Crisis of Masculinity

It was during the late 1960s that historians first developed the notion of a “crisis of masculinity” to describe the nervous concerns that middle-class men had regarding masculinity and the male body during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This idea not only brought scholarly attention to important changes in constructions of manhood in the twentieth century, but also raised questions about the timing of changes in cultural constructions of masculinity, the extent of uniformity and variation in men's experiences of social change, and about men's attitudes toward feminism.

During the nineteenth century, expansion in the West, Manifest Destiny, the market revolution, and, later in the century, an emphasis on the “strenuous life” all suggested the possibility of a secure, uncontestable concept of masculinity grounded ...