The New Men's History and the
Peculiar Absence of Gendered
Power: Some Remedies from
Early American Gender History*
Toby L. Ditz
When women became professional historians in significant numbers starting
in the late 1970s, they immediately blew the whistle on conventional
history, pointing out that it was merely men's history masquerading as
universal history. By the early 1980s, when I received my PhD, the first
cohort of women's historians was already publishing ground-breaking
work. Galvanised by second-wave feminism and bottom-up social history,
they made it crushingly obvious except to the most resisting readers that
women made, and also make, history. Beneficiaries of the interdisciplinary
conversations and debates fostered by women's studies programmes, and
familiar with theories of gender that were emanating from every corner of
the humanities and social sciences, they made it obvious, too, that gender
was a major feature of a now greatly expanded historical terrain. When,
in 1986, Joan Scott published her now classic article, `Gender: A Useful
Category of Analysis', she was elegantly codifying and propagating among
historians as a whole what was by that time a rich, theoretical discussion
of gender and history.1
Then a strange thing happened, or, rather, did not happen. Women's
historians knew in principle that conventional history's first scandal ­ the
absence of women ­ entailed a second: historians had suppressed the
gender of their male subjects. Masculine particularity, like whiteness, had
been overlooked precisely to the extent that the power and privilege it
signified was hegemonic.The predominantly male historians and cultural
critics who had taken such an interest in the doings and writings of European
and European-American men had, as Joy Parr points out, treated
their historical subjects for the most part as representatives of their classes,
 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Gender & History ISSN 0953­5233
Toby L. Ditz, `The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American
Gender History'
Gender & History, Vol.16 No.1 April 2004, pp. 1­35.
their callings or their nations, and even as spokesmen for universal human
aspirations, but not as gendered persons. Qualities that in retrospect
might have been attributed to the historical subjects' gendered power and
to their culturally defined masculine identities were `naturalized so effectively'
in historical writing that they `seemed without names' of their own.2
The historian's self-conception as a disinterested interpreter of the past,
so long as it remained undisturbed, encouraged this misapprehension; the
male investigator and his subject both had a stake in downplaying the
gendering of cultural and political authority.3
With a massive challenge to
masculine hegemony in our own day well underway, though, the jig was
up: the gender of history's usual subjects was no longer so easily ignored.
Even so, historians of women for the most part delayed their systematic
deconstruction of manliness and masculinity and repositioning of conventional
history's male subjects for another five or ten years. Only in the
1990s did women's historians begin, with increasing momentum, to revisit
conventional history, joining forces with the early practitioners of men's
history to undo `the ruses of masculine privilege'.4
By that time, men's
history and men's studies had become specialties in their own right; they
(sometimes) acknowledged their debt to women's history and feminism,
but they also had their distinctive forums, journals, intellectual affiliations
and characteristic preoccupations.5
Partly as a consequence of this in
some respects puzzling intellectual division of labour, men's history runs
the risk of occluding women and downplaying men's power over women.
Although it undertakes to write `a history of men as gendered beings',
it has not been, as Mark Carnes has recently observed, an `interactive
history of gender'.6
In the following pages, I examine several orienting
premises of men's history and suggest how they abet the displacement of
the narrative of men's gendered power. I then discuss several strategies
for avoiding this displacement with the help of examples from my own
field, the history of the British colonies in America and the early United
States.
The first premise of men's history is good news from the vantage point
of women and history. It is that manliness and masculinity are a feature
of a larger gender order that subordinates women and preserves what
the sociologist, Robert Connell, calls the `patriarchal dividend', a phrase he
coined in his influential book, entitled simply Masculinities. `Hegemonic
masculinity', he writes, `is the [historically variable] configuration of gender
practices' that legitimates `patriarchy'. It `guarantees the dominant position
of men and the subordination of women' by ensuring that men have
superior control over economic goods, the state and the military and by
authorising violence against women as an expression of male right.7
The `patriarchal dividend' is, then, men's superior access to valued
resources and authoritative political and cultural institutions, and women's
2 Gender and History
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corresponding exclusion or marginalisation. Dominant masculinity legitimates
this patriarchal dividend and preserves it in the face of challenges.
Spoken like a good male feminist: so far, so good. And, Connell is not
alone in voicing such commitments, although he is among the most
theoretically savvy to do so.8
The second premise is that masculinity, and the larger gender order
within which it is embedded, is also fundamentally about differentiation
among men. From its inception, the literature has focused on multiple
forms of masculinity and their relationship to one another. It would
be hard to overstate this point. The proliferation of linked terms like
`hegemonic', `complicit', `subordinate' and `marginal' masculinities is
testimony to the intensity of this interest.9
This is only partly a question of
how manliness co-articulates with racial, ethnic and class distinctions to
produce hierarchies among men. The premise is, rather, that the gender
order itself is as much about relations of domination and subordination and
competition and affiliation among men ­ as it is about the subordination
of women. This is a profoundly important insight that owes a
great deal to the influence on men's studies of queer theory's interest in
the processes that (imperfectly) reproduce dominant masculinity and
generate alternative gender identifications. Yet the focus on multiple masculinities
and their mutual construction is also a major source of gender
trouble. Most of us probably view masculinity and femininity as complementary,
if not always oppositional terms. We think of them as co-produced
and as doing the work, in the first instance, of structuring the division of
labour and the allocation of power between men and women. But men's
historians tend to hold that many, if not most, forms of masculinity are, in
conjunction with race and class, generated primarily in relationship to
other masculinities. Together they differentially distributemasculine privileges
and structure relations among men. The risk inherent in this otherwise
productive insight is, of course, that the question of how masculinity
articulates with femininity to confirm the `privilege, power, and authority'
that men have over women will be suspended more or less indefinitely.10
Several factors have compounded this risk. The first cohort of men's
historians in both the United States and Britain often examined the
sex-segregated settings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
such as fraternal orders, schools and workplaces. Similarly, some early
historians of sexuality also singled out the neighbourhoods, places of entertainment
and educational settings where a gay, and later homosexual,
presence was gradually articulated, established and defended.11
`In such
situations', Joy Parr observes, `becoming a man could seem to be a personal
journey, an individual accomplishment achieved in solidarity with some
men, and in distinction from others, but relatively abstracted from relations
with women'.12
This focus was, in turn, partly the product of an approach
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 3
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to cultural politics widespread among social historians until as late as the
1990s, one which viewed members of different classes and ethnicities as
generating relatively cohesive and distinctive subcultures. Fruitful as this
approach initially was for underscoring the possibilities for self-making
and historical agency among the enslaved, the labouring classes, and women
(white and non-white), it was always subject to the criticism that it downplayed
the operations of power among the oppressed.13
Moreover, its application
to the study of the powerful was mistakenly even-handed. Whatever
its shortcomings, the exploration of `women's culture', like the study of
the culture of the slave quarters and working-class or gay urban enclaves,
was of a piece with the general project of making previously marginalised
historical actors `visible', as women's historians then liked to say.14
But when
applied to the culture of heterosexual white men who already crowded the
historical stage, the separatist approach could have oddly perverse results;
it certainly initially encouraged men's historians to downplay the deployment
of gendered power over women by the men they studied.
More recently, men's history and men's studies, like the rest of the
humanities, has moved towards a more processual view of culture and
identity formation, so much so that we may state as the third premise
of men's studies as it is now practised that masculine subjectivities are
internally complex, provisional and dynamic. Gail Bederman beautifully
distills this shift in analytic fashion as it applies to men's history. No longer
are we apt to see `manhood as a culturally defined collection of traits,
attributes, or sex roles', she writes. Rather, we now typically hold that
`gender ­ whether manhood or womanhood ­ is a historical, ideological
process' through which `individuals are positioned and position themselves
as men or as women'.15
But the influence of various post-structuralist
theoretical tendencies on the historical study of the gender of men has not
necessarily worked to offset the occlusion of women. Indeed, the emphasis
on the cultural circulation of multiple discourses, the nexus of knowledge
and power, and, especially, the open-ended construction of social identities
and categories of social difference through contested social practices
has tended to encourage an ever more detailed exploration of manly
identities and their complexities.16
Once again, Connell's Masculinities is
representative. Its approach is resolutely constructionist and processual
(if ambivalently post-structuralist). The result is an enormously subtle
exploration of the daily social and cultural practices through which men
internalise and alter what are, in any case, unstable and fractured gender
identities. Connell's passages on homoerotics and homosexuality, for example,
illuminate with special sensitivity the policing of gender boundaries
that sustains provisional alliances among some men, while creating alternative
and/or despised social positions and identities for others. But in
spite of these virtues, or even because of them, Connell's Masculinities
4 Gender and History
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focuses primarily on how the patriarchal dividend is allocated among
men; Connell is less concerned with the women at the margins of his story
or the processes that put them there, and this is true of several other
landmark books in men's studies.17
What makes this doubly interesting is
the fact that Connell is elsewhere an astute theorist of gender, not just an
analyst of masculinity. Even so, men's gendered power over women does
not closely inform the narrative of his masterwork on masculinity.
If we focus for a moment not on an influential text, but on one of
the new fields and approaches that left its distinctive imprint on the
scholarship of the 1990s, the result is much the same. A few years ago,
Mrinali Sinha noted in the pages of this journal that the historiography
of India had become closely attuned to the `gendered investments of
colonial discourse' and had generated a large literature on women's history,
but that the specialised study of masculinity was just emerging as a distinct
area of inquiry.18
Post-colonial studies has in fact recently fostered, as
Sinha had urged, explicit treatments of dominant and subaltern masculinities
and their role in sustaining or failing to sustain, imperial hegemony. The
masculinity of the post-colonial subject has been thoroughly historicised,
understood to be `shaped by the contingent practices of colonial rule'.19
Allowing for considerable differences in theoretical emphasis, it is fair to
say that this masculine subject has also turned out to be fractured, hybrid
and unstable. His structures of self-recognition and demarcation are
based not only upon racialised gender distinctions and oppositions, but
also upon all manner of intimate exchanges in the form of fantasised projections
and cross-identifications between coloniser and colonised, whites
and their racial others, and, yes, between masculinity and femininity. The
field's embrace of this complexity has encouraged detailed anatomies of
the colonial male subject and its relation to other men within an imperial
field. Still, with some brilliant exceptions, such as the work of Ann Stoler
and Antoinette Burton, these give less attention than they should to the
distribution of gendered power over women and its role in sustaining and
undermining imperial regimes.20
And, more often than one would like,
`mimic man,' still simply means colonial man, or even a colonial subject
emptied of gender.21
The emphasis on the unstable and provisional features of (masculine)
identity formation has underwritten the curious, and widely remarked
upon, tendency to see the masculine subject as everywhere fragile and
endangered, and even in constant crisis. And here we are speaking of the
men who might be thought most easily to embody, and benefit from,
dominant ideals of masculinity. This emphasis on crisis is so pronounced
that it amounts if not precisely to a fourth premise, then to a fourth ­ and
quite pervasive ­ theme in men's history and men's studies. Michael
Kimmel's influential overview of dominant standards of middle-class
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 5
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manhood, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, accents crisis and
anxiety. And historians of the United States have observed for quite some
time now that urban, white and largely professional men at the turn of
the twentieth century re-invented a muscular form of outdoor, imperial
masculinity to fend off neurasthenic bouts of anxiety and lassitude
triggered by the perceived paradoxes of modernity and (over-)civilisation.
