Manful Assertions

Masculinities in Britain Since 1800

Michael Roper, John Tosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000445961
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Masculine assertions, whether of verbal command, political power or physical violence, have formed the traditional subject matter of history. This volume combines current discussions in sexual politics with historical analysis to demonstrate that, far from being natural and monolithic, masculinity is an historical and cultural construct, with varied, competing and above all changing forms.

1 INTRODUCTION Historians and the politics of masculinity

Michael Roper and John Tosh

DOI: 10.4324/9781003209164-1

‘Manful assertions’ – whether of verbal command, political power or physical violence – have been the traditional stuff of history. Yet this truth is more often accepted than analysed. The context in which Thomas Carlyle used the phrase in the 1830s shows all too clearly that his readiness to applaud manly displays in others grew out of a deep insecurity about his own masculinity, which he later sought to purge through historical writings on such ‘heroic’ men as Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great.¹ Not for nothing is Carlyle so frequently hailed as a founding father of historical writing in Britain.² The historians who came after him echoed Carlyle’s preoccupations, not only by excluding women from the public record, but by elevating the ‘public’ man as the object of study while entirely submerging his gender identity. Where they attempted to make masculinity natural and monolithic, this volume emphasizes its divergent, often competing and above all its changing forms. Where they buried their masculinity away in supposedly objective accounts of the past, we stress the ways in which masculinity underpins social life and cultural representation. And where they constantly emphasized the differences between women and men, boys and men, heroes and fops, we stress that masculinity has always been defined in relation to ‘the other’.

Making men visible as gendered subjects has major implications for all the historian’s established themes: for family, labour and business, class and national identities, religion, education, and – though we scarcely breach this bastion of professional conservatism – for institutional politics too. Our aim is to demonstrate that masculinity has a history: that it is subject to change and varied in its forms. The range of contributions to this volume is itself telling evidence of the historical diversity of masculinity. They deal in turn with the early nineteenth-century Man of Letters; the mid nineteenth-century Professional Man and Respectable Working Man; Imperial Man and the Boy Hero in the inter-war period; and the post-war Public School Man and Company Man.

Through our work we hope to give historical substance to two key propositions: that masculinity (like femininity) is a relational construct, incomprehensible apart from the totality of gender relations; and that it is shaped in relation to men’s social power. In making these claims we have two constituencies in mind: first, the historical profession which until now has been highly resistant to problematizing the masculinity of its male subjects; and second, the much more diverse body of people who are concerned with the contemporary politics of gender, but are frustrated by the lack of historical perspectives on masculinity. The problem at present is that on the one hand, historians have traced the history of precepts about ‘manliness’, but their discussions have lacked an adequate understanding of men’s power over women as an organizing principle of masculinity. On the other hand, some feminist approaches have viewed masculinity and male dominance as simple mirror images of each other. In the first part of this chapter we review the ways in which historians have discussed manliness, and the calls from gender studies for a more informed historical perspective on masculinity. Then we look at how • historians and sociologists have theorized masculinity and its relationship to male dominance. Finally we offer our own conclusions about the historical themes which seem – at least on the basis of the contributions to this book – critical to the study of British masculinities.

HISTORIANS AND MASCULINITY

To the extent that historians have paid any attention to masculinity, they have deployed well-established historiographical tools. Much the most significant has been that branch of the history of ideas which deals with moral discourse. For most of the period with which this book is concerned – and certainly from the 1840s until the 1930s – the proper definition of ‘manliness’ as a code of conduct for men was a matter of keen interest to educators and social critics. Emphasis was variously placed on moral courage, sexual purity, athleticism and stoicism, by pundits who ranged from Thomas Arnold through Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, to Robert Baden-Powell. Since this list includes some of the best-known literary figures of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, it is not surprising that their interpretations of manliness have been closely studied, notably in Norman Vance’s sensitive treatment of Hughes and Kingsley.³ Special attention has also been given to the manly precepts which were upheld in all-male institutions of the period, notably the public schools, the Boys Brigade and the Boy Scouts. For example J. A. Mangan’s study of the rise of athleticism analyses a key change in the ethos of the late Victorian public school.⁴

