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REVIEWS
SECTION 6
GENERAL REVIEWS
| Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West, 1890–2000. By Cas Wouters (London: Sage Publications, 2004. ix plus 188 pp. $99.95).
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| In Sex and Manners, Cas Wouters presents part of a larger comparative study of change in twentieth-century manners books in the United States, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Germany. The focus here is on ideas and practices relating to gender relations, especially courtship. Wouters' work is useful because of its comparative, empirical, synthetic and systematic approach. He is able to develop a convincing theory of change on the basis of clear patterns of similarity and difference in the different nations he examines. In all four areas he finds that manners have become more informal and emotions more free over the course of the twentieth century; and that psychic and social gaps between groups have narrowed, allowing greater integration and easier identification between groups. At the same time, the process of individualization has proceeded, as individual identity has grown at the expense of group identity. This trend has been linked in turn to an increasing reliance on self-control rather than external controls for behavior. All of these were "spiral" trends, with periods of accelerated change followed by periods of retrenchment, but in the overall direction just described. The national differences Wouters finds are mostly the result of a vanguard surge of change in the United States in the 1920s, where, in courtship as in other areas, the United States experienced developments that other western nations did not realize until after World War II. Interestingly, Wouters finds that an earlier start did not lead to the greatest degree of sexual and gender emancipation by 2000, but rather circumscribed change in the U.S., at least in comparison to the Western European societies that he surveys. |
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