Self-Control

“Control yourself!” is a common message that Americans of both sexes begin hearing at a young age, though it is an admonition that often carries greater intensity and has wider implications when addressed to males. Over the course of American history, different aspects of restraint––sometimes emotional, at other times sexual or economic––have been stressed. The call for self-control has roots in the Puritans' scrutiny of their thoughts and actions, but it began to have a particular significance for men, both politically and personally, after the American Revolution, an event that was essentially about self-governance. Subsequently—whether resisting women's desire for a wider role in society or justifying discrimination against blacks and other minorities—white Protestant males often claimed a greater capacity for self-control and labeled it an essential requirement for full participation in a political democracy. Even after women and ethnic minorities became full political participants, self-control remained a matter of greater importance for men in private [Page 411]life. Sometimes celebrated and sometimes criticized, an emphasis on self-control has been at the heart of dominant cultural requirements for manhood.

In sixteenth-century Europe, the Protestant Reformation introduced the proposition that the most legitimate earthly authority governing human actions was the individual. New England Puritans saw themselves as the most faithful upholders of this belief. The Puritans did not overtly link control of self to their sense of manhood, but they did consider men's activities of more consequence than those of women. The American Revolution put into much wider practice the notion that the best authority was not external to the person governed. The republican ideology informing the revolution linked self-control more tightly to manhood by confining political activity to men and making control of the self––the subordination of self-interest to civic spirit—an important political value. In the new nation, a woman's most important role was to train her sons for republican citizenship by instilling in them self-reliance and self-control.

The generation of the American Revolution believed that the success of their experiment in republican government required male self-control. John Adams worried liberty might lead to wealth, which in turn might produce unseemly self-indulgence. Thomas Jefferson, too, frequently expressed concern about unchecked indulgence of physical urges. Benjamin Rush, a political thinker, physician, and the founder of American psychiatry, wrote extensively about the need to cultivate a new type of personality that suited a republican society's need for self-controlled men. Drawing on Enlightenment notions linking manhood, political order, self-control, and a mechanistic cosmology, Rush urged that American males must become no less than “republican machines” who shunned unproductive play and idleness.

The onset of industrialization, urbanization, and the market revolution in the nineteenth century further reinforced the premium on male self-control. The rapidly industrializing society prized orderliness, time-consciousness, industriousness, and restraint, and the unprecedented situations that many men encountered in their new urban environments—as well as the new market economy itself—lent a fresh urgency to self-control and prompted the appearance of a growing body of advice literature. Men were increasingly urged to avoid drinking and shun excessive selfishness in their pursuit of wealth. Masturbation became a particularly worrisome example of a man's loss of self-control, a concern addressed by Rush and apparently widely shared by nineteenth-century Americans. So serious was the worry that a man might overspend himself sexually, sapping vital energy needed for work, that the historian G. J. Barker-Benfield has written of the era's “economy of sperm.” Men of an emerging middle class linked manhood, whiteness, and self-control, justifying their social position and economic success through the notion that they controlled themselves better than did black or working-class males.

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