Browsing by Subject "Men's Studies"
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Item Open Access Alger, Horatio, Jr.(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The author of over one hundred novels, Horatio Alger, Jr., has come to be associated with a rags-to-riches narrative that combines moral uplift with social mobility. In the majority of his novels, a young, destitute street boy is discovered by an older, wealthy man who enlists the boy's services, offers assistance and guidance, and enables him to ascend the social ladder. Alger's novels address the consequences of urbanization and economic transformation for changing notions of manhood in Gilded Age America. Alger's emphasis on paternalistic relations as a means of uplift may have a biographical background: In 1866, Alger had to leave his post as minister of a Unitarian church in Brewster, Massachusetts, over charges of having sexually abused young boys. Upon arriving in New York, Alger ...Item Open Access Bureaucratization(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Bureaucracy, or bureaucratization, refers to routinized, deper-sonalized, and dispersed processes devoted to the execution of a variety of administrative tasks, and to the regulation and assessment of these tasks. Within a bureaucratic system of governance, authority is dispersed and disconnected from ownership or physical production. Notions of a “bureaucratic manhood,” or a “bureaucratic team player,” slowly began to appear in U.S. society as bureaucratic systems of governance and administration emerged after 1830. This development enabled men to articulate masculine power and authority out-side the contexts of craft skills (which were slowly displaced by industrialization after 1830) and ownership and entrepreneurial control (which were transformed by corporatization after 1880). In addition, a mode of bureaucratic manhood gained ground after 1880 that linked masculinity to the exerciseItem Open Access Civil War(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The American Civil War (1861–65) between the North (the Union) and the South (the Confederacy) was a conflict over issues of national identity, economic development, western expansion, and slavery. With roughly 2 million soldiers fighting for the Union and about 800,000 for the Confederacy, the war wrought transformations in the lives of both black and white men and altered ideas about manhood in both the North and the South. It served as a juncture between two regional sets of ideals of manhood and highlighted the race, gender, and class hierarchies on which they were contingent.Item Open Access Class(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The economic and social transformations engendered by industrialization, urbanization, and the emergence of a market economy in the nineteenth century led to processes of class formation, class difference, and class identity that have profoundly shaped definitions of manliness in the United States. A man's position in the process of production, the type of work he performs, and the amount of managerial and entrepreneurial control he exercises are determinants of class status and are intricately connected to notions of masculinity and gender. As an expression of a man's economic status, and of the cultural attitudes and perceptions that it engenders, class and class difference are connected to articulations of gender and manliness in U.S. society.Item Open Access Cold War(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The Cold War, which began after World War II and lasted through the 1980s, was a geopolitical rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union grounded in an ideological rivalry between capitalism and communism. The Cold War raised concerns about both external and internal threats to American strength, social stability, and security, and particularly to material abundance, middle-class lifestyles, and cultural norms about masculinity. Motivated by fears of emasculation, effeminization, and homosexuality, Americans anxiously defined their nation and their way of life in terms culturally associated with masculinity, including power, diplomatic and military assertiveness, economic success, sexual and physical prowess, moral righteousness, and patriotism.Item Open Access Confidence Man(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The confidence man—a man who takes advantage of people by gaining their confidence, convincing them to trust him with their possessions, and then stealing those possessions— was a male archetype of Victorian middle-class culture. He symbolized middle-class Americans' anxieties about the potential for predatory male behavior in the increasingly anonymous, impersonal, and competitive social world being created by urbanization and the market revolution.Item Open Access Crisis of Masculinity(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.It was during the late 1960s that historians first developed the notion of a “crisis of masculinity” to describe the nervous concerns that middle-class men had regarding masculinity and the male body during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This idea not only brought scholarly attention to important changes in constructions of manhood in the twentieth century, but also raised questions about the timing of changes in cultural constructions of masculinity, the extent of uniformity and variation in men's experiences of social change, and about men's attitudes toward feminism.Item Open Access Democratic Manhood(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Between 1815 and the 1840s, a concept of democratic manhood emerged in the United States, marking a conscious rejection of European (especially British) notions of ascribed social status. Strongly associated with Democratic president Andrew Jackson, democratic manhood was defined as political equality and broadened political participation among white men—and by the exclusion of women and nonwhites from the privileges of citizenship. It emphasized physical prowess and boisterous patriotism, expressed by the popularity of such frontiersmen as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Furthermore, the concept informed a developing urban counterculture that resisted the aristocratic pretensions and bourgeois morality of an emerging middle class.Item Open Access Douglass, Frederick(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Frederick Douglass was a nineteenth-century abolitionist, author, and politician. Through his autobiographies, Douglass fashions himself as a representative, mid-nineteenth-century black male, though his definition of black manhood often seems to lack a specific African-American dimension. Woven into his critique of slavery and racism is an ideal of manhood shared by white middle-class men and grounded in notions of individualism, self-reliance, and entrepreneurial capitalism.Item Open Access Emerson, Ralph Waldo(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Ralph Waldo Emerson was the founder of a distinct American intellectual tradition and a key figure in the antebellum (pre–Civil War) transcendentalist movement. He espoused an ideal of manliness rooted in scholarly activity, self-knowledge, intellectual dissent, and individual autonomy, a concept that grew out of early-nineteenth-century ideas about manhood. However, although Emerson's celebration of individual autonomy suited the surging individualism engendered by the antebellum market revolution and the egalitarian spirit of Jacksonian democracy, he initially eschewed the emerging entrepreneurial model of manhood promoted by proponents of capitalist development.Item Open Access Gilded Age(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The Gilded Age (1873–1900) takes its name from the title of