Men's Groups

Shifting Perceptions of Men's Activities

The growth of urban centers associated with the Industrial Revolution produced a cluster of “reforms” in the mid-nineteenth century. Huge numbers of men and women responded to economic opportunity and began to labor under the new, predatory demands of a virtually unregulated factory system. When work was over, the burgeoning urban labor force tended to indulge in the robust forms of leisure that had long been part of traditional rural life. Women activists, mostly from the middle class, began to work for reform and focused largely on the leisure of working-class men. The reformers' motivations may have been a concern for the enormous potential loss of manpower flowing from these leisure habits, the costs of maintaining order, and the fear of workforce disruptions.

Long-practiced, traditional pastimes were increasingly criminalized during this period. Clark and Critcher (1985) have noted that police were supposed to control crime as part of a general agenda of maintaining public order, which local magistrates defined as clearing the streets of nuisances. Some of the biggest nuisances were the many traditional pastimes and leisure activities of men's rural heritage. Popular culture was seen as the culprit; wherever popular culture was in evidence, whenever industrial or working class people congregated, the attention of police was attracted.

Yet squalid working conditions in factories or factory-support industries established the need for recreation, with the specific goal of revivifying the self. If the industrial laborers worked long and hard, they played hard as well. Commercial sex and combat entertainments such as cock, dog, or ferret fighting complemented drinking and rambunctious play. Dance halls; taverns; playhouses with bawdy ballads on the boards and prostitutes, moneylenders, and lottery peddlers strolling the aisles; houses of ill repute; and ladies of convenience on most corners defined the sites of suspect leisure. These settings were likely to be found in or near working-class neighborhoods, which housed consumers of such goods and services.

Suppression of vice, support of virtue, and a general attempt to revise the leisure of the workers into forms that middle-class observers thought appropriate were the aims of the reform efforts. A belief that sport could [Page 910]replace the desire for sex stimulated the advent of “muscular Christianity.” Muscular Christianity sought both to teach such commercially useful values as “teamwork” and “sportsmanlike” behavior missing from the prevailing social Darwinian philosophy of the industrial barons) and to exhaust the residual energy available to workers in their free time. A long period of propagandizing about the vice of gaming began. Prostitution and related commercial sex industries were suppressed, with an emphasis on criminalizing the worker. Temperance groups sought to reduce drinking. This pressure for social control was maintained throughout the close of the century and on into the next, primarily at the level of neighborhood bars and taverns. Indeed, the age boasted an enormous blooming of entertainment facilities for the middle and upper classes, almost all of which were fairly free of harassment until Prohibition.

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