Mim, Prim and Miniminy Mouthed

I’m working on a new novel and I’m sometimes led to interesting places while doing my “research” (procrastinating). The book I’m working on is set in a small town in New England and it involves a psychiatrist and a scandal. There is also a theme that involves witches, but you know, the modern kind. Anyway, my internet meanderings led me to this article that was published in TIME Magazine in 1956. You can find it here.

I cannot urge you strongly enough to open this link. It’s an article about a psychologist in 1956 who published a paper in a journal of psychology about modern day witches. This doctor used, as case studies, six young female patients “all of whom were loathed by everybody, including the analyst.” He referred to these loathsome patients as modern-day “hags.”

“ Stein’s half-dozen “witches in modern dress” were all youthfully slender, lively of expression, some of them bucktoothed and “prancing” of gait. Although they were married and active sexually, they secretly dreaded the sex act and remained “psychically virgins.” They had a “miniminy mouth”; that is, they were ” ‘mim,’ prim, reticent, shy, affected.” They tended to be frigid, attract weak, boyish men, hated kissing on the mouth (a witch’s kiss was believed to draw out the soul). Often they had affairs, mainly with married men. They hated and hurt men, yet believed they were of loving disposition; they were charming, and yet tortured men.”

This Stein fellow had six of these bucktoothed, prancing, miniminy-mouthed hags in one practice? Honestly, while reading this it occurred to me that I bear more than a passing resemblance to these poor women. I’m not loathed by everybody and I do not have buck teeth, but the prancing gait thing worries me, because I do have a rather animated walk and although I certainly don’t “dread” the sex act, I do consider myself a psychic virgin. I like to think that I’m charming and yet that I torture men, but in reality, especially in recent years, men really seem to take little notice of me at all. The piece is fascinating to me, though, because it was really not written that long ago. The shrink actually used the word “hag” several times to describe these patients. Read it, I’m telling you.