Masculinity Studies and the Encyclopedia: Assumptions and Scope

Scholars in several disciplines—including history, literary studies, anthropology, sociology, religion, and media studies— have cultivated this new field. This encyclopedia has been developed to reflect these diverse foundations, with articles examining men's family lives, work, sexuality, bodies, and behaviors; images of masculinity in literature, film, art, music, television shows, and cultural iconography; social and political ideologies and power structures; controversial issues; the relation between notions of masculinity and historical events, processes, and periods; and group identities in which gender has intersected with race, class, ethnicity, age, religion, and region. The encyclopedia's categories, as listed in the Reader's Guide, are intended to represent the range of exploration in the field as well as to guide users toward those dimensions of American masculinity that most interest them.

The contributors to this volume share the assumption that men's lives have been grounded fundamentally in gender; that is, in their awareness of themselves as males. Their concern is with men not merely as politicians, scientists, intellectuals, professionals, leaders of social movements, or military officers— the stuff of traditional scholarship—but as men. They owe this approach to the women's studies scholars of the 1970s and 1980s, who revealed the importance of gender as a category of social, cultural, and historical analysis. Some view masculinity studies as a threat to women's studies, fearing that it might be a means by which men can remain at the center of scholarly inquiry, and that the study of masculinity will blur, if not eclipse, the study of women. But because constructions of manhood and womanhood are, and have always been, relational—each necessarily being defined with reference to the other—the two fields are very much interrelated and mutually dependent.

The contributors also understand that masculinity is not monolithic and not simply dependent on biological sex. Rather, it is historically, socially, and culturally rooted. It is variable across time, and it is conceptualized and lived in ways that shape and are shaped by men's differing self-perceptions, needs, and aspirations. Nowhere is its variability clearer than in the dynamic and multiform culture of the United States. Nor is understanding masculinity simply a matter of examining the images and masculine types conveyed by popular culture and the media. Such images are certainly influential in U.S. society, which is highly dependent on the media, and they are by no means neglected in this book, but these representations often tell us more about what men are supposed to be than about what they actually are. This encyclopedia is informed by a sensitivity to the similarities and differences— and to the complex interrelations—between image and reality, prescription and practice.

Although, or perhaps because, this encyclopedia aims to convey the state of the art in gender studies, there is much that it cannot do. Since the field of American masculinity studies is continually developing and redeveloping, the encyclopedia necessarily omits topics that have not yet received much scholarly attention. The encyclopedia may also appear to privilege some periods over others, with entries on the Victorian and Progressive eras specifically, but not one on the colonial era. This reflects scholars' conviction that some periods have clearly defining cultural characteristics. Of course, they continue to search for synthetic understandings of other periods or groups whose defining cultural characteristics (if there are any) remain unclear. Finally, limitations of space required selectivity in choosing entry topics. This encyclopedia is not [Page 2]intended to be exhaustive, but rather to convey a sense of the scope of the field.

The encyclopedia, then, is offered to its users as a tool. Each entry offers suggestions for further reading, including academic books and scholarly journal articles, and each directs the user to related entries in the encyclopedia. At the end of the encyclopedia, a comprehensive bibliography provides readers with a list of sources—organized according to important thematic categories in the field—that will provide additional directions for further study. An extensive index offers users an additional means of locating topics of interest. By encapsulating the current state of scholarly interpretation, American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia is intended to help students and scholars advance their studies, develop new questions for research, and stimulate new ways of exploring the history of American life.

Masculinity and U.S. History

Perhaps the primary lesson of masculinity studies as applied to U.S. history is that because American history (like all history) has been fundamentally about relations of power (e.g., political, economic, social, cultural), it has also been fundamentally about the social and cultural constructions of gender and masculinity used to support or seek power. In particular, white males of the middle and upper classes virtually monopolized power and public life until well into the twentieth century, and they have continued to dominate them into the early twentyfirst. Thus, concepts and experiences of masculinity, infused with related concepts and experiences of race and class, have been at the heart of American life. They are the proverbial elephant in the closet, figuring prominently, but sometimes so obviously as to be overlooked.

White men in power have deployed race- and class-based ideologies and rhetorics of manhood in an attempt to justify their hold on power, to maintain their power, and to address challenges to their power. Since the initial establishment of the United States, this group of men associated American citizenship, patriotism, and even national identity itself with white masculinity, using implicitly and explicitly gendered metaphors to describe these associations. At the same time, in a democratic and increasingly multiracial and multicultural society in which existing power arrangements have continually been contested and reconfigured, masculinity has also been contested and reconfigured. Women and nonwhites have challenged or attempted to claim constructions of (white) masculinity in their efforts to attain power, and white males have responded through defensive reactions couched in terms of perceived threats to their manhood. In short, one may view the sweep of U.S. history as, in large part, the establishment and ongoing erosion of the power of white men and white masculinity as an initially preindustrial and agrarian American society became modern and industrial, and then postmodern and postindustrial. Viewing U.S. history through the lens of gender and masculinity—while recognizing and examining the elephant in the closet—has yielded new insights into American culture, called our attention to previously overlooked facets of the American experience, and revealed new dimensions of familiar events, movements, and institutions.

