Hall, Granville Stanley

1844–1924

Psychologist and Pedagogue

The founder and first president of Clark University, Granville Stanley Hall formulated theories on child development, psychology, play, and race that greatly influenced theories about white manhood and male sexuality around the turn of the twentieth century.

Hall's chief concern was neurasthenia, a medical condition of mental and physical exhaustion first diagnosed by the physician George M. Beard in 1869. Neurasthenia tended to affect white middle-class men who feared that industrialization and urbanization undermined their ability to meet contemporary expectations of manhood. While men such as Theodore Roosevelt advocated the “strenuous life” as an antidote, Hall supported a preventive approach that targeted adolescent boys.

The concept of organic memory, which states that each individual inherits the history of his or her own race, informed Hall's thinking on child development, race, and the formation of the self. Hall advocated organized play as means through which boys could counteract the allegedly debilitating and effeminizing effects of urban-industrial “overcivilization” and achieve a reinvigorated white masculinity by tapping the primitive energy embedded in their genetic make-up. Under proper guidance, Hall believed, the primitive impulses in boys could be directed into a forceful adult masculinity able to withstand the pressures of urban, industrial life.

This prescription for the reinvigoration of white, middle-class masculinity influenced Hall's understanding of sexuality. Influenced by his New England Protestant background, and by middle-class Victorian attitudes generally, Hall initially regarded sexuality as a morally and physiologically enervating force that needed to be contained and restricted. But his insistence on tapping and directing atavistic impulses through organized play for the purpose of creating a forceful, reinvigorated masculinity eventually led Hall to suggest that the sexual energy of boys and young men could serve as a substitute for depleted nervous energy. This new link between sexuality and the development of adult masculinity became one of the main themes in Hall's two-volume study on pedagogy and child psychology, Adolescence (1904).

Changing scientific theories of genetic inheritance helped to stimulate this change in Hall's views on sexuality. As he began his work on Adolescence in the early 1890s, scientists had begun to abandon the postulate developed by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet Chevalier de Lamarck, which maintained that genetic inheritance was shaped by parental behavior, and instead began to recognize the role and function of chromosomes. This shift in scientific knowledge about genetic inheritance prompted Hall to alter his earlier repressive views on manhood and male sexuality as he completed Adolescence.

While Hall did not advocate free sexual expressiveness, his acceptance of sexuality as a positive force in a man's life nonetheless represented a profound departure from a Victorian emphasis on restraint and suppression. In Adolescence, Hall argued that sex was not immoral, but sacred because it was part of God's purpose of evolution through procreation. This new appreciation of sexuality and the body led Hall to embrace the concept of “muscular Christianity” as an ideal of male spirituality.

Hall's writings helped to redefine men's approach to their sexuality and played a critical role in shifting understandings of manliness from the self-restrained manhood characteristic of middle-class Victorian culture to the more assertive, and at times aggressive, masculinity that developed at the turn of the twentieth century.

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