The Transformation of American Women's Emotional Culture. By John C. Spurlock and Cynthia A. Magistro. (New York: New York University Press, 1998. xiv, 213 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8147-8045-8.)

This is a well-written and interesting book whose many virtues are only partially obscured by a confusing interpretive framework. 1

John C. Spurlock and Cynthia A. Magistro are concerned with the relationship between "emotionology and emotional experience" for well-educated young women of the early twentieth century. This reviewer finds "emotionology" a clunky, imprecise term that the historical profession, let alone the general reader, could well do without, and one is thankful that the authors invoke it sparingly. The book is an analysis of how middle-class women reacted to the powerful dictates of the new, pleasure-oriented culture of the 1920s and 1930s, and the analysis is usually clear and incisive. 2

The heart of the book, the middle four of its six chapters, covers youth, young single women, wives, and mothers. Each chapter begins by using secondary and selected primary sources to detail the expectations imposed on women in these successive life stages. Spurlock and Magistro then offer wonderfully evocative excerpts from several women's diaries to trace the ways in which women wrestled with these dictates. . . .

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