One important outcome of this recent work is that we now have a reasonably clear impression of a marked shift in the codes of manliness current among the governing and professional classes during the latter half of the nineteenth century – from the moral earnestness of the Evangelicals and Dr Arnold to the respect for muscle and might so prevalent at the close of the Victorian era. Moreover this shift has been carefully placed in relation to other key Victorian concerns such as churchmanship,⁵ liberalism,⁶ and imperialism.⁷ Here at least is the germ of a gender perspective across a wide swathe of cultural and intellectual history, which addresses the diversity and mutability of masculinity over time.

Despite this promise, however, recent historical work on all-male institutions and on manliness leaves a great deal to be desired. The crucial problem is that women are almost entirely absent from these accounts, seemingly on the assumption that masculinity takes on a sharper focus when women are removed from the scene – as they may appear to be when men write about manhood or live together in schools and clubs. In the literature about Victorian public schools, for instance, there is scant acknowledgement that the typical schoolboy had been moulded by his mother or nanny for some years before he entered the school, and that feminine absence conditioned his emotional development during adolescence. In similar vein, historians of the scouting movement tend to be much more interested in Baden-Powell’s stress on imperialism and class deference than his insistence that boys attending day schools be removed from the feminine atmosphere of home.⁸ Current interpretations of Victorian manliness are marred by the same imbalance. It needs to be remembered not only that sexual purity was a major preoccupation for many proponents of manliness, but also that their doctrines were conditioned by their experience of (and views about) women – manifestly so in the case of Charles Kingsley.⁹ There is a persistent British tradition of masculine autonomy in such writing which needs to be dismantled.

If women are largely absent from recent historical work on masculinity, it follows that little attention is given to the world of family and domesticity. Yet any proper assessment of the historical significance of manliness surely requires that we treat it as more than simply a guide to men’s conduct in work and public life. The proponents of manliness intended their teaching to influence men’s behaviour in the home; indeed, it was commonly recognized that the foundations of manly conduct were laid within the family before formal schooling began.¹⁰ The dual reference of manliness to both private and public spheres was implicit in David Newsome’s pioneering work of thirty years ago;¹¹ but to follow up his insights required a systematic study of the place of men in families. Remarkably this task has until the last few years been all but ignored, with the result that the history of the family has been no less distorted than the history of masculinity.¹²

Removing women from the field of study also obscures the connections between masculinity and social power. When reading the recent work of historians, it is easy to forget that codes of manliness served as gender boundaries, or that attendance at public school was an apprenticeship for privilege over the weaker sex as well as the lower orders. It is certainly helpful to know the range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century prescriptions for manliness, but this begs the question of how these differences should be interpreted. As Lynne Segal has recently emphasized, understanding what ‘masculinity’ is requires that we firmly locate the differences between men in the context of sexual politics: men’s power over women, the power of older over younger men, and – during the last hundred years at least – the power of heterosexual over homosexual men.¹³ Historians are in a potentially strong position to draw the kinds of connection which Segal recommends, since they study societies in motion from the vantage point of hindsight. It should not be necessary to spell out that the shifting spotlight on Reason, Feeling, Purity and Athleticism within ‘manly’ discourse before 1914 reflected not just the play of ideas, but a contested understanding of the sources of masculine power. Yet the history which places manliness in this gendered context has yet to be written; and more generally, the immense potential for historical insight into the politics of masculinity remains largely untapped.

SEXUAL POLITICS AND THE HISTORY OF MASCULINITY

While academic historians have been making tentative steps towards recognizing the gender of their principal subjects, others more centrally concerned with the politics of masculinity have been calling for a new kind of history. The questions which we ask and the categories we employ in this book are strongly influenced by a range of politically aware writers, many of whom straddle the divide between academia and activism.