Gail Bederman, who undertakes a detailed cultural analysis of racialised
manhood in her book, Manliness and Civilization, is rightly sceptical of the
historians' vocabulary of crisis, but she affirms that `middle class men
were unusually obsessed with manhood at the turn of the century'. This
worried `obsession' was only partly eased when dominant ideals of masculinity
began to incorporate the putatively natural passions and physicality
that white cultural authorities had previously associated pejoratively with
lower class and non-white men. Dana Nelson, writing of the early national
era as well as the later nineteenth century, says flatly that American
national manhood was `anxiety-making at its foundation'. It held out to
middle-class white men an illusory promise of escape from `competitive,
hierarchically ordered relations' into `a rich emotional mutuality' based
on `fraternal sameness', but denied even this compensatory fantasy of
belonging to non-whites and working-class men, and disguised the differential
burdens imposed by class and racial inequality. To go back further
into the colonial era, Virginia's eighteenth-century planter patriarchs
were `anxious' and the manly identities of Philadelphia's overseas colonial
merchants were `imperiled'.22
Despite the literature's sometimes intensive interest in the privileges of
whiteness, in the co-making of racial and gender identities, and in the
marginalisation of class, sexual and racial others, the privileged men in
these texts often come across as fragile, yearning and self-divided to the
point of pathology. It is a wonder they ever got out of bed in the morning,
and yet they constructed to their own benefit urban, industrial economies
and imposed imperial systems straddling the globe at enormous cost to
others. As others have observed, something is wrong with this picture.23
At its most extreme, attentiveness to the social construction of gender
identities and to their labile qualities elides the operations of power and
creates false equivalences. One gets the impression that the planter's
lament about the responsibilities of mastery has the same weight as the
burdens borne by the men and women labouring in his fields; or that the
CEO's fretfulness about the legal shenanigans of his corporation's subsidiaries
and the auditing of his expense accounts is somehow comparable
to the troubles of workers laid off in Flint, Michigan or toiling in the sweatshops
of the export zones. It is also typically assumed that violence against
women, racial minorities and homosexuals signals a crisis in masculinity that
it is always, in effect, the response of insecure bullies defending their
6 Gender and History
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turf. But such violence is not necessarily a defensive response to crisis. It can
be, instead, one of the sanctioned, if uglier techniques that some men routinely
use to maintain their gendered privileges over women and other men.
It has been suggested plausibly that the theme of crisis in academic
men's history obliquely registers the current social and intellectual challenges
mounted by women and racial and sexual minorities to white men's
virtual monopoly over the higher precincts of academic and professional
life. Practitioners of men's history who seek to explain the more outlandish,
anti-feminist outcroppings of the contemporary men's movement
may also project onto their historical subjects the sense of masculinity under
assault explicitly enunciated by the likes of John Bly.24
But in addition
to these contextual factors, a methodological or theoretical confusion is
also partly responsible for some of the excesses associated with the crisis
theme. As we have already suggested, many students of men's history are
committed to a series of linked propositions: hegemonic masculinity and
the men who benefit most from the status quo face constant challenges;
dominant ideals of masculinity and their alternatives are internally
complex; gender norms must be continually re-inscribed in persons and
institutions via practices that never mechanically instantiate or reproduce
them. Interpreters with such commitments (rightly) expend enormous
intellectual effort exploring the micro-political and cultural dynamics of
masculinity. But as a consequence, they may easily confuse the local perturbations
and conflicts that attend the making and re-making of gender
identities with crisis. And even when competitive relations among men
do pose significant challenges to hegemonic masculinity, the literature
often passes over the conjoint operations of masculinity and femininity
and the role of women in the production of such challenges. Above all,
the literature as a whole does not distinguish especially well between
crises in masculinity and crises in the larger gender order. Do the former
always entail realignments in men's relations with women and significant
challenges to men's gendered authority or shifts in the terms of its exercise?
The literature is none too clear on this point. Once again, the narrative of
competition among men and masculinity in crisis threatens to obscure the
dynamics of the larger gender order.
In the end, the new literature on the history of masculinity and men
leaves us with the queasy feeling that, cumulatively, it risks replicating the
oppressive omissions of conventional history. It is in danger of restoring
men ­ however particularised, differentiated and socially constructed ­ to
the centre of our historical narrative. As Bruce Traister's sceptical review
of American masculinity studies puts it, in the act of `returning man' to his
`historicized particularity', `Americanist cultural criticism' threatens once
again to become the `study of malekind' and to displace `the women and
texts responsible for the rise of feminism within academic literary studies'.25
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Faced with this dismaying prospect, one is tempted simply to throw in the
towel and stay within (or rejoin) the ranks of those continuing to do a
theoretically informed, women-centered history on the grounds that it
remains the most promising place for sustaining a feminist counterweight
to this retrograde tendency.
In fact, some of the most interesting work on manhood done by historians
of the United States has appeared in the context of larger projects
that do not focus primarily on men or masculinity. The scholarship on the
era of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era stands out in this regard,
although it is not alone. Hazel Carby, who has devoted much of her career
to reconstructing the culture and social practices of black women writers
and activists in the late nineteenth century, has written one of the most
persuasive accounts yet available of white southern manhood during the
Jim Crow era in the context of her analysis of Ida Wells's anti-lynching
campaign and its scathing critique of racist sexual stereotyping. Glenda
Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow follows in the same mould. Writing in
sympathetic awareness of developments in men's studies, but more deeply
influenced by critical race theory and women's history, Gilmore nests her
analysis of new standards of masculinity emerging during the Jim Crow
era among middle-class African-American men and among white racists
within a larger narrative that centres on middle-class African-American
women.26
Here, the themes of manliness and femininity in the era's
political rhetoric, the sexualised racial stereotypes used by whites to justify
their campaign of terror, and the resistance to that campaign by AfricanAmericans
appears to have created unusually powerful incentives and
opportunities for scholars to sustain a simultaneous focus on race and
gender, and to do integrated histories of men and women.27
Still, integrated histories are no guarantee in and of themselves that
gendered power will move to the foreground of our narratives. In a recent
forum on the management of `sexual and affective intimacies' as a technique
of imperial administration in North America, Ann Stoler's lead essay
draws our attention to the sites of intercultural contact where men and
women were, and are, bound together in relations of intimacy and violence,
and in the making and remaking of the complex racial categories and
inequalities that structure imperial governance. But although the forum's
participants effectively link the domains of the familial, the educative and
the sexual to the imperial project, these domains remain oddly uncoupled
from gendered power: the discussants responding to Stoler's essay do not
systemically thematise gender relations or masculinity and femininity,
though the differentiated domains of `intimacy' that the forum highlights
would seem to beg for such an analysis. Similarly, some recent histories of
marriage in early America downplay the gendered power relations at the
heart of marriage. Seeking to redress what they identify as a prior cohort
8 Gender and History
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of women's historians' inattentiveness to the affections and also to undo
the `myth' of sex-segregated separate spheres, their authors focus on
men's relations with women, but they marginalise, often by design, the
classic feminist problematic of gendered power.28
And, in any case, the specialised study of men as gendered beings is not
going to wither away anytime soon.29
During the 1990s an increasing
number of feminist scholars who grew up intellectually and professionally
within the fold of women's history and women's studies have claimed,
albeit sometimes ambivalently or apologetically, 30
their right to redirect
their concentrated attention toward conventional history's male subjects.31
This should not necessarily be a cause for regret. The analysis of the
gender of men is important, and narrower-gauge studies properly done
will sometimes be the best approach. From a feminist perspective, what is
ultimately at stake in the study of masculinity `is, or should be, the effect
of masculinity construction on women'.32
And, if most existing approaches
to men's history downplay these effects, then that is all the more reason
to create an even stronger rapprochement between women's historians
and students of masculinity. Besides, this undertaking has its special
pleasures. After all, as Judith Allen has recently reminded her readers,
conventional historians had always felt the perfect freedom to turn aside
occasionally from their so-called universal histories to probe the woman
question, and, for a hundred years and more, certain professions have established
and maintained their legitimacy largely by `problematizing and scrutinizing'
women.33
To reverse this gaze and scrutinise the gender of men is,
then, a sign of women's professional power, as well the logical extension
of over thirty years of accumulated work on women's history and gender.
The question becomes: how can we do histories of men and masculinity
without occluding men's power over women? The pages that follow offer
two types of remedies with the help of examples from my own field of
early American history. They begin by observing that certain ways of
conceptualising men's power and women's subordination are better than
others at keeping gendered power in play, and that it therefore pays to be
self-conscious about the implicit orienting assumptions informing our
work. The remainder of the essay turns to questions of method, inventorying
several strategies of problem selection, research design and narrative
presentation that have proven useful in counteracting the tendencies that
have led to the sidelining of men's power over women.
To turn to our orienting presuppositions first. Note that in Robert
Connell's Masculinities, the gender order rests on an implied axis of male
inclusion and female exclusion: men have superior access to valued,
power-conferring resources and institutions, women have less. The gender
order is about the way that masculinity and femininity, in conjunction
with other categories of social difference, differentially position men and
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 9
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women in relation to claims on these resources and institutions. At this
level of abstraction, however, an alternative position is that the gender
order concerns, in particular, men's access to women and how that access
is maintained, challenged and altered. It is about the way masculinity and
femininity, in conjunction with other categories of social difference,
situate persons so that men have access on advantageous terms to women's
sexuality, reproductive capacities, labour and/or their kinfolk's resources
and social networks. In this view, too, the differential distribution of that
access to women also underwrites solidarities and hierarchies among
men. This position has a distinguished lineage traceable to the feminist
scholarship of the 1970s and early 1980s, when socialist-feminists claimed
bluntly, as did Heidi Hartman, that `patriarchy's material base is men's
control of women's labor', and that under capitalism `the division of labor
by gender tends to benefit men' `both in the household and in the labor
market'. Meanwhile, radical feminists, such as Catherine MacKinnon,
Andrea Dworkin and Adrienne Rich, found the key to gender domination
in the modern world in men's control over women's sexuality and
in `compulsory heterosexuality' specifically. Enforced by the state, its legal
institutions, and its tolerance of male violence, compulsory heterosexuality,
they argued, becomes hegemonic because it eroticises power asymmetries
between men and women and thus embeds them deeply within gendered
consciousness.34
Compulsory heterosexuality, in short, guarantees men's
sexual access to women.
