Reform Movements

Issues of men and masculinity have often been central to American reform movements. By definition, such movements have sought to change some aspect of culture, politics, or the economy, and they have attempted to reconfigure, sometimes in limited and sometimes in grandiose ways, power relationships in American society. Given the centrality of gendered language and concepts to the ways power relationships are understood and articulated, defining and promoting a particular vision of masculinity (and, for that matter, femininity) has often been a central strategy of different reformers attempting to accomplish social and cultural change. This relationship between reform and masculinity characterizes the three most important reform impulses in U.S. history: that of the antebellum period (1820–60), the Progressive Era (1890–1915), and the various reform movements ...