The lens of gender and masculinity studies has revealed that the founders of the United States were heirs to a European worldview grounded in an agrarian, preindustrial economy and in patriarchal social arrangements that assigned males the responsibilities and privileges of public and domestic power and consigned women to subordination. Viewing this system as an expression of a divinely ordained natural order, the earliest European colonizers sought to re-establish it in colonial America—and, with only a few exceptions, they largely succeeded. Their notions of masculinity shaped not only gender hierarchies but also racial hierarchies. They concluded from the very different gender arrangements of Amerindian and African peoples that the men of these groups were aberrantly masculine, and thus fit for subjugation. Yet colonizing a new environment forced them to adapt European patriarchy to new patterns and perceptions of land availability, and to the relative absence of European institutional infrastructures. Europeans also brought with them developing political, economic, and religious notions, such as the Protestant emphasis on individual experience, the political ideology of republicanism, and the developing economic system of market capitalism, that eventually transformed the patriarchal social and political order.

The founding of the United States was led by a generation of white male patriot leaders who were both inspired by and fearful of democracy's subversive potential. This dual outlook shaped their conceptions of the new nation's political and social structure, as well as the definitions of manhood upon which they grounded it. Determined to legitimate their own seizure of power and maintain the patriarchal system they deemed essential to order, they confined the exercise of political power to white property-owning males and developed a conception of republican citizenship that privileged the qualities they associated with manhood and whiteness. It is no coincidence that the most well known of the Revolutionary-era patriot organizations called itself the Sons of Liberty, that George Washington quickly became known as the “father of his country,” that later generations of Americans would refer to those who established the [Page 3]nation as “founding fathers,” or that the most prominent personification of the United States became, and remains, the decidedly white male figure of Uncle Sam. At the same time, the American Revolution inspired other men—namely those who did not own property and belonged to what were sometimes called the “lower orders”—to incorporate into their lives different understandings of republicanism and manliness, which helped them press their own claims to power during the political and social upheaval of the Revolutionary period.

Because the American political system developed amid an exaltation of republican manhood and assumed its modern features as the right to vote was being expanded to include all adult white males, it is hardly surprising that ideologies and rhetorics of masculinity became central to American political culture. The presidential election of 1828 set a key pattern of American electioneering. Andrew Jackson was presented to voters as a frontier-dwelling, Indian-fighting, heroic military general with a decided penchant for physical confrontation and defending his wife's honor. In the elections that followed, every campaign sought to emphasize a candidate's manliness. Similarly, American political leaders seeking to justify domestic and international applications of their power have historically used the rhetoric of manliness to underscore the presumed moral righteousness, and ostensibly protective purposes, of their policies. Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and continuing into the twentyfirst century, the U.S. government has cast itself in its domestic and foreign policies as a paternal and chivalric protector (often of emasculated dependents) while labeling perceived internal and external enemies as either demasculinized conspirators or as hypermasculine brutes.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, another important pattern emerged: Americans conceptualized in masculine terms the capitalist economic system that was becoming virtually synonymous with national life. This development was hardly surprising, since the national market economy was, like the democratic political system, confined largely to white men. In defining white men alone as possessed of the qualities of self-control, rationality, competitiveness, and ambition necessary to succeed, and thus naturally suited to the amoral roughness of the marketplace, Americans effectively defined the public world of economic exchange as a masculine sphere of activity, and financial success was thus seen as a masculine achievement. In the South, slave-owning southern men grounded their particular brand of capitalist production in an ideology of gender and racial hierarchy that cast white male slave-owners as paternalistic patriarchs presiding over their profitable plantations and enslaved laborers. Even in the twentieth century, as women and nonwhites increasingly enjoyed access to economic opportunity, many Americans continued to gender the nation's economic system male—and to color it white. Most Americans remained less likely to think that the rough-and-tumble world of economic competition had become feminized than to think that successful women had become masculinized. Similarly, economically successful nonwhite men have often been assumed to lose their racial or ethnic identities—to become “white.” Like American national identity itself, the so-called American Dream began, and remains, ideologically linked to white masculinity.

