| In this dissertation, I examine the mental hygiene movement, whose journal, Mental Hygiene, was a scene for assessing modernist notions of healthy citizenship and social normativity between 1917--1950. The movement understood itself to be concerned primarily with individual mental health and generally healthy citizenship, but as its project broadened, I argue that the reality of cultural, racial, and class difference complicated the movement's broader public education project by calling into question what values and what realities could be identified as shared. Further, I show how this complication significantly revised the image of mental health, as mental hygiene became less about individual values, practices, and orientations toward life and more about fostering dynamic relations among diverse values and structural antagonisms within the nation. Historians of Progressivism and of the social sciences have shown that the mental hygiene movement, like other Progressive movements, contributed to what they call the "medicalization" of American culture. Not covered in previous stories of this movement's contribution to American culture was the impact of the problem of difference or social hierarchy in the movement's work to realize its broader aims. Mental Hygiene, I argue, tracks much of this drama of mental hygienists' realization of the challenge of the problem of difference to their broader aims. Along with surveys and other forms of research within the journal used to document and analyze the variety of lived experiences that their message had to address if it were to remain relevant, mental hygienists relied more and more on the collection and review of life histories - as clinical case histories, as popular memoirs of mental illness and recovery, and as composite sketches of cultural/racial life histories. Reading Mental Hygiene as the instantiated life history of the mental hygiene movement between 1917 and 1950, I show how these published materials tell the story of the conceptual maturation of mental hygiene from its Progressivist/liberal origins to a more comprehensive, more dynamic mental hygiene that is better, though still imperfectly, suited to the reality of a very diverse United States. |