Several strands of sexual politics are involved here. First in the field, and still the most productive of scholarly work, is gay history. What seems particularly impressive in retrospect is how quickly gay historians moved away from discussing social attitudes towards homosexuality to re-create the historical experience of gay people themselves. Indeed the historical record revealed a veritable treasure house of positive images for gay men, which is one reason why they have attached such high priority to historical work. In the space of just five years (1977–82) three major studies appeared – by John Boswell, Alan Bray and Jeffrey Weeks – which documented the existence of gay sub-cultures in Western Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and in England since the close of the nineteenth century.¹⁴ Each of these works was characterized by a move away from a linear dynamic towards a careful contextualizing of homosexual experience in specific historical cultures, which revealed shifting patterns in the expression and organization of desire. ‘There is’, Bray affirms, ‘no linear history of homosexuality to be written at all’ – nor, we would add, of masculinity.¹⁵

To treat gay history in this fashion has wide-ranging and subversive implications. In Jeffrey Weeks’s words, it ‘propels us into a whirlwind of deconstruction’.¹⁶ It suggests that the ranking of homosexuality and heterosexuality as fixed identities, far from being part of the ‘natural’ order, was consolidated only about a hundred years ago. And if the negative labelling and outright oppression of homosexual behaviour over the past millennium have been intermittent rather than continuous, what does this say about the self-image and self-doubting of the socially dominant forms of masculinity? For example, as several writers have pointed out, the medical and legal onslaught on homosexuality in Britain from the mid nineteenth century was part of the heavy price paid for the institutionalization of heterosexuality in the Victorian family.¹⁷ The decisive contribution of gay history to date has been to dissolve the ‘essence’ of homosexuality – and by inference other sexual orientations too – and thus to undermine one of the central planks of ‘commonsense’ masculinity.

Heterosexual masculinity, of course, represents in large measure the oppressive social order whose history gay writers wish to lay bare. But the men’s movement during its most active phase in the late 1970s and early 1980s carried strong liberationist overtones too, because of the way in which it experienced the current norms of masculinity as oppressive. Most of these writers were middle-class heterosexual men, whose experience of personal life, often with feminist women, caused them to view their masculinity as a deforming of the true self. In the magazine Achilles Heel (1978–81) and in books like The Sexuality of Men,¹⁸ they stressed men’s estrangement from their emotional selves as the heavy price they pay for the privilege of living in a patriarchal society. In the recent words of Victor Seidler, ‘If we live in a “man’s world” it is not a world that has been built upon the needs and nourishment of men. Rather it is a social world of power and subordination in which men have been forced to compete if we want to benefit from our inherited masculinity.’¹⁹ In such accounts gender is often represented more as an oppressive social structure ‘out there’ than as a set of relations which is reproduced psychically and socially in daily living.

A liberationist perspective was also evident in the men’s movement attitude to history. The desire to recover a golden age in the past is clearly perceptible in Donald Bell’s 1981 essay ‘Up from P...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction Historians and the politics of masculinity
• 2 Strenuous Idleness Thomas Carlyle and the man of letters as hero
• 3 Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class The family of Edward W hite Benson
• 4 Masculinity and the ‘Representative Artisan’ in Britain, 1850–80
• 5 ‘I Live But Not Yet I For Christ Liveth in Me’ Men and masculinity in the Salvation Army, 1865–90
• 6 The Blond Bedouin Lawrence of Arabia, imperial adventure and the imagining of English-British masculinity
• 7 Knowing Your Place The tensions of manliness in boys’ story papers, 1918–39
• 8 Mummy, Matron and the Maids Feminine presence and absence in male institutions, 1934–63
• 9 Yesterday’s Model Product fetishism and the British company man, 1945–85
• Select Bibliography
• Index