Men's Movements

Throughout the twentieth century, men have organized in response to social, cultural, and economic changes affecting conceptions of family, labor, and spirituality. Men's movements however, which are based primarily on issues of masculine identity, have been largely a phenomenon of the late twentieth century. Unlike such early-twentieth-century movements as “muscular Christianity” and the Men and Religion Forward Movement—whose purpose was to assert the virile nature of the Christian faith in response to a perceived feminization of American culture—men's movements of the late twentieth century specifically address themselves to the question of male identity.

The civil rights and liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s prompted men to begin to organize explicitly on the basis of their identity as men. While some men's movements have been committed ...