Men's Clubs

Since the early 1700s, American men of different classes, ages, races, and ethnicities have established men's clubs to foster [Page 300]conversation and debate, education, business relationships, athletic competition, and social service. Men's clubs have also provided refuge from the pressures of work and family. They are places where like-minded men have gathered to discuss, drink, gamble, and pursue business in private, often sumptuous, surroundings. Despite these varying purposes, all men's clubs achieve status for themselves and their members through exclusive membership practices, and they have been integral to their members' understandings of male identity.

America's earliest men's clubs, grounded in colonial-era and republican conceptions of manhood, promoted intellectual improvement, political awareness, civic spirit, public usefulness, social acumen, and business opportunity. Among these early clubs were the Junto, established by Benjamin Franklin in 1727 for weekly discussions on morals, politics, and natural philosophy, and the “State in Schuylkili,” a Philadelphia eating and drinking club founded in 1732. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, college students, disappointed by their curriculum and seeking to discuss issues in greater depth, established clubs such as Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club (1770) and Yale's Skull and Bones Society (1832), imagining them as places for the more rigorous pursuit of knowledge. Because of this educational focus, many early men's clubs built impressive private libraries in addition to their sometimes elaborate physical facilities.

For young men not in college, societies such as the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), first established in the United States in 1851, could substitute for a formal education by providing access to spirited discussion, debate, and camaraderie. In all such clubs, members were expected to cultivate good manners and begin friendships that would serve them later in life. This focus on cultivating useful relationships gave rise in the early twentieth century to clubs such as Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis—all oriented toward professional, civic-minded men.

The nineteenth century was the great age for the formation of urban men's clubs, with New York City boasting an estimated five hundred such clubs by the 1920s. Many early clubs, such as New York City's Union, Century, Brook, and University Clubs; Washington, D.C.'s, Metropolitan and Cosmos Clubs; and San Francisco's Bohemian and Olympic Clubs, were established as dinner and discussion clubs. Members could, for an initiation fee and monthly dues, take advantage of such club amenities as large lounges, libraries, bars, theatrical spaces, exercise rooms, baths, billiard parlors, and sleeping accommodations. These amenities encouraged men to engage in the friendly competition, intellectual debate, and social intercourse that club members deemed essential to manliness.

As private spaces, men's clubs also allowed members to pursue behaviors restricted elsewhere, such as drinking, gambling, and bawdy humor, with relative freedom only limited by internal club conventions. Men's clubs thus represented places in which men could engage in behaviors and discuss topics otherwise inappropriate for mixed company. Believing that enacting these dimensions of manhood required a strongly homosocial setting, men's clubs tended to exclude women, inviting them to attend only for limited periods of time or on special occasions. At the same time, in an expression of the domestic longings that many middle-class men of the period associated with complete manhood, men's clubs strove through their furnishings and décor to duplicate a homelike environment. Because of their location in urban centers, close ties to particular professions, and exclusive membership practices, men's clubs mostly served white men and were segregated by economic class. These clubs, catering largely to the middle and upper classes, thus contributed to the process by which their members formed class- and race-based notions of masculinity.

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