In a variant of this position that pays homage to Gayle Rubin's feminist
rereading of structural anthropology's concept of the `traffic in women'
and also creates a unified field for the study of sexuality and masculinity,
Eve Sedgwick argues that men are oriented primarily towards relationships
with other men and to the affective and material rewards attaching
to those relationships (rather than to the rewards directly accruing to
control over women). But she also insists that the entire spectrum of homosocial
bonds, consensual and conflicted, is mediated by the possession
of women: women come `between men'. The social order is, according to
Sedgwick, fundamentally triadic and structured by relations of inequality
between men and women. Heterosexuality in particular, with its concomitant
vigorous policing of the blurry border between homosocial and
specifically homosexual desire, has been, on her account, the main form
of this mediation and central to men's induction into masculinity since the
late seventeenth century at least.35
At the same time, Sedgwick draws our
attention to ruptures and contradictions in the consolidation of heteronormativity
and its support for patriarchal power ­ ruptures and
contradictions that signal men's differential positioning in relationship to
culturally sanctioned forms of masculinity and, simultaneously, to women
and femininity.
10 Gender and History
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These varied lines of thought have in common the view that what
secures the `patriarchal dividend', however conceived, is not in the first
instance the exclusion of women from this or that resource or form of
social power, but the possession of women. Access to women defines
masculine privilege; it is what makes men alike as men and secures, however
incompletely, the male bond. Correlatively, disparities in the terms
of that access are at the core of competing forms of masculinity and the
differential claims to masculine privilege associated with them. To be sure,
the quest for a single social site (e.g. sex or reproductive labour) that anchors
all systems of gender inequality may now seem quixotic to contemporary
readers. The feminist theories of the 1970s and the early 1980s bear in this
regard as in others the mark of their structuralist moment and their deep,
if critical, engagement with Marxism; revisionists, like Eve Sedgwick
herself, prefer a more fully historicised approach. But if this quest now
seems dated, it is still worth revisiting the more general proposition that
the gender order pivots on men's access to women, its differential distribution,
and challenges to it, because this way of thinking has the advantage
of linking, almost by definition, manliness and social relations among
men tightly to their relations with women and to their gendered power.
The early American case illustrates the enormous interpretive mileage
that can result from construing the gender order and masculinity in this
way. Before turning to the British colonies in North America and to the
new United States, though, a caveat is probably needed. To claim flatly
that the gender order always pivots on men's access to women would
be to run the risk of asserting a universalist fallacy at a time when most
historians are more than ever committed to the view that the factors
which sustain inequalities between men and women are historically and
culturally variable and cannot be identified a priori. Still, the American
case has affinities with other social formations in which kinship
affiliations and/or household membership are central to the organisation
of economic and political life. Let us state more circumspectly, then, that
in these allied contexts access to women will also be a central feature of
the gender order and structures of masculinity in particular.
The implicit logic of the existing scholarship on gender and masculinity
in early America does accord remarkably well with an emphasis on access
to women. Women's historians and others have long pointed out that dominant
standards of manliness were embedded in the structures of colonial
household governance and servitude that sorted men and women, European
and non-European, into social relations of mastery and dependence.
Whether we consider regions dominated by household systems of family
labour, by tenancy and servants, or by slave-based agriculture, these
relations of mastery and dependence, including their associated gender
inequalities, were at the heart of British colonial-settler societies. This is
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not to say that these relations were evenly institutionalised or everywhere
hegemonic, but they structured the macro-dynamics of accommodation
and resistance to the expansion and consolidation of colonial rule, and the
micro-dynamics of power in daily life. This was true of both the English
settlers themselves and of contacts between the British and Native
Americans. For, as the British expanded their settlements and their
jurisdiction in North America, they, more than the French or the Spanish,
attempted to impose their system of household governance, its associated
gender roles and its structures of gender inequality on indigenous populations.
As a result, conflict along the gender frontiers where Europeans
and Native Americans interacted was in significant part about resistance,
accommodation or adaptation to this attempted imposition. The vitality
of creole or hybrid cultures in some places and eras was a measure of the
weakness of this strategy of rule in some areas along the British Empire's
moving frontier.
In a provocative overview essay, entitled `Household Governance',
Carole Shammas estimates that in places securely under the jurisdiction
of Anglo-Americans, well over half of the adults in the colonies and in
the early republic were household dependents legally subordinated to the
authority of their masters, fathers and husbands, a considerably higher
percentage than in Great Britain itself.36
Accordingly, socially sanctioned
adult manhood in the British colonies was closely associated with becoming
a head of household, a status that ordinarily combined the authority
of the master, the father and the husband. That status, which was by no
means available to all Anglo-American men, let alone to non-European
men, conferred the legally sanctioned ability to command the labour of
others, to act as overseer of internal household affairs and to represent
household dependents in civic and political matters. Manly independence
entailed control over others as well as freedom from social dependence.
One pillar of this control, of course, was the emergence of a racialised
system of mastery and servitude, a development that was at every point
intertwined with the dynamics of gender. The early history of that system
as illuminated by women's historians powerfully reinforces the point that
the prerogatives of manliness in this context can be usefully conceived of
in terms of access to and control over women. Kathleen Brown's book,
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs, became virtually an
instant classic because she was among the first to wed a detailed analysis
of gender, including structures of masculinity, to the study of the institutionalisation
of slavery and the consolidation of racism in late seventeenth
and early eighteenth-century Virginia. When conjoined in law and ideology
with other ways of organising perceptions of difference, such as the contrasts
between African and European, pagan and Christian, and savage
and civilised, Anglo-American gender conventions helped to systematise
12 Gender and History
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an initially inchoate discourse of race, and created sharpened distinctions
between black and white womanhood and manhood. Codified in law and
social practices, these now firmly racialised gender distinctions laid the
foundation for a new, harsher regime of servitude. They tied planter-class
masculinity, in particular, tightly to whiteness, to heightened coercive
powers over black women and men, and to the patriarchal protection of
white women, who were increasingly figured ideologically as domestic,
non-labouring and genteel. At the same time, the prerogatives of mastery,
including authority over women, were systematically denied to black
men.37
Jennifer Morgan's work on the migration of populations and the transfer
of laws, customs and social practices from Barbados to South Carolina
updates these themes. In a slave regime that would quickly come to depend
for its perpetuation on natural reproduction as well as the cross-Atlantic
trade in commoditised bodies, Morgan examines how property law and
inheritance practices defined and distributed possession of female slaves.
Both the legal technicalities governing inheritance and the social commentary
of colonial observers came quickly to delineate the dual character
of their `laboring' bodies, describing female slaves in terms of their capacity
to reproduce and their capacity to work. Control over those bodies and their
varied capacities was the material foundation of planter-class pre-eminence,
and was central to planters' manly identities as patriarchal masters and
leading members of a new planter society. At the same time, attempts to
circumscribe the master's access to the labouring bodies of female slaves
were one important form of resistance for both enslaved men and women.38
Becoming an independent householder depended, in the usual case,
on the conjoint operations of marriage and property ownership. Because
this was so, marriage was a second central pillar of the British colonies'
household-based system of governance. It was also, obviously, a pivotal
institution for defining men's access to women and a central guarantor of
sex inequality. The law of marriage created a legal subject ­ the husband
­ who had access to, and power over, another: the wife. This is not to
minimise the brilliant work that has shown us the de facto limits on the
power of husbands, the complexities and limits on the reach of law, or the
robustness in some places of women's ability to wield their skills and
responsibilities into significant social and cultural influence and, even,
a limited autonomy. Still, marriage institutionalised one main form of
men's gendered power over women through its manifold restrictions, in
favour of the husband, on the wife's civil and political capacities, her
property rights, her rights in her own children and even her right to
unfettered physical mobility. As Hendrik Hartog, who has recently
published a comprehensive book on the law of marriage in America, puts
it, `the twin achievements of the law of coverture were that it transformed
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 13
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women into wives and that it constructed and legitimated a structure of
power within marriage'.39
One detects a recent quickening of interest in marriage among early
Americanists studying manhood, in part because they realise that distinctions
among men and definitions of manliness were closely associated
with it. Recent work by Thomas Foster, Mark Kann and Richard Godbeer,
among others, trace in detail how men's trajectory from youth to marriage
(or its short-circuiting) sorted youth and men into those who were and
were not entitled to enter into full privileges of adult manhood. Provincial
authorities who enacted and implemented marriage laws prohibited some
men from marrying altogether, and discouraged or banned interracial
unions, often in the face of direct challenge from poor whites, Indians and
blacks who fashioned informal marriages among and for themselves. The
effect overall was to restrict the access of non-white men to legal marriage
and its privileges, and to create an unofficial blurry zone of toleration that
nonetheless consolidated along racial lines distinctions between licit and
illicit unions. Nor did all Anglo-American men have access to women,
white or non-white, through marriage. Those who lacked the property,
skills, personal appeal or inclination to attract women and constitute
households were politically and culturally suspect, unless they could
persuade kinswomen, as some elite men did, to act as substitute wives and
become mistresses of their households. At its best, this literature links the
sexual and affective dimensions of marriage to manliness without forfeiting
its focus on gendered power. Foster's work, for example, shows that
the languages of virility and fatherhood, and of marital sexual pleasure
and love, fused internal states of desire and masculinised dispositions of
the sexual body to the authority of husbands over wives and to the social
prerogatives of independent mastery. To the extent that dominant standards
of manliness in the eighteenth century came to incorporate an erotics
of marriage, marginal and repudiated sexualities also came into sharper
cultural focus and became associated especially closely with single men,
non-householders and racial outsiders.40
Marriage and the access to women that it underwrote also structured
relations among men, as we have already implied. This is not just because
some men could not become husbands and thus were excluded from the
powers over women that came with it. It is also because marriage defined
both a couple and a social triad: the husband, the wife and other men.
