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Bachelorhood
Bachelorhood has long provoked contradictory responses among Americans: Men and women alike have found single men's freedom from the strictures of family deeply compelling, but Americans have also perceived bachelorhood as a grave danger to social order. Shirking traditional marital obligations and lacking both the domesticating influence and legitimate sexual outlet of a wife, bachelors have threatened to destabilize the complex relationships governing social and political life in the United States. Bachelorhood, then, has represented both a masculine ideal—the self-invented man unconstrained by obligations—and its opposite—the rootless hedonist ungoverned by propriety.
The Troubling and Troubled Man Alone: Bachelorhood before the Civil War
In colonial America, concerns about the dangers of bachelorhood outweighed envy of single men's freedom. Fearful that unmarried men would become lustful degenerates, many New ...
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