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talent for witty repartee, but even they were advised to display blushes and downcast eyes. They were warned by conduct manuals that “the coldest reserve” was “more admirable in a woman a man wishe[d] to make his wife than the least approach to undue familiarity.” Men could adopt a quiet demeanor that implied self-possession and a power that didn’t need to flaunt itself. Though shyness per se was unacceptable, reserve was a mark of good breeding.
    But with the advent of the Culture of Personality, the value of formality began to crumble, for women and men alike. Instead of paying ceremonial calls on women and making serious declarations of intention, men were now expected to launch verbally sophisticated courtships in which they threw women “a line” of elaborate flirtatiousness. Men who were too quiet around women risked being thought gay; as a popular 1926 sex guide observed, “homosexuals are invariably timid, shy, retiring.” Women, too, were expected to walk a fine line between proprietyand boldness. If they responded too shyly to romantic overtures, they were sometimes called “frigid.”
    The field of psychology also began to grapple with the pressure to project confidence.In the 1920s an influential psychologist named Gordon Allport created a diagnostic test of “Ascendance-Submission” to measure social dominance. “Our current civilization,” observed Allport, who was himself shy and reserved, “seems to place a premium upon the aggressive person, the ‘go-getter.’ ” In 1921, Carl Jung noted the newly precarious status of introversion.Jung himself saw introverts as “educators and promoters of culture” who showed the value of “the interior life which is so painfully wanting in our civilization.” But he acknowledged that their “reserve and apparently groundless embarrassment naturally arouse all the current prejudices against this type.”
    But nowhere was the need to appear self-assured more apparent than in a new concept in psychology called the inferiority complex.The IC, as it became known in the popular press, was developed in the 1920s by a Viennese psychologist named Alfred Adler to describe feelings of inadequacy and their consequences. “Do you feel insecure?” inquired the cover of Adler’s best-selling book,
Understanding Human Nature
. “Are you fainthearted? Are you submissive?” Adler explained that all infants and small children feel inferior, living as they do in a world of adults and older siblings. In the normal process of growing up they learn to direct these feelings into pursuing their goals. But if things go awry as they mature, they might be saddled with the dreaded IC—a grave liability in an increasingly competitive society.
    The idea of wrapping their social anxieties in the neat package of a psychological complex appealed to many Americans. The Inferiority Complex became an all-purpose explanation for problems in many areas of life, ranging from love to parenting to career. In 1924,
Collier’s
ran a story about a woman who was afraid to marry the man she loved for fear that he had an IC and would never amount to anything. Another popular magazine ran an article called “Your Child and That Fashionable Complex,” explaining to moms what could cause an IC in kids and how to prevent or cure one.
Everyone
had an IC, it seemed; to some it was, paradoxically enough, a mark of distinction. Lincoln, Napoleon, Teddy Roosevelt, Edison, and Shakespeare—all had suffered from ICs, accordingto a 1939
Collier’s
article. “So,” concluded the magazine, “if you have a big, husky, in-growing inferiority complex you’re about as lucky as you could hope to be, provided you have the backbone along with it.”
    Despite the hopeful tone of this piece, child guidance experts of the 1920s set about helping children to develop winning