Criminal prosecutions for adultery and civil suits brought by husbands
against other men for seducing their wives, for example, defined husbands'
rights in wives in terms of sexual `possession' or `sexual monopoly' as over
and against other men. These legal actions were designed `to remedy the
wrongs that men did to each other, part of a constellation of rights by
which a husband defined his rights and his identity as a husband in relation
14 Gender and History
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to a world of men'.41
This theme also resounds throughout the literature
on manliness and politics, but is perhaps most strongly expressed by Mark
Kann, who argues at length that marriage was a key institution for sorting
men into those who were worthy of political inclusion and those who were
not, and therefore the foundation for political fraternity in the revolutionary
era and the early republic. Despite the distinctions between independent
men created by wealth, family connections and style of life, becoming
a married head of household conferred the capacity to act politically in
one's own right, and conjointly with others. Meanwhile, revolutionary era
political polemics and moral jeremiads associated the bachelor and single
youths with social and political disorder. Thus, marriage, or access to
women, demarcated respectable members of the `political fraternity' from
the unruly men cast outside it.42
Kann's formulation is heir to a strand of feminist political theory closely
associated with Carole Patemen, which holds that revolutionary-era
regimes in America and Europe and their contemporary successors were
fundamentally, not accidentally, masculinist: only men were active citizensubjects,
and their political self-activity was linked by definition to the
possession of domestic women.43
Kann's position is also in accord with the
work of colonial women's historians who argue that as an historical
matter, politics had become more masculinised by the revolutionary era
than it had been in the past. They cite several factors. As imperial and
provincial law and administration became more elaborate and formal, the
political salience of family-based political coalitions waned and, with it, so
did the informal political influence wielded by women who were members
of leading families. Furthermore, by the late eighteenth century, the loopholes
that had earlier allowed some property-owning women, especially
unmarried women, to acquire some of the privileges of freemen were
shutting down.44
Not everyone would wish to hold that the political foundations of the
early republic were inherently masculinist, as Kann's stance would have it.
But ideological visions of the active body politic and the national political
subject had become, on almost everyone's account, thoroughly masculinised.
Republicanism's citizen subject was concretely embodied, and clearly
male. He was the yeoman, whose political virtue and capacity to defend
liberty was insured by his position as an arms-bearing, property-owning
householder. (The era's iconography even typically portrayed him at his
door, contemplating his small domain while surrounded by his grateful,
hardworking wife and loyal sons.) Competing late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Lockean natural rights and contract language did
individuate the bearer of citizenship rights and make him more abstract.
But, arguably, the individual subject who consented to form a polity was
marked by a now naturalised masculinity (and race); women were now
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 15
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categorically effaced as political subjects in virtue of their natures as
gendered beings. Moreover, the Lockean citizen still possessed a wife,
and with her, a household, although it was one now imagined not so much
as a government in miniature and a constitutive political unit, but as a
feminised, non-labouring `home' that centred on the putatively natural
conjugal family, and on fostering the moral sensibilities and affections
associated with the feminine and the familial.45
In broad strokes then,
gender historians have construed early America as a gendered polity in
which the construction of the male citizen was founded on his relations
to women.
This brief discussion of recent approaches to manliness and marriage
and to the co-articulation of gender and race in early America was meant
to illustrate a basic point: that some initial orienting assumptions about
gender are better than others if we wish to increase our chances of doing
histories of men and masculinity that avoid the field's characteristic
occlusions. In the case of early America, conceptualising the gender order
in terms of men's access to women works to unify much of what we know
about the dynamics of masculinity and competition among men. At the
same time, it encourages us to engage systematically rather than simply
assert what is after all the first premise of men's history: that the engendering
of men involves power over women, whatever else it might also
concern. Because access to women was unevenly distributed, exploring
the terms of that access also underscores the second premise of men's
history, which is that the gender order is also about differentiation among
men. And the utility of this orienting insight ought to extend well beyond
early America to other social settings in which kinship and household
organisation are chiefly responsible for allocating labour and economic
resources or regulating participation in politics. We can continue to ponder
and debate whether or not access to women, even broadly construed, is so
salient a feature of masculinity and the gender order elsewhere, especially
in contemporary market-dominated political economies and disciplinary
states, though it is a fair guess that attention to it will be very productive
in a great many contexts.
Recognising that our theoretical bets or presuppositions do not dictate
in a one-to-one fashion our concrete methods of historical research and
interpretation, the remainder of this essay examines several studies that
successfully yoke histories of men and masculinity in early America to the
analysis of gendered power. Proceeding illustratively, it creates a (partial)
inventory of strategies of problem definition and historical interpretation
that have worked in practice. Many will be familiar to readers, at least in
other contexts, but it is instructive to examine how they are put to use by
historians of masculinity and gender. And a reminder never hurts. At the
same time, these studies allow us to elaborate further some implications
16 Gender and History
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of the insight that focusing on access to women will produce a more fullbodied
understanding of men and masculinity.
First, even when one's scholarly gaze is trained primarily on men,
comparisons are a good strategy for avoiding the occlusion of women.
That comparisons of men and women typically yield more nuanced understandings
of masculinity and femininity than can the study of men or
women alone by helping to pinpoint exactly what is gendered about the
characters and conduct of men is a basic point, but one to which we too
often pay only lip service. Jane Kamensky, for example, takes a comparative
approach to the analysis of speech practices among English settlers in
seventeenth-century New England. Arguing that the `prerogative of public
speaking' was central to the performance of masculinity, and marked the
line between persons with robust political and civil capacities and those
who lacked them, Kamensky examines childhood and the very different
trajectories of boys and girls out of it.46
She finds that undifferentiated
speech norms and pedagogical practices directed both boys and girls to be
modest, circumspect and even silent. But upon becoming adults, men
were enjoined, with modulations suiting their different social statuses, to
assume the prerogatives of public speech and to speak clearly, even boldly,
in a wide array of civic spaces and places. Meanwhile, the `decorous'
speech practices urged upon adult women more closely resembled speech
etiquette for children than they did those for adult men, and they tightly
circumscribed the places considered appropriate even for `demure' female
speech, limiting them largely to `godly household' settings. `Verbal modesty',
Kamensky observes, `amounted to a life's work' for girls and women.47
Of
course, not all women proved interested in the work mapped out for
them. Occasionally, some would become learned speakers, engaging in
theological disputation ­ and in mixed company, too: most famously
Anne Hutchinson, but others as well. Many more were uninterested in
the self-imposed disciplines of committed Puritans, and these mostly
lower-class women used earthier, vernacular vocabularies in taverns and
in the open air. But Kamensky's comparative exercise at least tells us why
New England magistrates reacted with rage at sharp-tongued women who
refused to comply with the Puritan etiquette that defined the feminine
speaker. Whether gentlewomen or servants, their unwomanly talk challenged
a specific and important male prerogative, unsettling one of the primary
axes of distinction between household masters with civil personalities and
their female dependants.
Second, we can attend to men's uses of the symbolic woman as they
attempt to stabilise similarities and differences among men and police
their own conformity to prevailing norms of masculinity ­ one way in
which women mediate relations among men. Take for example, men's concern
for their reputation and the damage words could do to reputations,
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 17
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concern that was very pronounced in the late colonial world. My own
work suggests that such concerns were acute among long-distance
merchants, in part because their peers' opinions about their competence
and practical virtue circulated not just in local conversation and the comparatively
well-defined spaces that gave rise to it, but in the correspondence
of the indefinitely large network of traders that spanned the
far-flung reaches of the British Empire. At especially fraught moments,
merchants resorted to highly charged, often overtly misogynist rhetoric
and imagery in their own writing. They made use of the long-standing
cultural association of malicious and idle talk with women by associating
their male detractors with, for example, the unregulated intercourse,
conversational and sexual, of the bawd and the bawdy house. Or they
would externalise the difficulties of distinguishing the manly, confidential
exchange of sober judgements about others from the covert pleasures of
retailing rumours by cooking up cautionary tales about merchants ruined
not by the irresponsible talk of other men, but by the salacious gossip of
ladies `at a tea table' and `spread from one tittle-tattle society to another'.
Thus, they made use of the symbolic woman not only to castigate their
competitors as unmanly or effeminate, but also to repudiate contradictions
in their own understanding of manliness and to externalise doubts about
their capacity to embody dominant standards of manliness.48
We have also long recognised that male political polemicists on both
sides of the eighteenth-century Atlantic made frequent use of female
monsters. Their sexual voraciousness and uxorious habits stood in for the
political corruption of the Court or the temptations of commerce, and
marked the moral distance between their male consorts and the virtuous
men who condemned them. But these writers also relied on figures of
virtuous women to stabilise such distinctions among men. As Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg has pointed out, elite male writers used the domestic
woman to champion `bourgeois' and republican morality against both
aristocratic luxury and the putative brutishness of the lower orders.49
One
might dub these uses of the symbolic woman the `Rousseau effect': the
domestic, but coyly seductive Sophie, who is the guarantor of Emile's
guileless transparency and manly candour ­ or her negative counterparts,
the idle gossiping women at tea table and the sexually corrupt aristocratic
woman ­ suddenly appear, externalising and feminising what was initially
a problem among men. Similarly, the nationalist literature of the new
republic used a series of symbolic women to mark off a new American
male political subject. It highlighted the virtue and virility of the new citizen
and distinguished him from Europeans in part by depicting America as a
sexually welcoming, yet innocent, female Indian who sought protection
from old-world corruption. Simultaneously, the figure of the pure and
domestic white woman signalled the civility that fitted him and his band
18 Gender and History
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of brothers to succeed the first Americans as the continent's rightful
guardians, albeit with an occasional sigh of regret for the Indians whom
they displaced.50
We might say along with Eve Sedgwick, then, that the
symbolic woman comes `between men' to authorise necessary distinctions
and solidarities among them.
Third, even when competitive relationships among men and the structures
of masculine identifications at play in such relations are our primary
concern, we should be alert to the fact that these conflicts frequently
involve alliances with women. Attention to such alliances is another way
of vivifying for historical studies the principle that women mediate
relations among men. Janet Lindman's recent work on evangelical ideals
of masculinity among Baptists in late eighteenth-century Virginia is a case
in point. She shows that white evangelical men were able successfully to
challenge elite standards of manliness. They could do so in part because
they had the support of many white women, who were on the whole more
strongly drawn to the message of spiritual rebirth than were men. In
the face of ridicule and opposition, these male evangelicals associated
manliness with peaceable resignation and words rather than fists and
guns, and, in a reversal of prevailing gender conventions, with suffering
and forgiveness rather than the pugnacious defence of impugned honour.
Their alliance also fortified evangelical men sufficiently to embrace the
fundamental changes in masculine `bodily comportment' demanded by
their religion's austere repudiation of worldly pastimes, whether rowdy
(drinking and gaming) or genteel (dancing and exhibits of sartorial elegance).
This austerity required, overall, that the white male convert disavow the
`public displays of prowess' that constituted conventional masculinity.51
At the same time, the movement included African-American converts
of both sexes. The melding of English and African-American styles of
worship in mixed-sex congregations accentuated evangelical religion's
premium on the emotional and bodily evidence of conversion. The `weeping
sinner' who experienced the paroxysms of his `trembling, moaning,
groaning' body in close physical communion with white women and
African-Americans of both sexes was the antithesis of elite white masculinity's
emphasis on bodily self-mastery and emotional moderation.52
Moreover, in a pattern typical of the spread of revivalist movements
elsewhere, women who were attracted early to the message of evangelical
preachers in turn recruited their own men folk. As a result, these new standards
and bodily practices ­ shall we call them hybrid or creolised standards
of masculinity? ­ appealed successfully not only to large numbers of white
`men of middling rank', but also to many of `genteel status'.53
In these cases
and others, alliances between women and men, black and white, reverberated
to change the balance of cultural authority among white men, many of
whom literally came to embody alternative codes of masculinity.
