Masculinity, Anxiety and Mental Health in the 1950s

By Emma Collins, Third Year History

Masculinity is an everchanging phenomenon. During the 1950s, it was a concept rife with tension as traditional ideas of masculinity were contending with a new ideal based on familial values and fatherhood in the Western world. The 1950s were a time filled with anxieties over the decline of Britain after the Second World War, the threat of communism, and most pressingly, the nuclear threat. Mental illness was also heavily stigmatised because the public viewed it as an invisible and incurable threat. A whole family would be stigmatised by one family member with a mental illness as it was believed their genes were degraded, and they were all potentially ill. Historiography on masculinity in the 1950s primarily focuses on anxiety in the period and the changes that came with that. Despite the taboo on mental health, anxiety was common in the 1950s Western world.

1950s models of masculinity differed by a man’s age and class. It was assumed that a man would become a father, and so had a responsibility to provide for his family. When actualised, this differed throughout the decade and from person to person. Laura King’s work outlines how middle-class men were required to provide emotionally for their families through time spent with their children and completing household chores for their wives.[1] Meanwhile, in his oral histories of working-class families in the 1950s, Mark Peel highlights how working-class fathers were more likely to focus on providing financially for their children, as they worked longer hours and for less pay than middle-class fathers.[2] However, this did not mean they were not present fathers. Working-class fathers wanted the best for their children, and a recurring sentiment through those interviewed by Peel was that they worked so their children could have a better life.[3] Not being able to provide for their families was a major stress for men at the time. Sometimes unemployed men fell into a ‘stupor’, as it was called in the 1950s, or anachronistically, a depressive episode. But their families would care for them and help them through unemployment, for example by encouraging them to work part-time until the men found permanent jobs.[4]

Fatherhood and masculinity presented many contradictions and tensions, as King, Peel, and James Gilbert have demonstrated.[5] An ‘ideal man’ was authoritative yet cooperative as work in a factory or office required it to run efficiently.[6] Men were also required to care emotionally for their loved ones as family ideals were pushed to heal society from the inside after World War Two.[7] Mass consumption was also pushed as the 1950s saw a rapid increase in consumer culture when items became cheaper and incomes rose.[8] These ideals of cooperation, care and consumption contradicted traditional concepts of masculinity as they were seen as predominantly feminine and soft. This created tension around masculinity because to be the ideal man in the 1950s meant having traditionally feminine attributes that were distorted to be viewed as masculine. As Gilbert argues, men likely experienced some anxiety around this contradiction as the 1950s were heavily focused on what it meant to be a man and forced the ideal on as many men as possible.[9]

Mental illnesses were also feminised. Victoria Madden highlights that personality disorders, depression, and anxiety were all associated with femininity and weakness.[10] Men were taught to be strong, and mental illness presented the opposite of that. Christopher Callahan and German Berrios’ work explains in World War Two, ‘Shell Shock’, now attributed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, was recategorized as ‘combat fatigue’.[11] Rest was the only prescription for it, and once a man was deemed as recovered, he was reemployed. This was to help men acclimatise and reintegrate, as if they were seen as mentally ill, they would have been ostracised.

There were attempts in the 1950s by psychiatrists to destigmatise mental illnesses. However, Emily Miller argues that psychiatrists only increased their own reputation and reformed how asylums were viewed.[12] New medicines were also developed such as antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy. But mental health did not succeed in becoming less stigmatised. Madden argues that mental illnesses in media began to be represented as dark, invisible corruptors.[13] For example, there was a particular fixation in horror films with distorted personality disorders, which were incredibly unscientific.[14]

In a time of anxiety for many people, men with mental health issues had to face an ostracising society with everchanging, contradictory expectations. Their identities were hidden and complex while their illnesses were demonised. Masculinity was a volatile, tension prone topic, but solace could be found in family and friends.

[1] Laura King, Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1914-1960, (Oxford University Press, 2015), (p.15).

[2] Mark Peel, ‘A New Kind of Manhood: Remembering the 1950s’, Australian Historical Studies, 27.109 (1997), pp. 147-157, (p.147).

[3] Peel, p.152.

[4] Peel, pp.156-7.

[5] King, (2015), p.15; Peel, p.152; James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s, (University of Chicago Press, 2005), (p.4).

[6] Gilbert, p.3.

[7] King, (2015), p.5.

[8] Gilbert, p.3.

[9] Gilbert, pp.2-4.

[10] Victoria Madden, ‘Horror of Personality: Exploring the gothicisation of mental illness in American fiction of the long 1950s’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2019), (p.4).

[11] Christopher Callahan and German Berrios, Reinventing Depression: A History of the Treatment of Depression in Primary Care, 1940-2004, (Oxford University Press, 2005), (p.93).

[12] Emily Miller, ‘Be a Man: Childhood, Masculinity, Mental Hygiene, and the Asylum in the 1950’s’, (unpublished master’s thesis, Marshall University, 2019), <https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2217&context=etd>, [Accessed 9 November 2024],  (p.3).

[13] Madden, p.3.

[14] Madden, p.3.