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Industrialization

The process of industrialization, which began in the United States during the early nineteenth century, had an enormous impact on American constructions of masculinity. It complicated preindustrial notions of manhood based on male patriarchal control over family and household, while also generating new and often class-based definitions of gender. For some segments of the male population, industrialization eroded two critical foundations of preindustrial male patriarchy: It reduced the importance of property ownership and moved productive, income-generating labor out of the home. In doing so, it opened up opportunities for social and cultural experimentation with definitions of manhood both in and outside the workplace. Men were able to shape these new articulations of masculinity to some extent, but the impact of industrialization on their work and on the economic foundations of their lives also set the parameters for their redefinition of themselves as men.

Household Production, Proto-Industrialization, and Patriarchy

Through the late eighteenth century, most American households were sites of preindustrial production grounded firmly in patriarchal authority, which in turn was a fundamental component of masculine identity. Between 1790 and 1815, however, the nature of both household production and household patriarchy began to shift. Commodity production in the countryside and in urban households intensified as merchants increased investment in domestic markets and the development of manufactures. This early commodity production, or proto-industrialization, actually relied on the patriarchal family unit and its social relations to organize, mobilize, and discipline a spatially dispersed workforce and produce goods for expanding markets. In and around Lynn, Massachusetts, for instance, merchants and artisans began in the 1780s to create a thriving shoe industry based on a “putting out” system in which entrepreneurs supplied raw materials to widely dispersed farm families working out of their own homes. Such forms of household-based commodity production actually reinforced domestic patriarchy, since the father/husband mediated the relation between the income-generating family members and the artisan or merchant who supplied the raw material.

Eventually, however, the success and profitability of this form of household production enabled master artisans, merchants, and shopkeepers to relocate and concentrate work processes into workshops, thus undermining traditional household patriarchy. This process was uneven in its application. In the 1790s, Samuel Slater hired whole family units for his textile mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and even purchased land for heads of households to support a combination of industrial labor and subsistence agriculture. He then sought to incorporate household patriarchy and the family as a productive unit, and to channel the social discipline these relations helped to generate into industrial manufacturing. But while the Slater Mills relied on the patriarchal family unit to maintain industrial discipline among its workers, the textile mills at Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts, which were built later, involved no similar effort to preserve preindustrial patriarchal relations.

The Breadwinner Ideal

Across class lines, men counteracted the limitations that industrialization imposed on patriarchy by monopolizing income-generating productive labor. Accompanying and justifying this development was a new definition of manhood, that of primary family breadwinner. This concept was grounded in an increasing emphasis on gender difference, and on the notion of men's unique suitability for the new forms of work generated by industrialization. The breadwinner ideal had a mixed effect on male domestic authority and masculine identity. On the one hand, it made men, their manliness, and their ability to provide economic security for their families dependent on market forces beyond their control. By disrupting the link between men's work and their households, moreover, it reduced the time that most fathers spent at home, which limited their control over their wives and children. It also rendered them less able to validate themselves by transmitting their skills to a son or apprentice or by steering their sons into their own career paths. Yet at the same time, the male breadwinner actually held a greater share of domestic economic power than had the preindustrial patriarch, and breadwinning reinforced men's ability to provide for their wives and children.

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