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 19
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Once one foregrounds alliances with women, it is difficult to avoid
noticing how changing practices of masculinity play out in relation to
men's power over women, or how dominant and alternative definitions of
masculinity incorporate gendered power. Lindman addresses these
matters explicitly. The evangelical movement created for a brief time an
opening for a mixed-race fellowship, and more equality for men and
women within evangelical churches. Lindman concludes, however, that
white evangelical men moved quickly to shut down these challenges to
patriarchal authority. They monopolised their church's leadership
positions, reserved for themselves the power to discipline its members,
and limited the church franchise. As they did so, the `evangelical church',
Lindman writes, `became a vehicle to strengthen male dominance and
white supremacy'.54
This newly secured institutional domain ensured that
one of the rewards of reformed masculinity would be participation in `new
bonds of collective fellowship with like-minded men' comparatively
undisturbed by continued challenges to white men's prerogatives.55
The
evangelical movement in late eighteenth-century Virginia embraced reformed
masculinity all right, but in new organisational settings it reinstated
men's religious authority over women.56
This outcome bears directly on my fourth point. Despite the tendency
of the literature on the masculine subject to call every crack and fissure
in the process of inducting men into their masculine identities a crisis,
squabbles among men over their share of the patriarchal dividend, no
matter how rhetorically high-pitched or even violent, do not in themselves
signal a gender crisis, although they may well precipitate one. We should
stipulate that a gender crisis involves challenges to the terms of men's
dominance over women, and we should be interested in the outcome. To
turn once again to Kathleen Brown's work, her reinterpretation of
Bacon's rebellion in late seventeenth-century Virginia links it to gender
in ways that had gone largely unexplored in earlier histories. First, she
situates it within the history of masculinity by construing it not only as a
conflict among provincial leaders, and between leaders and lesser sorts,
over Indian policy and the terms of governance, but also as a struggle
involving `two distinct cultures of masculinity':57
the one based on claims
to high birth and displays of aristocratic gentility; the other, a virulently
racist and hyper-masculine culture of the gun, the cockfight and the tavern.
Bacon's Army was eventually defeated, but its racialised and martial
`lexicon of colonial masculinity' triumphed as the dominant language of
manhood in the rebellion's aftermath.58
Though it retained the older
vocabulary of manly honour, it blurred the once finely graded distinctions
in the degrees of honour men could possess and replaced them with
solidarities based on whiteness. Thus, Bacon's rebellion involved, to be
20 Gender and History
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sure, a shift in the ascendant culture of masculinity and a conjoint consolidation
of racial distinctions among men.
But Brown also locates the rebellion and its outcome within the
context of long-term instabilities in gender relations and their resolu-
tion.59
Household governance in general was weakly institutionalised in
the recently founded colonial outpost of Virginia prior to the rebellion
in 1676. Demographic, social and political conditions had combined to
produce multiple challenges to men's control over free women and
female servants, in particular; neither individual householders nor local
officials could, for example, eradicate preaching by Quaker women or
limit the influence of the `Brabling Women' whom they repeatedly hauled
before the local magistrates and accused of fomenting disorder in failed
attempts to curb their power as moral arbiters of community life.60
Despite
women's active participation in the rebellion, however, the post-rebellion
political settlement marginalised their informal political influence and
limited their cultural authority, to a greater extent than before, to the precincts
of the household and its immediate neighbourhood. That settlement
extended political privileges and property ownership to a larger number
of white men, who could now successfully claim to embody the new
standards of hegemonic masculinity, but specifically denied them to free
blacks, and hardened the distinctions between racialised slavery and other
forms of servitude. With class conflict thus reduced, legislators, judges
and the newly-enlarged white male electorate could turn to the task of
reinforcing their own patriarchal authority not only as masters, but also as
husbands and fathers. Enhanced authority over wives, daughters and
female servants, white and black, was one of the `privileges' enjoyed by
the enlarged `fraternity of men' established by the new regime and its
`culture of white manhood'.61
The episode, properly interpreted, involved
competition among men and competing definitions of masculinity, but it
simultaneously sprang out of and addressed volatility in men's gendered
authority over women. It was, then, indicative of a crisis in men's access
to women and its resolution.
The cultural frontiers where Native Americans interacted with Europeans
supply especially compelling episodes of gender crisis, and I would
like to consider Claudio Saunt's interpretation of one such episode, the
Redstick War of 1813.62
That war is usually understood as a civil war
among the Creek Indians of Alabama and Western Georgia that pitted
`religious nativists' against those willing to accommodate Europeans. But
Saunt also interprets it as the culmination of a long-term gender crisis,
affecting both relations between men, and between men and women.63
Decades of intermittent warfare in the context of European rivalries in
the region had accentuated the power of warriors and their culture of
`violent masculinity' at the expense of alternative bases of male prestige
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 21
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and influence within Creek society. The dominance of a warrior culture
also created a more polarised vocabulary of masculinity and femininity
than had existed in the past. During the same period, trade with Europeans
for a variety of reasons increased Creek women's economic dependence
on men.64
In this context, when the British eliminated their Spanish and
French rivals in 1763 and then sought, as did their US successors, to pacify
the area by inducing Creeks to adopt the settled life of small planters,
they found willing allies among many Creek women. Such women
explicitly sought to circumscribe the influence of the now demoralised
and increasingly reckless warriors, and to find alternative sources of
income in market-oriented agriculture and spinning and weaving. At the
same time, some Creek men sought to strengthen their power and prestige
by interposing themselves as the official spokespersons for their people
with US reformers and Indian agents and by embracing new codes of
masculinity that made `cattle, slaves, and specie' the measure of successful
manhood.65
Several decades of tension followed, marked by Creek women's
struggles with white and Indian men over the terms on which they would
work, and between the Creek men who embraced the new culture of
masculinity, including its patriarchal privileges, and the increasingly
desperate warriors who repudiated it or were shut out of it. The Redstick
War was the result. It was, in short, the violent culmination of a gender
crisis on the south-east's colonial frontier.66
As several of the foregoing examples indicate, threats to masculine
authority often provoked misogynist backlash. And here we are speaking
not just of threats produced in men's agonistic encounters with one
another ­ encounters in which women might be mediators or scapegoats
­ but of women who erode, subvert, or directly challenge men's individual
or collective authority over them. My fifth point is that the historical
appearance of backlash, however dismaying, is an opportunity to bring
studies of masculinity and (threats to) men's access to women into
alignment. The virulently misogynist writings of three southern planters
analysed by Kenneth Lockridge are examples of backlash by individual,
but representative, men. All were, he suggests, ambitious but insecure
colonials stymied by their position at the cultural and political margins
of Empire and, especially, by their disadvantage in a London-centred
patronage game that typically left colonial elites competing for scraps.
More immediately, women who controlled their access to much-needed
financial resources thwarted all three: the young Thomas Jefferson's
mother controlled his inheritance during the years when he might
be expected to engage in elite courtship rituals; wealthy, highly placed
women rejected outright Robert Bolling's and William Byrd's proposals
of marriage. Because marriage was such an important foundation of
social connections and wealth, especially for upwardly mobile men with
22 Gender and History
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elite aspirations or those who had financial repair work to do, these failed
courtships posed a double challenge to Byrd's and Bolling's felt sense of
manliness; they threatened the material basis of their masculine privilege
and their amour propre as lovers.
Their response was an outpouring of misogynist writing. The fevered,
racist and violence-tinged sexual passages that laced William Byrd's
commonplace book may stand for the others. These included shop-worn
disquisitions on the hypersexuality of African women, run-on narratives
that jumbled up multiple anecdotes about menstruation rituals in Brazil,
Roman tales about women who buried their lovers alive, ribald reports of
techniques used by the ancients to maintain male erections, and titillating,
detailed descriptions of mismatched genitalia. According to Lockridge,
the central motif of these `coruscatingly hostile' passages was the threat
that the corrupt bodies and uncontrolled appetites of `lascivious women'
posed to the bodily integrity of men.67
From one vantage point, these
female grotesques are simply additional illustrations of the way in which
symbolic women mediate troubled relations among men: they condensed
the threat to colonial men's authority that emanated from the corrupt
metropolitan centre.68
But these outpourings were also, as Lockridge only
intermittently recognises, the distorted, hyperbolic expressions of male
anxiety and anger about their failed relations with women at the fraught
place where money and sex met. To the extent that eighteenth-century
marriage ideals welded the blunt consideration of wealth and status to the
promise of erotised intimacy between beloved `first friends', courtship was
a liminal moment. Though women's economic and social dependence
rigged the game of courtship in favour of men, women could, in principle,
refuse their suitors ­ precisely because, in the context of wives' continued
subordination to their husband's authority, the promise of mutual
pleasures required her consent and her judgement about the terms of the
bargain. A refusal was a critique of her suitor's social assets and personal
desirability, and a withholding of resources and affections. Not all, or
even most, men reacted so strongly to such rebukes as did the men
examined by Lockridge. But their enraged, if oblique response to their
failures with women indicate characteristic points of instability in the
gender order, places where individual women could directly challenge the
terms of men's access to them.69
Of course, backlash is a collective phenomenon, too. As Carol Karlsen
was among the first to tell us, the Salem witchcraft episode of 1692 may
be early America's paradigmatic case of collective backlash against
women.70
It occurred in the midst of war between the French, the Indians,
and the English on New England's north-eastern frontier and in the
aftermath of the brief, but draconian Andros regime and the disruptions
of the Glorious Revolution. Facing major defeats in the ongoing war, and
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 23
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with the stability of the Commonwealth and their household authority
hanging in the balance under a newly issued royal charter and a newly
appointed governor, Puritan magistrates and ministers preferred to
believe that the colony's recent reversals of fortune were providential
afflictions visited on a backsliding people rather than the result of their
own rather more temporal political and military failings. As a consequence,
they turned what should have been a local incident into a colony-wide
witch hunt.
With the help of a religious culture not yet shorn of magic or stripped
of theological commitments to the workings of the devil in the world, the
largely young female accusers ­ some of whom had recently fled from the
decimated settlements along the frontier ­ and the male authorities who
endorsed their accusations at first targeted unusually powerful or unruly
women: propertied widows, but also contentious, haughty neighbours,
wandering female beggars and drunks under no one's particular dominion.
They then turned on anyone (male or female) who might seem to be
under the influence of such women, including people associated with
the ranting Quaker women who populated Salem town, and others linked
to wartime defeats on the frontier, who, they said, were consorting with
Indians in a pact with the devil. All the while, Puritan magistrates,
ministers and doctors were transforming through constant probing the
physical symptoms and visions of the young female accusers into the
legally intelligible signs of witchcraft, reshaping their familial discontents
and inchoate fears and aspirations into testimony against the accused and
extracting through repeated interrogations confessions from the witches.