an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. The social transformations that prompted Twain and Warner to characterize this period as materialistic, shallow, and corrupt also affected definitions of manliness. Amid the increasing pace and growing scale of urban industrial life, the Gilded Age witnessed the emergence of corporate and bureaucratic structures, new technologies, new forms of work, and changing career paths for men. Those who considered work, productive effort, and artisanal or entrepreneurial autonomy critical to their definitions of manliness found themselves in a social setting that no longer seemed to furnish men of different class backgrounds with a sense of achievement.Item Open Access Graham, Sylvester(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and antebellum health reformer, addressed medical, dietary, and sexual aspects of manhood. Graham's emphasis on restraint in these areas meshed well with Victorian concerns about physical purity and bodily discipline in all aspects of life. While Victorian Americans valued self-control and bodily discipline in general, they were particularly inclined to identify these with ideal manhood. Ordained in 1830, Graham began lecturing that same year for a temperance organization, the Pennsylvania Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits. Graham was suddenly propelled into a position of cultural influence in 1832, when, amid fears of a cholera outbreak, he advised Americans of the preventive value of proper eating habits and food preparation.Item Open Access Gulick, Luther Halsey(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Luther Halsey Gulick contributed to the field of physical education and helped redefine middle-class manhood during the Progressive Era (1890–1915). Born into a family of Congregational ministers, Gulick devoted his life to promoting and intertwining physical education and male spirituality. Gulick held several influential positions in the field of physical education. He headed the gymnasium department at the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts (1887–1900); served as director of physical education in the public schools of New York City (1903–08); held the presidencies of the American Physical Education Association (1903–06) and the Public School Physical Training Society (1905–08); and cofounded the Playground Association of America with educator Joseph Lee in 1906 (and served as its first president).Item Open Access Hall, Granville Stanley(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The founder and first president of Clark University, Granville Stanley Hall formulated theories on child development, psychology, play, and race that greatly influenced theories about white manhood and male sexuality around the turn of the twentieth century. Hall's chief concern was neurasthenia, a medical condition of mental and physical exhaustion first diagnosed by the physician George M. Beard in 1869. Neurasthenia tended to affect white middle-class men who feared that industrialization and urbanization undermined their ability to meet contemporary expectations of manhood. While men such as Theodore Roosevelt advocated the “strenuous life” as an antidote, Hall supported a preventive approach that targeted adolescent boys.Item Open Access Immigration(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Processes of immigration have interacted with concepts and experiences of masculinity throughout U.S. history. As male immigrants moved from their countries and cultures of origin to the United States, both their notions of manliness and the dominant American culture's masculine ideals were sometimes challenged, and sometimes affirmed, by the encounter. Leaving one's country of origin and relocating over vast distances for economic betterment or to escape political or cultural persecution corresponded to traditional ideas about manliness, which portrayed a man as a successful provider, family caretaker, and guardian.Item Open Access Industrialization(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The process of industrialization, which began in the United States during the early nineteenth century, had an enormous impact on American constructions of masculinity. It complicated preindustrial notions of manhood based on male patriarchal control over family and household, while also generating new and often class-based definitions of gender. For some segments of the male population, industrialization eroded two critical foundations of preindustrial male patriarchy: It reduced the importance of property ownership and moved productive, income-generating labor out of the home. In doing so, it opened up opportunities for social and cultural experimentation with definitions of manhood both in and outside the workplace.Item Open Access James, William(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Through his research and his teaching, the philosopher William James sought to mediate between two concepts of middle-class manhood that developed in U.S. culture from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The first concept, rooted in antebellum intellectual, religious, and reform movements such as the Second Great Awakening, transcendentalism, and abolitionism, emphasized moral idealism and the authority of individual conscience. The second concept, which emerged after the Civil War, eschewed this antebellum idealism and defined true manliness in terms of duty, obligation, and a “strenuous life”—understood as a struggle toward masculine physical fitness. James sought to combine the ethical principles that informed antebellum reform movements with the new emphasis on the strenuous life to generate a manly, intellectual individualism.Item Open Access Market Revolution(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.The term market revolution describes a succession of economic and technological changes that transformed U.S. society between 1825 and 1860. The construction of roads, canals, and railroads; the opening of the West to settlement; the expansion of postal delivery routes; and the introduction of the telegraph drew previously disparate communities closer together and helped to create a national market of commodities, goods, labor, and services. This transformation fundamentally altered American notions of manhood, causing a shift from the eighteenth-century ideal of the community-oriented patriarch and provider to the more modern ideal of the market-oriented breadwinner and “self-made man.”Item Open Access Masculine Domesticity(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Male domesticity emerged as a distinct aspect of male identity, particularly among white middle-class men, when the market revolution of the early nineteenth century began to separate social life into private and public spheres. As income-generating labor was removed from the home, and as the home became redefined as a place of consumption and child-rearing (both associated with women), middle-class articulations of manhood became differentiated into two aspects—domesticity and breadwinning—that were both oppositional and mutually dependent.Item Open Access Men and Religion Forward Movement(SAGE Publications, Inc., 2004) Winter, Thomas; Carroll, Bret E.Cofounded by Fred Smith and Henry Rood in September 1911 as a nationwide campaign, the Men and Religion Forward Movement (MRFM) emerged out of the cooperation between evangelical churches and religious agencies such as the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ, the Young Men's Christian Association, and the Presbyterian Labor Temple. The movement aimed to draw men to Christ and into church membership, as well as to remasculinize Christianity and evangelical churches and to diminish the role that women were increasingly playing in church affairs.