Men's Movements

Feminism and the Men's Liberation Movement

The men's liberation movement emerged in the early 1970s as white, middle-class, college-educated heterosexual men responded to the challenges posed by the women's movement. During the second wave of feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, women launched a widespread critique of male dominance and the social impact of male violence and aggression. In response, some men began to question their own complicity with systems of domination [Page 302]and oppression, and also to explore the limitations that adherence to the male role placed on their own lives and experiences. Although the men's liberation movement acknowledged the negative impact of sexism on women, it was particularly concerned with the emotional and psychological toll traditional conceptions of masculinity exacted from men. Through workshops, newsletters, and “consciousness-raising” groups modeled on those of the women's movement, men questioned the association of masculinity with competitiveness and lack of emotional expressiveness. Books like Warren Farrell's The Liberated Man (1974) argued that men (as well as women) were oppressed by a gender system in which men were defined through their public success while restricted in their interpersonal relationships.

By the mid-1970s, the limited usefulness of an approach that focused on the personal costs of masculinity without the framework of a broader analysis of patriarchy was apparent. Responding to the feminist objection that men's liberation posed a false symmetry between men's and women's oppression, a group of men formed an increasingly separate movement, eventually distinguished as the “antisexist” or “profeminist” men's movement. In contrast to the men's liberationists, organizations such as the National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) approached male domination and violence as systemic, rather than individual, problems. After the 1970s, the profeminist movement would be largely relegated to the academic community; the American Men's Studies Association (1991) and the Journal of Men's Studies (1992) would emerge out of this movement, along with the journal Men and Masculinities (1998). Through these institutions, a critical interest in the social and historical construction of masculinity would be encouraged and sustained.

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