Thus, in the face of challenges to their position as Puritan patriarchs, the
authorities obtained the signs, testimony and confessions needed to reassert
state power in its most spectacular form.
But having made gruesome object lessons of independent and
obstreperous women and those connected with them, the magistrates and
puritan ministers began to have scruples about the accusers and their
testimony ­ scruples that were reinforced as the mostly female accusers
began to implicate highly placed people. They now did an about face, and
cast the girls and young women not as defenders of a commonwealth
besieged by earthly and spiritual enemies, but as the passive and unwitting
handmaidens of a devil who spoke through them. This reinterpretation,
as Mary Beth Norton points out, conveniently reasserted a gendered
division of labour suited to more ordinary times.71
Backlash against women, violent or otherwise, is a recurrent feature
of manliness under threat. When women in eighteenth-century BritishAmerica
and the early United States used the opportunities and the
languages made available by the colonial order of things and talked out,
talked back, talked dirty, said `no', accused men in court or harangued
24 Gender and History
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them in public, withheld their property and their favours, their bodies
and their labour, took up their looms or smashed them, drank behind
barns or ranted in the streets, abandoned old churches and started new
ones, worshiped in defiance of their masters and in their own style,
preached and prophesised or otherwise made inroads on the patriarchal
dividend, backlash was usually forthcoming and usually successful, at least
temporarily. This would not necessarily be the case in other places and
times. Either way, attending to backlash highlights instabilities in the
dynamics of gendered power.
Sixth, and finally, people whose gender practices and identifications
disrupted the conventional categories of man and woman, male and
female, provide an excellent opportunity to examine the mutual construction
of masculinity and femininity, and the policing of the troubled
borders between them.72
The well-known case of Thomas/Thomasina
Hall of seventeenth-century Virginia, who spent many years shuttling
successfully back and forth across the cultural gender divide, living at
various times as a soldier and manservant, but also as a maidservant and
skilled seamstress and needle-worker, may be paradigmatic.73
But crossdressing
women also created gender trouble. Women who passed as men
in the British navy and army, in the Continental army and even among
bands of pirates were not rarities in early modern Great Britain and the
colonies. As Marcus Rediker notes, they `drew upon and perpetuated
a deeply rooted underground tradition of female cross-dressing, panEuropean
in its dimensions, but especially strong in early modern England'.74
In the picaresque narratives of adventure left by a few of them, these often
impoverished women combined blunt assertions of economic motives the
need for a berth, wages and even pensions ­ with dreams of `greater
freedom, prestige, and power',75
and expressed pride in their `manly' physical
courage and their seagoing and martial skills. In short, their thoroughgoing
enactment of masculinity allowed them to enter into spaces, places
and occupations otherwise inaccessible to women and acquire a portion
of masculine privilege.76
When such women were discovered, they became the objects of
cultural fascination, even admiration. The commentaries written about
them show how cultural authorities attempted to reconcile their displays
of `female masculinity'77
with dominant languages of gender. According to
Dianne Dugaw, commentators downplayed their protagonists' typically
masculine virtues and accomplishments, and their expressions of pride in
them. What they could not ignore ­ especially the masculine dress and
bodily dispositions that were in fact the lynchpins of their narratives ­ they
treated as mere subterfuge in the service of a disguised femininity. And, in
place of prosaic economic motives, they substituted affirmations of their
heroines' exceptional circumstances and inserted archetypically feminine
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 25
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motives, such as escape from male predators and defence of sexual chastity.78
Whether these commentaries ever fully effaced the subversiveness of the
`female sailors bold' for their readers is another question. But however
contemporary readers might have construed them, the sailors' creative
appropriations of masculinity highlight the social construction of gender
categories perhaps more clearly than coupling the study of masculinity
with men alone could do.79
Indeed, insofar as their subjectivities are lost
to us, it is an open question whether to call them female sailors or female
transvestites at all. They remind us that to speak with assurance of male
and female historical subjects as if they had a gendered existence apart
from the practices that sustained and altered their gendered subjectivities
and their classification by others is to beg the most interesting questions
about the conjoined construction of masculinity and femininity, and the
power dynamics that pervade it.
Unease about the study of masculinity among women's historians
and others with feminist commitments, including many men's historians
themselves, appeared more or less simultaneously with the emergence of
the new men's history. The proliferation of specialised studies of men and
masculinity has done nothing to diminish this disquiet. Indeed, it may
be escalating, as growing numbers of women's historians try their hands
at such studies, and as newer cohorts of specialists appraise the existing
scholarship. The opening pages of this essay distil and systematise the
critical insights that prior articulations of this unease have generated,
arguing that some of the field's otherwise most fruitful guiding premises
and methodological commitments account in good part for its peculiar
neglect of gendered power. It offers this critique in the hopes that its
diagnosis of the reasons for the occlusions characteristic of men's history
will resonate broadly among historians of women and gender, and beyond
the author's professional location as an historian of the British colonies in
America and the early United States.
Out of a conviction that the scrutiny of the gender of men is an
important feminist intellectual concern, and, more pragmatically, on the
assumption that the new men's history will flourish for some time to
come, the second half of the essay explores how studies of masculinity and
manhood might more reliably or consistently foreground gendered power.
It argues that conceptualising the gender order in terms of men's access
to women is an excellent starting point in a wide variety of historical settings
(and for a wide variety of problems). It also generates, still with the
help of illustrative studies of early America, a partial inventory of techniques
suited to highlighting the mutual construction of masculinity and
femininity, gendered power, and challenges to it. As a partial list, it is an
open-ended offering to all historians interested in the study of masculinity
and gendered power, who will surely see ways of expanding it. The stakes
26 Gender and History
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involved in our conceptual commitments and methodological choices are
high. The new men's history can continue to court the danger of returning
us to the status quo ante, or it can incorporate, as fundamental to its understanding
of the construction of the male subject, sustained attention to the
modalities of power that permeate the construction of masculinity and
femininity and structure relations of inequality between men and women.
Notes
*This essay originated in an oral presentation for a panel entitled, `Gendering Colonial America,
Making Women's History Colonial,' Twelfth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women,
Storrs, Connecticut, 6­9 June 2002. My co-panelists were Nancy Cott (acting as moderator),
Kathleen Brown, Jane Kamensky, Carol Karlsen and Jennifer Morgan. When I first volunteered
to make remarks about the new men's history, I had not focused on the fact that everyone on the
panel had done some work on the history of manhood and masculinity. I profited greatly from
thinking about my co-panelists' scholarship as I wrote this piece. I also thank Mary Ryan, Judith
Walkowitz, my graduate students, and the readers for Gender & History who read earlier drafts
of the piece. The members of the seminar sponsored by the Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Program at Johns Hopkins also provided lively and helpful commentary.
1. Joan Scott, `Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis', American Historical Review
91 (1986), pp. 1053­75.
2. Joy Parr, `Gender History and Historical Practice', The Canadian Historical Review 76
(1995), pp. 367 (quote).
3. In her recent essay review, Judith Allen remarks, `As ... historically the dominant
practitioners of history, men as a group have not proved especially curious about men as
a sex. In relations of dominance and subordination, as the truism goes, the dominant
group remains unmarked, transparent, unscrutinized'. Allen, `Men Interminably in Crisis?:
Historians on Masculinity, Sexual Boundaries, and Manhood', Radical History Review 82
(2002), p. 192. Also see Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum
City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 4­6.
4. Toby L. Ditz, `What's Love Got to Do with It?: The History of Men, The History of Gender
in the 1990s', 38 Reviews in American History (2000), pp. 167­68. Michael Kimmel observes
that the `invisibility of masculinity' is a `privilege' associated with power. Michael S. Kimmel,
The Gendered Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 5­6. But see Bruce
Traister, who is sceptical about the posture that engaging in the study of `men as men'
qualifies one as a `critical pioneer'. Bruce Traister, `Academic Viagra: the Rise of American
Masculinity Studies', American Quarterly 52 (2000), pp. 281, 282.
5. The American Men's Studies Association became an independent organisation in 1991,
and its official journal, The Journal of Men's Studies, began in appearing in 1992. Prior to
that, the AMSA had been affiliated under another name with the National Organization
for Men against Sexism (founded in 1984) and had been sponsoring conferences and a
newsletter since the early 1980s. For a useful short summary of the origins of men's studies,
especially in the social sciences, see Judith Kegan Gardiner, `Introduction', in J. Gardiner
(ed.), Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), pp. 1­6.
6. Mark C. Carnes, `Foreword', in Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone (eds), A Shared
Experience: Men, Women, and the History of Gender (New York: New York University Press,
1998), p. xi. Nancy Cott suggested in 1990 that there was `every opportunity for salutary
intersection between `men's' and women's history' and that men's history could illuminate
the workings of what we then called `the sex/gender system'. Nancy F. Cott, `On Men's
History and Women's History', in Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (eds), Meanings for
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 27
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Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1990), p. 206.
7. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 77, 82­83.
8. Also see, for example, Kimmel, The Gendered Society, p. 2.
9. The terms are Connell's, but they and their near-equivalents are in widespread use. Until
recently, men's historians were also quite taken with typologies as a way of registering
the existence and interaction of multiple masculinities. See, for example, Mark Kann's
classificatory scheme, which includes `the traditional patriarch', `aristocratic manhood', `the
genteel patriarch', `republican manhood', and, yes, `the self-made man'. He has, in turn,
derived his terminology from Michael Kimmel. Mark E. Kann, A Republic of Men: the
American Founders: Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York
University Press, 1998), pp. 12­15. Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural
History (New York: Free Press, 1996).
10. Lynn Segal, `Changing Men: Masculinities in Context', Theory and Society 22 (1993), p. 626.
Also see Parr, who seconds Segal's concerns, but also suggests that `it is ... important to leave
open the possibility that some forms of masculinity have not been defined by their difference
from femininities, but by their difference from other masculinities.' Parr, `Gender History',
pp. 370­71. Many critics have reiterated Segal's point. See Konstantin Dierks, `Men's
History, Gender History', Gender & History 4 (2002), p. 150; Mark Justad, `Women's Studies
and Men's Studies: Friends or Foes?', The Journal of Men's Studies 8 (2000), p. 402.
11. Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989), who does argue that the secret rituals and spaces of male fraternities are a
reaction to the cultural and social authority claimed by middle-class white women of the
era. See also the collected essays in Carnes and Griffen (eds), Meanings for Manhood, and
W. Jeffry Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997). The high-water mark of gay history in the subculture
studies mode is George Chauncey's dazzling Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890­1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
12. Parr, `Gender History', p. 369.
13. Women's historians were debating this point more or less from the outset. See Ellen
Dubois, Mari Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lerner and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, `Politics
and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium', Feminist Studies 6 (1980), pp. 26­64.