The social and cultural use of gender to underwrite male power during the nineteenth century was by no means confined to those areas of life called “public.” In domestic life, too, men assumed and usually sought to monopolize family leadership, typically by appealing to the same ideologies of masculinity that they used to justify their public political and economic power. While the market and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century undermined the household economy on which patriarchy had rested in the preindustrial United States, these transformations also generated new ideologies of the family that preserved, and even enhanced, male domestic power in the “private” sphere of the home. Older patriarchal practices survived among those groups, such as yeoman farmers and the industrial working class, who resisted or were dislocated by the wrenching social and economic changes of the period. But during the early decades of the nineteenth century an emerging middle class produced a “cult of domesticity,” as well as new and more modern ideals of masculinity (the “breadwinner” and the “family man”), which located the father at the apex of the nuclear family. These ideals eventually spread well beyond the white middle class, and they have retained enormous influence into the twenty-first century.

Although the advent of an urban-industrial society in the nineteenth century benefited white middle-class men, it became clear by midcentury that these men were also troubled by the transformation. They feared that the transition from nature's rhythms and vigorous physical labor to corporate work environments and urban and suburban living alienated them from important foundations of masculine identity. In response, they developed new ideals intended to accommodate the new order. One of them, which found scientific support in Darwinian biology and in contemporary psychological theories of human development, was an emphasis on strenuous exercise, outdoor activity, martial spirit, and the romantic ruggedness of nature (particularly in the West). The growing identification of manliness with physical strength, virility, and prowess was evident throughout American culture by the late [Page 4]nineteenth century, and it remained strong throughout the twentieth. Indeed, the cultural premium on masculine toughness found new sustenance during the twentieth century in the growth of leisure time and a consumer economy, and it acquitted new impetus and urgency as a result of the nation's rise to global power, the two world wars, the Cold War, and growing threats from domestic and global terrorism.

Other new ideals were intended to empower men for success in the emerging corporate and bureaucratic world. If earlier men had required an inwardly wrought individual “character,” men of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were increasingly advised to cultivate “personality” and external appearance and to practice teamwork in order to achieve success amid increasingly large organizations and bureaucratic chains of command. Manliness in the twentieth century increasingly meant being a “team player,” a successful businessman, or an effective salesman. It required men to cultivate a winning manner and to “dress for success” by wearing “power” clothes.

White men in power asserted these new concepts of masculinity with particular urgency, for their power was being increasingly challenged. Waves of immigration—which started in the mid–nineteenth century, accelerated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and resumed after 1965—began to deprive whites of northern and western European descent of their numerical dominance as the nation became more multiracial and multiethnic. Nativist groups appeared in response, casting racial and ethnic “others” as un-American intruders in a white masculine America, and labeling them as either hypersexualized beasts (as in the case of southern Europeans, Jews, or Latinos) or effeminate (as in the case of Asians and, again, Jews). Even those who did not join nativist organizations often accepted these stereotyped images. During the late nineteenth century, in particular, whites of self-proclaimed Anglo-Saxon ancestry, drawing on theories of social Darwinism, anxiously perceived themselves as losing a competitive struggle for survival among the races. These men placed their hopes in the ideals of manly vigor and strenuous living—and in reproduction by racially responsible white couples. Physicians, psychologists, and other cultural authorities agreed that “normal” male sexuality was oriented toward procreation, and any other form was viewed as deviant.

The most direct challenges to the power of white males during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries came from organized groups of women and nonwhite men who—with particular intensity and success during the late twentieth century—were seeking power of their own. Women's rights activists and feminists sought to end the identification of citizenship and economic and professional opportunity with masculinity; civil rights activists and ethnic and racial militants sought to end their identification with white masculinity; and gay rights activists sought to end their identification with heterosexual masculinity. These groups were supported by white men of the counterculture and political left who were increasingly critical of American political, economic, and social institutions, and thus sought new ways to distribute power in American society. All of these groups sought to redefine the relation between manliness and American life by offering their own visions of manhood.

By the end of the twentieth century, these movements had made considerable headway in creating an American nation that was not for white men only, and not so thoroughly grounded in concepts of masculinity and whiteness. Furthermore, traditional male power was increasingly undermined during the late twentieth century by growing divorce rates, economic circumstances that prompted a growing incidence of dual-income families, and postmodern questioning not only of white male power, but of whether masculinity and whiteness had any objective existence or meaning at all. In response, a growing number of white men defensively asserted in film, television, and talk-show radio what they considered to be traditional American values—that is, those ideas that supported the power of white masculinity—and they turned to conservative political and religious groups, and sometimes to right-wing militia and patriot organizations, in an effort to express and defend these values.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, then, the meaning of American masculinity—or masculinities—is hotly contested. The masculinity-whiteness-heterosexuality-Americanism complex has eroded, generating a search for new ways to conceptualize the relation between manhood and American life. That search pervades the nation's political and religious life, has infused its popular culture, is powerfully evident in academia, and is at the heart of this encyclopedia.