Health

The Revolutionary Era

The first strong cultural link between health and masculinity in American life accompanied the founding of the nation in the late eighteenth century. As American patriots sought to define American nationhood by proposing a distinction between virtuous republican American men and the corrupt and effete British government and aristocracy, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush formulated a version of republican manhood grounded in bodily health. Rush counseled American men that a strict vegetarian diet would improve strength and virility, while meats, spicy foods, and alcohol would produce disease by overstimulating the body. He associated a plain diet with the simple and virtuous living characteristic of the ideal republican man, and rich foods, by contrast, with the luxurious living of foppish British aristocrats. For Rush and the many American men who took his advice, good health became a manifestation of manly citizenship and the basis of a stable republic.

The Nineteenth Century

The association between health and manhood was reinforced during the early to mid–nineteenth century as industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of a national market economy raised new and interrelated concerns about male behavior and the direction of national development. By the 1830s, these concerns had produced a spate of reform movements—many of them influenced by the Protestant revivalism of the Second Great Awakening—intended to shape American male behavior and the emerging urban-industrial capitalist system. Many of these movements were grounded in the assumption that American men, loosed from traditional moral restraints of church and community, required self-control and spiritual grounding (called “character” by nineteenth-century Americans) to ensure social stability, moral order, and economic productivity.

Among these movements was a push for health and dietary reform, led by Sylvester Graham. Although Graham addressed both men and women, his advice primarily targeted young men, on whose shoulders he rested the future of the nation. Believing that consumption of meat, alcohol, tea, coffee, and tobacco would lead to disease, Graham urged American men to adopt a strict diet of vegetables, grains, and water, as well as a regimen of moderate exercise. The resulting physical and spiritual health, he counseled, would direct the energies of the body away from wasteful and debilitating sensual indulgence and toward the self-discipline and the competitive economic success that he and his contemporaries deemed fundamental to manliness and national strength. Joining many Americans in associating masculinity with public economic activity and the threat of overindulgence (and women with moral purity, motherhood, and domesticity), Graham suggested that men's health began at home, in dietary practices and foods regulated and prepared by their wives and mothers. He thus rooted his notions of healthy manhood firmly in the emerging Victorian gender dichotomy that historians call the “cult of domesticity.” Indeed, many Victorian Americans underscored their association of health with masculinity by suggesting that women were naturally weak and prone to unhealthfulness.

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