14. On false symmetry see Cott, `Men's History and Women's History', pp. 205­6; Traister,
`Academic Viagra', p. 299. False symmetry was one aspect of the feminist debates in the
mid-1990s about the intellectual and administrative politics of the use of the terms `gender'
and `gender studies'. Rosi Braidotti, who prefers the language of sexual difference, states
that the covering concept of gender `presumes that men and women are constituted in
symmetrical ways' and lambasts gender studies for its `politically disastrous institutional
consequences', among them the `take-over of the feminist agenda by studies on masculinity'.
Rosi Braidotti, with Judith Butler, `Feminism by Any Other Name', Differences: A Journal
of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (1994) as usefully summarised in Calvin Thomas, `Reenfleshing
the Bright Boys: or, How Male Bodies Matter to Feminist Theory', in Judith Kegan Gardner
(ed.), Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), pp. 61, 65 (quote).
15. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880­1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 7. Bederman's
formulation is indebted to Joan Wallach Scott, `The Evidence of Experience', Critical
Inquiry 17 (1991), pp. 773­97, and Teresa de Lauretis, `The Semiotics of Experience', in
De Lauretis (ed.), Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), pp. 158­86.
16. Judith Butler's work, most notably Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990), but also Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
`Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993), has been especially influential in American men's
studies.
28 Gender and History
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17. Connell had previously published a book on women and gender important in his own
field of sociology, entitled Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) and has just released Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2002). Similarly, compare Michael Kimmel's American Manhood to his overview, The
Gendered Society. See also, E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in
Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
18. See Mrinalini Sinha, `Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from Indian
History', Gender & History 11 (1999), p. 447.
19. Sinha, `Giving Masculinity a History', p. 454.
20. Antoinette Burton, `A `Pilgrim Reformer' at the Heart of the Empire: Behramji Malabari
in Late-Victorian London', Gender & History 8 (1996), pp. 175­96; Catherine Hall,
`Imperial Man: Edward Eyre in Australasia and the West Indies, 1833­66', in Bill Schwarz
(ed.), The Expansion of England: Race, Ethnicity and Cultural History (London: Routledge,
1996), pp. 130­70; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The `Manly Englishman' and the
`Effeminate Bengali' in the Late Nineteenth-Century (New York: St Martin's, 1996); Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, `Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman
(eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), pp. 82, 90­104; Ann L. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's
History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995). Also see the recent forum on the possibilities for drawing the history of North
American and post-colonial studies closer together. Ann L. Stoler, Ramón Gutiérrez,
Lori D. Ginzberg, Dirk Hoerder, Mary A. Renda and Robert J. McMahon, `Empires and
Intimacies: Lessons from (Post) Colonial Studies: a Round Table', Journal of American
History (2001), pp. 829­97.
21. Homi Bhabha, `Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', October 28
(1984), 126­33. On Bhabha's gender-neutral subject, see Anne McClintock, Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995),
pp. 362­4. But also see his theoretical treatment of masculinity, anxiety and authoritarian
forms of nationalism, Bhabha, `Are You a Man or a Mouse?', in Maurice Berger, Brian
Wallis and Simon Watson (eds), Constructing Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 1995).
22. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880­1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 11 (quote),
11­15; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender,
Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early American History
and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Toby L. Ditz, `Shipwrecked,
or Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in
Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia', Journal of American History 81 (1994), pp. 51­80; Dana
D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White
Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 16, 19.
23. For general appraisals of the crisis theme to which these paragraphs on crisis are especially
indebted, see Judith Allen, `Men in Crisis?', pp. 199­202; Bederman, Manliness and
Civilization, 10­20; Frank Mort, `Crisis Points: Masculinities in Social Theory, Gender and
History 6 (1994), pp. 124­30; Traister, `Academic Viagra', pp. 285­99. Also see Judith Kegan
Gardiner, `Introduction', in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, pp. 6­11, 14.
24. Mainstream academics associated with men's studies critique the politically conservative
tendencies associated with the men's movement. Judith Kegan Gardiner, `Theorizing Age
and Gender: Bly's Boys, Feminism, and Maturity Masculinity', in Masculinity Studies &
Feminist Theory, pp. 102­107. Despite the American Men's Studies Association's early
affiliation with the anti-sexist men's movement and the generally progressive commitments
of its mission statement, its embrace of diverse perspectives on how to interpret men's
experience extends to proponents of Bly's mythopoetics. `Mission Statement', American
Men's Studies Association, <www.vix.com/pub/men/orgs/writeups/amsa.html>; James
Doyle and Sam Femiano, `Reflections on the Early History of the American Men's Studies
Association and the Evolution of the Field', <www.mensstudies.org/history.htm>.
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 29
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25. Traister, `Academic Viagra', p. 276.
26. Hazel V. Carby, `On the Threshold of the Women's Era: Lynching, Empire and Sexuality in
Black Feminist Theory', in Henry Lewis Gates (ed.), `Race', Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 301­316; Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The
Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
in North Carolina, 1896­1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Also
see Jaquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's
Campaign against Lynching, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) and
Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). See Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham's elegant appraisal
of approaches to race and gender in her widely cited essay of the early 1990s, `AfricanAmerican
Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race', Signs 17 (1992), pp. 251­74.
27. Also consider in an adjacent context, Steven J. Stern's magisterial, The Secret History
of Gender: Women, Men, & Power in Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995).
28. Stoler et al., `Empires and Intimacies', pp. 829­97; Laura McCall and Donald Yacovone,
`Introduction', in A Shared Experience, pp. 1­15; Lisa Wilson, `Ye Heart of a Man': The
Domestic Life of Men in Colonial New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
29. Carnes notes that he and others had wrongly predicted in the 1980s that men's history and
women's history would `wither away' in favour of an `interactive' history of gender. `Foreword',
p. xi.
30. See notably Dana Nelson's felt need, as one who is `unrelentingly critical of the effects that
the institutions and practices of white manhood produce for women and people of color',
to account for what might strike the reader as her `startlingly sympathetic' analysis and
interpretation of some of the white men, real and fictional, who appear in her book,
National Manhood, pp. 25, 26.
31. To name only a few well-known women's historians who have ventured into men's history,
consider the following: Elsa Barkley Brown, who developed the concept of `womanist
consciousness' to interpret the culture of late nineteenth-century African-American women
in her `Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint
Luke', Signs 14 (1989), pp. 610­33, is now working on a full-scale study of male friendship
among early twentieth-century African-American men; Catherine Hall, who together with
Lenore Davidoff, wrote the magisterial Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English
Middle Class, 1780­1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), later published White, Male, and
Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992);
Darlene Clark Hine, who has in the past co-edited several volumes of essays and documents
on African-American women's history of signal importance for institutionalising that
field of study, including the widely acclaimed Black Women in America: An Historical
Encyclopedia, 2 vols., Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
(eds), (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), is now co-editor of a series on black
manhood. See Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (eds), A Question of Manhood:
A Reader in U. S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, vol. 1, `Manhood Rights': The
Construction of Black Male History and Manhood, 1750­1870 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1999); and Carroll Smith Rosenberg, who published ground-breaking
work on nineteenth-century women's history as early as the mid-1970s, including the
touchstone essay, `Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America', in the inaugural issue of Signs 1 (1975), pp. 1­30, has lately
turned her attention to the gendered rhetoric of the literary men of the early republic.
`Discovering the Subject of the "Great Constitutional Discussion", 1786­1789', Journal of
American History 79 (1992), pp. 841­73.
32. Thomas is summarising and endorsing the views of Kaja Silverman and Tania Modeleski,
`Reenfleshing the Bright Boys', p. 62 (emphasis in the original).
33. Judith Allen, `Men in Crisis', pp. 192­3.
30 Gender and History
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34. Heidi Hartmann, `Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Case of
Housework', Signs 6 (1981), p. 372; Catharine A. MacKinnon, `Feminism, Marxism, Method,
and the State: Toward a Feminist Jurisprudence', Signs 8 (1983), pp. 635­58; Adrienne Rich,
`Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience', Signs 5 (1980), pp. 631­60. Also see
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
35. Gayle Rubin, `The Traffic in Women: Notes on the "Political Economy" of Sex', in Rayna
R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1975). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
36. Her estimates exclude the substantial number of adult children who were de facto dependants:
living at home without property of their own, but legally entitled to depart. Carole
Shammas, `Anglo-American Household Government in Comparative Perspective', William
and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995), pp. 123 (figures), 104­144.
37. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs.
38. Jennifer Lyle Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction, and Slavery in Early America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming, 2004); and Morgan, "Some
Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder": Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of
Racial Ideology, 1500­1770', William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997), pp. 167­92. On sexual
access to slave women and its importance in defining slaveholders' masculinity, see also
Natalie A. Zacek, `Sex, Sexuality, and Social Control in the Eighteenth-Century Leeward
Islands', in Merril D. Smith (ed.), Sex and Sexuality in Early America (New York: New
York University Press, 1998). Also see Kirsten Fischer's Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and
Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002).
39. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2000), p. 135.
40. Wayne Bodle, `Soldiers in Love: Patrolling the Gendered Frontiers of the Early Republic',
in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, pp. 217­39; Thomas A. Foster `Deficient Husbands:
Manhood, Sexual Incapacity, and Male Marital Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century New
England', William and Mary Quarterly 56 (1999), pp. 723­44; Foster, `Sex and the EighteenthCentury
Man: Anglo-American Discourses of Sex and Manliness in Massachusetts, 1690­
1765', PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2002; Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in
Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Mark Kann, Republic
of Men; Lisa Wilson, `Ye Heart of a Man'; Karin Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial
Philadelphia (Ithaca: Cornell, 2000), pp. 106­110, 116­17. On interracial unions and selfmade
marriages on what has come to be known as the gender frontier, see Nancy F. Cott,
Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000), pp. 27­37; Albert L. Hurtado, `When Strangers Meet: Sex and Gender on
Three Frontiers', Frontiers 17 (1996), pp. 52­75; Philip D. Morgan, `Interracial Sex in the
Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, 1700­1820', in Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S.
Onuf (eds), Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 52­84; Peggy Pascoe, `Gender,
Race, and Intercultural Relations: the Case of Interracial Marriage', Frontiers 12 (1991),
pp. 5­18; and the important collections Martha Hodes (ed.), Sex, Love, Race: Crossing
Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
41. Hartog, Man and Wife in America, pp. 137, 139. The language of sexual `possession' and
`monopoly' is Hartog's.
42. Mark Kann, Republic of Men.
43. Pateman, Sexual Contract. For the French case, also see Joan B. Landes, Women and the
Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1988); and Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of
Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
44. Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut,
1639­1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Linda K. Kerber,
`The Paradox of Women's Citizenship in the Early Republic: The Case of Martin vs.
