Abstract
FROM JUNE 1962 TO JANUARY 1964, ELEVEN women were sexually assaulted and then strangled or stabbed to death in their apartments in the city of Boston, their mutilated bodies being left behind with nylon stockings tied around their necks. Assuming these to be the doings of one man, soon nicknamed the Boston Strangler by the press, the police asked a team of psychiatrists to draw up a profile of the murderer. Interestingly, the committee came up with a description not only of the killer but of his mother as well. The man was “a neat, punctual, conservatively dressed, possibly middle-aged, probably impotent, probably homosexual fellow” with a “’sweet, orderly, neat, compulsive, seductive, punitive, overwhelming’ mother” (Brownmiller 203). During his childhood, “she had walked about ‘half-exposed in their apartment, but punished him severely for any sexual curiosity’” (Brownmiller 203). “Consumed by mother hatred,” her son had consequently “chosen to murder and mutilate old women in a manner ‘both sadistic and loving’” (Brownmiller 203). While the murderer was still at large, a film based on the psychiatric report was made: The Strangler (Topper 1964) portrays a serial killer in a love/hate relationship with his bossy and nagging mother. When the real-life Boston Strangler was caught in October 1964, it turned out that his mother in no way matched the psychiatrists’ description. By then, however, the damage had already been done: the committee’s “findings” had been widely covered in the press and adapted to the big screen; the belief that a mother is to blame for her son’s aberrations and crimes had been confirmed once more.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Plant convincingly argues that Wylie’s attack on Mom touched a nerve because it addressed several real concerns in American society, such as the political influence of the Daughters of the American Revolution (an organization of women who claimed to descend from American Revolution heroes) and the Gold Star mothers (a group of women whose sons had died in World War II) (Plant 19–54). Her detailed analysis does not clarify why it was Mom’s harmful influence on her son that would come to constitute the nucleus of the consequent Momism discourse, however.
In Lesbian Configurations (1997), renée c. hoogland recounts the American adaptation of psychoanalysis as follows: “Whilst Freud’s ideas had for a long time been available to various contingents of ‘experts’ (including medical doctors, intellectuals, writers and philosophers), it was only in the post-war era that psychoanalysis became a virtual lay discourse, setting firm foot in the public domain [ … ]. The post-war vulgarization of Freud’s work did not only result in the kinds of ‘normalizing cures’ that have given American psychoanalytic practice such a bad name. It also grew in the reactionary 1950s, into one of the most effective and widely used repressive tools of socio-political control” (hoogland 71–72). I argue that the latter insight is borne out not only in the institutionalization of homophobia at the time but in the naturalization of Momism as well.
Recently, the term new Momism has been introduced by Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels in The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (2004). While I consider their discussion of the unattainable standard of motherhood created in the media to be insightful and valid, I believe “new Momism” to be a misnomer, for Douglas and Michaels describe the idealization of motherhood and not a depreciation of Mom.
Perhaps African American homosexuality was quite literally unimaginable at the time. Think in this respect of James Baldwin’s choice for a white homosexual protagonist in Giovanni’s Room (1956).
The term Lavender Scare was popularized by David K. Johnson’s The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004).
I focus on homosexual men and not lesbians in this section. While they also encountered homophobia— they were discharged from the army, for example— lesbians were not as visible during the Lavender Scare.
I am uncertain whether this is a reference to the linea alba (meaning “white line” in Latin) in the abdomen (a fibrous structure that runs down the midline of the abdomen) or in the mouth (a horizontal streak on the inner surface of the cheek).
The report mentions only one known case of a homosexual being blackmailed by a foreign agent— namely, an Austrian chief of counterintelligence services who in effect became a Russian spy in 1912 (United States 5). Strikingly, the report then refers to “other cases [ … ] where Nazi and Communist agents have attempted to obtain information from employees of our Government by threatening to expose their abnormal sex activities” (United States 5, my italics) and even remarking on the “protestations by the perverts [interviewed by the committee] that they would never succumb to blackmail” (United States 5). In fact, throughout the Lavender Scare, “no cases of genuine ‘homosexual blackmail’ of government officials by foreign agents were uncovered (or have been uncovered by historians)” (Cuordileone 64); “no gay American was ever blackmailed into revealing state secrets” (Johnson 9–10).
For a detailed reconstruction of the effects of the Lavender Scare in Florida, see Karen L. Graves’ And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers (2009).
This is the only source I have encountered that mentions African American homosexuals and lesbians.
The idea of an international network of influential homosexuals is not unique to Waldeck. In “The ‘Conspiracy’ of the ‘Homintern’” (2003), Gregory Woods lists numerous examples of similar accusations made throughout the twentieth century. See Chapter 3 for this as well.
Copyright information
© 2012 Roel van den Oever
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
van den Oever, R. (2012). Momism and the Lavender Scare. In: Mama’s Boy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295088_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295088_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44549-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-29508-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)