Excerpts From "Americans View Their Mental Health" (1960)

Excerpts from the book "Americans view their mental health: A nationwide interview survey" [1]. The book deals with a survey conducted in 1957 by Gurin (et al) on 2460 Americans 21 years of age and older. The excerpts here deal with happiness differences (or lack thereof) between men and women, plus a few related points. The material here will be referenced in a future post tracking the subjective levels of happiness between men and women over time (from the 1940s to the late 1960s). The excerpts are from pages 41-42, 208-210, and 219, respectively.

Because the two sexes represent different social roles and cultural subgroups, are subject to different demands and expectations, and encouraged toward different avenues of self-expression and gratification, we should expect men and women to stress different things as the sources of their gratifications or of their tensions and discontent. The findings, in general, support this expectation. In talking of happiness, worries, and unhappiness, for instance, men more often stress the economic and material and the job, and women more often find both gratification and sources of concern in children and the family. These differences between men and women are not always very striking, but they are consistent and in the expected direction.

Turning to how much rather than what kinds of happiness, dissatisfaction, and tension the two sexes experience, we found, in general, that there was more expression of problems among women than among men (Table 2.8). Women expressed more worrying, more often felt they had experienced a nervous breakdown, and more often felt they had had a personal problem that could have benefited from professional help. To what extent these differences suggest that women in our society are subject to greater strains than are men and to what extent they reflect a greater willingness on the part of women to face these strains and to admit to difficulty in handling them cannot be deduced from the data. But whatever their ultimate meaning, the data do suggest that there is a greater conscious experience of tension among women, that women dwell on their problems more, and more often view these problems in mental health terms. We will see these results duplicated in many other areas to be examined in the succeeding chapters, indicating a fairly general tendency for women to express more problems, tensions, and dissatisfactions.

It is of interest to note, in Table 2.8, that this difference between men and women did not appear in the question on the evaluation of one's over-all happiness. It was expected that women would express greater unhappiness, but no significant difference appeared. Apparently, the women's greater expression of tensions, problems, and dissatisfactions in specific areas is not reflected in the over-all evaluation of happiness. (It might also be noted that men and women did not differ in the anticipation of future happiness.) Possibly the 

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SEX 

Numerous differences between men and women have been reported in earlier chapters, and in reviewing these findings, several persistent themes appear. The most consistent sex difference in our data is the greater experience of distress reported by women as compared to men in all areas of adjustment with which we have dealt. It occurs in some evaluations of general adjustment, in the attitudes towards the self, in the evaluations of functioning in the marital and parental roles, and in the specific symptom patterns reported by men and women; women are more worried, more unhappy in their marriages, more aware of problems in their marriages, more likely to have felt that they had experienced a nervous breakdown. They also feel more inadequate in the parental role and are less accepting of themselves in the self-image they present. These experiences of distress are clearly manifest in the more frequent reports of all types of psychosomatic and anxiety symptoms.

What is the meaning of this? The simplest explanation would appear to be that women in our society are subject to greater stress than men. Margaret Mead (1949) has been particularly concerned with this problem and has pointed out that with the increasing flexibility in the feminine role in modern society there occurs a concomitant increase in uncertainty and stress in a woman's life. Although we have no way to assess the "actual" stresses and strains faced by our respondents, and thus cannot directly test this interpretation, we can with our data make some evaluation of its importance. If this interpretation does operate, it would be expected that the greatest difference in the experience of distress occurs among the younger respondents, where these cultural changes have had the greatest impact. There is some evidence for this in the fact that differences in the reports of difficulties in the marital and parental roles and in the incidence of negative self-evaluations are more apparent in the comparisons between younger men and women than in the comparisons between older men and women. We find no indication of greater differences in symptom patterns for younger than older men and women, however, so that the evidence bearing on the relevance of this interpretation of our data remains uncertain. What alternative interpretations can we offer?

We have already pointed to the possibility that these findings may reflect a greater readiness to admit distress rather than an actual difference in the stresses and strains encountered by men and women. The existence of such a difference between men and women in our society would not be surprising. The male role is closely linked to an active, coping interaction with the world, and a man's masculine identity is closely linked to his success in coping with his environment, to his strength in the face of difficulties.
It would not be surprising, then, if a man defended against feelings that attested to his failure in this respect, and not only experienced such feelings less often than women but also was less likely to report them if they were experienced. Women, on the other hand, commonly viewed as the "weaker" sex, would be less subject to identity problems linked to the experience and admission of difficulties and suffering.

Another frequently noted aspect of the feminine role in our society appears to be intimately related to the experience of distress: woman's role is viewed as more closely related to the maintenance of the solidarity of the family and larger social groupings of which she is a part.Fulfillment of this role would require sensitivity to the socio-emotional climate. Such sensitivity, involving a responsiveness to personal qualities in other people as well as in the self, could readily be manifest in our subjective measures of adjustment. A greater awareness of the "feeling" aspect of behavior, that is, a greater introspectiveness on the part of women, could account for many of our findings, not only those related to feelings of distress. We saw in Chapter III, for example, that women are more likely to report interpersonal or personality sources of shortcomings. In many realms of adjustment, women can be expected to be more attuned than men to the psychological facets of experience.

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There is a clear relationship between high family income and feelings of happiness in marriage (Table B.6). Our two indices of marital distress, however, bear very little relationship to income level and, if anything, go in the other direction: feelings of inadequacy and the experience of problems in marriage are likely to be reported more frequently at higher income levels. The apparent paradox of greater happiness in marriage reported by the same group that most often reports problems and feelings of inadequacy has been discussed earlier. It has been interpreted as indicating a greater involvement in marriage, leading both to greater satisfaction in marriage and to a self-questioning that springs from greater expectations. A couple faced with economic privations is likely to direct its energy toward overcoming them or at least toward learning to "make do"; but these efforts may deplete their investment in the marital relationship itself, an investment which would have led both to efforts to achieve greater marital satisfaction and attempts to acknowledge and cope with personal problems or inadequacies.

Further evidence of this difference in involvement among income groups may be found in relationships between sources of inadequacy feelings and income. There is a high concentration of concern with economic provision among people with low incomes, but a focus on inadequacies manifest in the marital relationship (particularly those we coded "protective traits" -inconsiderateness, impatience, etc.) among those at the higher income levels (Table B.7). A similar distribution of emphasis is found in relationships between income level and sources of both current dissatisfactions and past problems in marriage. 

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[1] Gurin, Gerald, Joseph Veroff, and Sheila Feld. "Americans view their mental health: A nationwide interview survey." New York: Basic, 1960. Print.

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NB: The text was OCRed from the physical book. I've made every effort to ensure that it was done properly, but there may still be an occasional error.