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 31
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Massachusetts, 1805', American Historical Review 97 (1992), pp. 349­78; Mary Beth Norton,
Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New
York: Knopf, 1996), esp., pp. 282­92, 405. Also see the excellent appraisal in Karin Wulf,
Not All Wives, esp. pp. 181­210. For a similar construction of the south in a slightly later
period, see Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender
Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995). There are considerable differences in emphasis
among these authors, but they all stress the masculinisation of politics. This is not the
universal consensus about the revolutionary era and early republic. See especially Rosemarie
Zagarri's thoughtful article on natural rights talk derived from Scottish Enlightenment
traditions as applied to women, `The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary
America', William and Mary Quarterly 55 (1998), pp. 228­9 (quote), also 204. On an
American variant of salon culture among elites, also see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: in
which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 2000); Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women
and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (University Park, PA: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Patricia Cleary, Elizabeth Murray: A Woman's Pursuit of Independence
in Eighteenth-Century America (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,
2000), esp. pp. 167­220; Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, pp. 11­49.
45. It should be said that the family so imagined was non-political, but not private in the sense
of `sequestered' or `opposed to the social'. In the ideology of the early republic, the natural
affections and the sensibilities associated with the family and the familiar were preeminently
social qualities that linked the domestic hearth to other scenes of sociability.
Nancy Cott, Hendrik Hartog and Amy Stanley have recently powerfully extended the
theme of marriage as a way of triangulating political relations among men into the
nineteenth century. Stanley, for example, argues that in a society increasingly governed by
the ideology of contract and its antinomies, `home' comes to be understood as the antithesis
and limit to market logic, and its possession, the sign of a man's freedom and capacity for
citizenship. As actual access to homes was differentially distributed along racial and class
lines, achieving the status of head of household became a political rallying point for freedman
and poor white workers. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage,
and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998). Also see Nancy Cott, who shows that the law of marriage played a significant role in
creating legal distinctions between US born European-Americans and immigrants and
Indians. Cott, Public Vows, pp. 120­3, 132­55. Also see Hartog, Man and Wife in America.
46. Jane Kamensky, `Talk Like a Man: Speech, Power, and Masculinity in Early New England',
in A Shared Experience, pp. 21, 22
47. Kamensky, `Talk Like a Man', p. 27.
48. The phrase is Defoe's. Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (New York: Alan Sutton,
1987), p. 141. Ditz, `Shipwrecked' and `Formative Ventures: Mercantile Letters and the
Articulation of Experience', in Rebecca Earle and Carolyn Steedman (eds), Epistolary
Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600­1945 (London: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 59­78.
49. The scholarly literature on misogyny in eighteenth-century political polemics is vast. On
France, see, for example, Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On Rousseau, theatricality, and women,
see Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, pp. 71­89. On early eighteenth-century England
and the colonies, see, among others, Kenneth Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage:
The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power
in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1992), pp. 32­37, 104­111.
For more on the virtuous woman and her complications when used `as both sign and
scapegoat' to represent her class, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, `Discovering the Subject',
pp. 861 (quote), 858­62, and `Domesticating Virtue: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in
Young America', in Elaine Scarry (ed.) Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and
Persons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 162­6.
32 Gender and History
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50. On nationalist literature and the vanishing Indian, see Carolyn Eastman, `"A Nation of
Speechifiers": Oratory, Print, and the Making of a Gendered American Public, 1780­1830',
PhD diss, Johns Hopkins University, 2001; Dana Nelson, National Manhood, pp. 61­102,
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, `Discovering the Subject'.
51. Janet Moore Lindman, `Acting the Manly Christian: White Evangelical Masculinity in
Revolutionary Virginia', William and Mary Quarterly 57 (2000), p. 395.
52. Lindman, `Acting the Manly Christian', pp. 401 (quotes), 405­410.
53. Lindman, `Acting the Manly Christian', p. 416.
54. Lindman, `'Acting the Manly Christian', p. 415.
55. Male evangelicals called their Christian fellowship, `our fraternity'. Lindman, `Acting the
Manly Christian', p. 414. Here Lindman shares a line of interpretation developed by Susan
Juster, Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics and Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
56. Rather then end on this pessimistic note, we should observe that the outcome would be
different in the second Great Awakening, especially in the northern states, but to a lesser
extent in the south as well. A generation after Virginia's evangelical Baptists reinstated
patriarchal authority in their new churches, women in many places gained greater
autonomy within the evangelised churches and moral reform associations that dotted the
early nineteenth-century landscape. The Second Great Awakening did redistribute cultural
authority among men, but it also enabled women to challenge more successfully than had
prior generations the gendered power of their male evangelical allies. Christine Leigh
Heyrman, Southern Cross: the Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997);
Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle-Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790­1985
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
57. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, pp. 139 (quote), 137­86.
58. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, p. 174.
59. She also analyses in some detail, as prior historians had not, the participation of women in
the Rebellion. In the midst of the actual fighting, women acted as suppliers and informants
for both sides, defended their homesteads and relied on their long-standing role as informal
arbiters of community morality to influence the course of events. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty
Wenches, pp. 162­6, 169, 171, 176.
60. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, p. 145. On the power of women's gossip and their
moral authority, especially as regulators of sexual conduct, in what Mary Beth Norton calls
the `informal publics' of local communities, see Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers,
esp. pp. 19­21, 253­77; also Norton, `Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century
Maryland', William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987), pp. 3­39.
61. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, pp. 140­9, 179 (quote).
62. For two other studies of cultural interaction and military conflict between European settlers
and Indians that systematically analyse competing masculinities without losing sight of
women's interactions with men or the overall dynamics of gendered power, see JoAnn Barr,
`The "Seductions" of Texas: The Political Language of Gender in the Conquest of Texas,
1690­1803', PhD Diss, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999), and Ann Little, Abraham
in Arms: Gender and Power on the New England Frontier, 1620­1760 (University Park, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
63. Claudio Saunt, `"Domestick ... Quiet being broke": Gender Conflict among Creek Indians
in the Eighteenth Century', in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (eds), Contact
Points, American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750­1830 (University
of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 151­2.
64. Women's participation in the increasingly lucrative and commercialised trade in deerskins
declined and the now masculinised trade in deerskins began to eclipse in importance the
economic value of the work that women did control, including crop and textile production
Saunt, `Gender Conflict', pp. 156 (quote), 154­9.
65. Of course, the British and Anglo-American reformers had in mind a gendered political
economy that ill-suited the aspirations of Creek women: `plow agriculture practiced
New Men's History and the Absence of Gendered Power 33
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by men' based on `a domestic economy of the patriarchal family.' Saunt, `Gender Conflict',
pp. 153 (quote), 163­6.
66. The dissident men burnt the schools, butchered the cattle, and murdered and then
mutilated the bodies of the white women and men who represented the new `civilized'
order, and some Creek women abandoned the use of `European goods' and became
`prophets, preaching against the plows and looms' that appeared to them to represent a
devil's bargain. Saunt, `Gender Conflict', p. 173.
67. Lockridge, Patriarchal Rage, pp. 23, 26­7.
68. They also represented, via displacement, the elements of the self that elite discourses of manly
identity and comportment repudiated as unmanly and low (but also covertly elicited),
especially the passions and their immoderate expression. Lockridge, Patriarchal Rage, p. 37.
69. Lockridge, `Colonial Self-Fashioning: Paradoxes and Pathologies in the Construction of
Genteel Identity in Eighteenth-Century America', in Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and
Fredrika J. Teute (eds), Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 279­87, 323. Richard
Godbeer proposes a somewhat different interpretation of Byrd's sexuality and its link to his
sense of masculine entitlement as a gentleman. `William Byrd's `Flourish': The Sexual
Cosmos of a Southern Planter', in Sex and Sexuality, pp. 135­55.
70. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
(New York: Norton, 1987). See also Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed:
The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); John Demos,
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1982); Christine Heyrman, Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities
of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690­1750 (New York: Norton, 1984), pp. 109­125; and
Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York:
Knopf, 2002).
71. As she puts it, the `young women' who had been `momentarily powerful became once more
powerless', `once again ... followers, not leaders; governed, not governors; the silent, not
the speakers'. Norton, In the Devil's Snare, pp. 304 (quote), also especially 297­8, 300.
72. The interest in multiple masculinities among men's historians, especially as reinforced by
historians of sexuality, has generated a high level of interest in men who created gender
trouble. The quickly accumulating studies of eighteenth-century discourses of effeminacy
and homoerotic friendships and the lively debates about the existence of the homosexual
subject in the eighteenth century are testimony to these interests among colonial historians.
Patricia Bonomi, The Lord Cornbury Scandal: The Politics of Reputation in British America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Richard Godbeer, `"The Cry of
Sodom": Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England', William and Mary
Quarterly 52 (1995), pp. 259­86; Jeffrey Merrick, `Sodomitical Scandals and Subcultures in
the 1720s', Men and Masculinities 1 (1999), pp. 365­84; John Murrin, `"Things Fearful to
Name" Bestiality in Colonial America', Pennsylvania History 65 (1998), pp. 8­43; Randolph
Trumbach, `The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in
Modern Culture, 1660­1750', in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey
(eds), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (New York: NAL books,
1989), pp. 129­40.
73. The eventual outcome may also be paradigmatic. When the magistrates did catch up with
Hall, they repeatedly tried and failed to pigeonhole Hall as belonging to one sex or the
other. Stymied in their effort to align the conventional social and anatomical signifiers of
gender, they ordered Hall to dress in men's clothing, with the proviso that s/he was also to
wear a female cap and apron. One might argue that the court created a third sex, but it did
so only in the form of a humiliating decree that actually shored up gender boundaries.
People like Hall might live alternately as a man and as a woman for long periods in a culture
that emphasised the embodiment and elaboration of masculine and feminine natures in
the outward signs of bodily carriage, comportment and display of skills. But they could
not occupy both categories simultaneously, except as living contradictions and objects of
34 Gender and History
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ridicule. See Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, pp. 75­80; Norton, Founding Mothers and
Fathers, pp. 183­97.
74. Marcus Rediker, `Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger: the Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary
Read, Pirates', in Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling Irun (eds), Men, Wooden Women:
Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700­1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996), p. 10.
75. Dianne Dugaw, `Female Sailors Bold: Transvestite Heroines and the Markers of Gender
and Class', in Iron Men, Wooden Women, p. 46.
76. Dugaw comments of one sailor, Mary Ann Talbot, who lived as John Taylor, that when
`dressed as a man and behaving as a man, Talbot is taken for a man and to a large extent
understands herself as "manly"'. `Female Sailors Bold', p. 45.
77. The expression is Judith Halberstam's and is in some ways problematic. See Halberstam,
`The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and Masculinity', Masculinity Studies and
Feminist Theory, p. 345.
78. Dugaw, `Female Sailors Bold', pp. 37 (quote), 37­43.
79. See Eve Sedgwick's plea that we `stop presupposing that everything pertaining to men can
be classified as masculinity, and everything that can be said about masculinity pertains in
the first place to men'. Sedgwick, `Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your
Masculinity!', in Constructing Masculinity, p. 12.
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