Book Quotes

I thought these were interesting, given the time period in which they took place. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

From the book Alfred C. Kinsey, by James H. Jones

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A glance at South Orange’s newspaper during the years immediately after 1900 provides an inventory of [residents’] fears. With varying degrees of alarm, local editors informed their readers about the rising divorce rate, working women, intemperance, the race problem, unemployment, and …the fear by many members of the middle class that recent immigrants …would take over the country by outbreeding old-stock Americans.

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With the standards set so high, many American males had a hard time fulfilling their culture’s requirements to “be a man.” Everywhere there were signs of men who felt that something had gone wrong in their lives. Many had a vague apprehension that they did not measure up, as though they consistently yet inexplicably fell short of some invisible mark society expected them to meet. …Joining the ranks of those who walked around feeling anxious about their failure to meet the ideal were those who complained of a gnawing sense of disquietude, a fear that life was passing them by, that their daily experiences somehow failed to bring them into contact with the “real” world. Though voiced somewhat differently, each of these complaints registered the confusion many middle-class men felt about their gender identity, signaling a crisis of masculinity that reverberated in popular culture no less than in individual lives.

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Almost to the person, the founders of the [Boy Scouts of America] regarded urban life as a cancer that was devouring the physical and moral strength of the nation. In the introduction to Boy Scouts of America: A Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Life-craft (1910), Ernest Thompson Seton…. [said] the last few decades had all but ruined the nation’s boys. Young men had been assaulted by new and insidious forces that threatened to sap every ounce of manhood from their spirit. Industrialization, urbanization, the collapse of small farms, and the decline of religion had produced “a very different type of youth in the country today.” Modern-day boys had no respect for their parents or superiors, no knowledge of tools, no ability to survive in the wilderness, and no devotion to what Seton called “the safe old moral standards.” Nor could their bodies match the splendid physiques of their ancestors. Neglecting their own athletic skills, they flocked to sporting events where they did “nothing but sit on the benches and look on, while indulging their tastes for tobacco and alcohol.”

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Reformers used the rising divorce rate as proof of the need for change. Between 1870 and 1920, the divorce rate rose fifteenfold, and by 1924 one marriage out of seven ended in divorce.