Property

The term property generally refers to the physical possessions an individual owns. Legally, there are two types of property: real and personal. In the United States, concepts of real property focused primarily on land ownership. However, the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society changed concepts of property, moving the focus to [Page 377]personal property, both tangible and intangible. Physical labor exemplifies intangible personal property, while tangible personal property exists in the form of home ownership. Because manhood and freedom have historically been tied to property, ownership of property has taken on specific importance for American males.

From the time of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, Western thought identified property ownership as a necessary condition for citizenship, political virtue, and liberty— all of which have historically been understood as central to male social identity. From the colonial period through the early nineteenth century, Americans accepted this association, which became central to Jeffersonian republicanism and agrarianism. It was believed that men with land had the means to support their families, and thus were independent. Ownership of land took on further importance in American history because white men tended to be the main property owners, using it to dominate economic, political, and social institutions.

Private property gave men, even of differing classes, common interests that they believed government was obligated to protect. Thus, with the exception of colonial New England, ownership of property, particularly land, determined who voted and held elected office. Men also used gender to determine access to property, especially property that produced wealth. Fathers passed property such as land, buildings, and livestock on to sons, while daughters inherited moveable personal property like furniture. However, patriarchal laws granted control of women's real property to husbands or heads of households, thereby negating the rights that property entitled women to exercise and maintaining the connection between manhood, property, and citizenship. In addition, the fact that only large property holders served as elected officials beyond the local level corresponded with the belief that government's primary objective was protecting the right to own property.

In the years before the American Revolution, American men interpreted duties and acts passed by the English Parliament as infringing on their personal liberty, and thus on their very manhood, because they taxed property. The new government resulting from the Revolution reflected these principles, and the Constitution protected personal property from a democratic majority by limiting suffrage to those with property over a specified monetary value. By the third decade of the nineteenth century, however, the traditional relationship between citizenship and property ownership had begun to erode, for political democratization led the states to adopt universal white-male suffrage and eliminate property qualifications for voting. Yet property itself remained fundamental to American conceptions of manhood—especially white manhood—throughout the antebellum period. In the northern states, homestead legislation facilitating white men's access to western land gained momentum–with strong support from landless men, while southern men measured their manhood in terms of ownership of land and slaves.

The Union victory in the Civil War freed millions of African-American slaves, who hoped to achieve manly independence through land ownership. Yet they remained without easy access to property other than their own physical labor. The same was true for growing numbers of white laborers. The abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment's extension of suffrage to all adult males in 1868, and rapid industrialization all combined to lessen the importance of agricultural property in guaranteeing manly independence. Furthermore, the liberalization of laws governing women's control of property—and African Americans' continuing push for equal economic opportunity—challenged the earlier association between real property ownership and white manhood. As a result, men increasingly identified labor itself—their personal property—as a valuable commodity, an intangible property they could use not only to attain physical possessions, but also to determine self-worth and manhood. Men also identified specific types of labor in factories, mills, and coal mines as male domains.

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