Professionalism

Manhood and the Professions: 1750–1880

While the term profession dates back to Roman times, it acquired a particular meaning in the mid–eighteenth century, when a professional occupation came to be associated with status as an educated upper-class gentleman and conveyed on the practitioner a sense of honor and dignity. Men in these professions derived a sense of authority and masculinity from the intellectual labor of their work—which did not require productive effort, entrepreneurial drive, or physical labor or prowess—and from the superior position that came from their mastery of specialized knowledge and employment in highly structured and hierarchical settings. Through these professions, the authority and aristocratic honor of the gentleman became transferred to bourgeois constructions of manhood during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The professions played a critical role in shaping the male-gendered concept of American national identity that emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Whereas some leading revolutionaries, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were farmers, many others, such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, both lawyers, and Benjamin Rush, a physician, came from the professions. Alexander Hamilton (in Federalist Paper No. 35, one of eighty-five essays written in support of the Constitution) and James Madison (in Federalist Paper No. 54) accorded professionals a special status as neutral arbiters and mediators, hoping that they would stabilize the new republic by mediating between different interest groups while remaining bound by duty, occupational responsibility, and dispassionate professional conduct. Yet at least one of the professions, the clergy, experienced a setback in terms of its occupational authority and status, since the disestablishment clause in the First Amendment to the Constitution explicitly withheld official authority from the churches. In contrast, the special licensing laws by which the states regulated access to medicine and the law perpetuated the particular authority and codes of manhood associated with these professions.

Between the 1830s and 1880, several social and political developments challenged older ideals of professional manhood. Political democratization, the market revolution, industrialization, and urbanization generated entrepreneurial ideals of “marketplace manhood” and “self-made manhood” and created an egalitarian notion of “democratic manhood” that undermined older professional codes of manliness grounded in aristocratic notions of rank and hierarchy. The term gentleman, previously a preserve of professionals, began to refer to all white men who conducted themselves in a proper, orderly fashion. The egalitarian and sometimes antiauthoritarian impulses produced by the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening further undermined those claims to special authority upon which the professions had relied. Finally, intensifying political partisanship undermined the ideal of the professional as neutral arbiter. In a social setting that tended to be hostile to prescribed social order and hierarchies, all the states took their special licensing laws off the books in the 1830s, opening up access to a wide variety of fields to men without special training and blurring boundaries between rightful and wrongful practitioners. Amid these transformations, the professional codes of manliness that had formed since the mid–eighteenth century lost their social force and momentum.

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