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The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Karen Harvey
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Type
Special Feature on Masculinities
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 296 - 311
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2005

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References

1 This is surely why the groundbreaking and important “Women's History” seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, has not changed its name to “Gender History.” The result is an uneasy compromise in which the famous seminar retains its older name while hosting numerous papers on gender and masculinity. At the time of writing, three papers in the current program explicitly referred to women and three to gender or masculinity.

2 Purvis, June and Weatherill, Amanda, “Playing the Gender History Game: A Reply to Penelope J. Corfield,” Rethinking History 3, no. 3 (1999): 333–38, 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some of us working in history departments know that gender history is just as embattled as women's history, however.

3 Hall, Catherine, “Politics, Post-structuralism and Feminist History,” Gender and History 3, no. 2 (1991): 204–10, 210CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Purvis and Weatherill, “Playing the Gender History Game.”

4 Bennett, Judith, “Feminism and History,” Gender and History 1 (1989): 251–72, 258CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 2Google Scholar.

6 Ibid., 42.

7 Roper, Michael and Tosh, John, “Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Roper, Michael and Tosh, John (London, 1991), 1Google Scholar.

8 Ibid.

9 See, e.g., many of the entries in “What Is Women's History?” History Today 35 (1985): 38–48Google Scholar. Juxtapose them with the comments in Corfield, Penelope J., “History and the Challenge of Gender History,” Rethinking History 1, no. 3 (1997): 241–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Bennett, “Feminism and History,” 259.

11 Judith Bennett—prompted by the publication of Joan Scott's Gender and the Politics of History—worried that the emphasis of gender history was on symbols, not material realities of inequality. See Bennett, “Feminism and History.” This is part of a revival of the “social,” as evidenced in Bonnell, Victoria E. and Hunt, Lynn, “Introduction,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Bonnell, Victoria E. and Hunt, Lynn (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar. The same is called for in Clark, Elizabeth A.'s “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” Church History 67, no. 1 (March 1998): 1–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Foyster, Elizabeth, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (Harlow, 1999), 3Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., 207.

14 Ibid., 10.

15 Ibid., 4.

16 Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 3Google Scholar.

17 Turner, David's Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar is another example of the latter.

18 Connell, Robert W., Masculinities (Cambridge, 1995), 77Google Scholar.

19 See Capp, Bernard, “Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England,” in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Griffiths, Paul, Fox, Adam, and Hindle, Steve (Basingstoke, 1996), 126–27Google Scholar; Shepard, Alexandra, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 195–205Google Scholar.

20 Laslett, Peter, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (1977; Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar, table 1.4, 26. These figures are based on a population of 7,837 from six parishes between 1599 and 1796.

21 Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England, 55.

22 Harvey, Karen, “‘The Majesty of the Masculine Form’: Multiplicity and Male Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Erotica,” in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Hitchcock, Tim and Cohen, Michèle (Harlow, 1999), 194Google Scholar.

23 Fletcher, Anthony, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (1995; New Haven, CT, 1999), xviGoogle Scholar.; Bennett, “Feminism and History,” 263-66.

24 Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 345.

25 Ibid., 401–2, 407.

26 Ibid., xvi.

27 This model of fragile patriarchy, of anxious manhood based in the household and built partly upon female sexuality, has been challenged by Alexandra Shepard. Her work deals with the period from 1560 to 1640 and is strictly outside the chronological bounds of this review; she is also contributing to this issue. It is worth noting, however, her claim that “manhood and patriarchy were not equated in early modern England” (Meanings of Manhood, 1). Patriarchal manhood was not the model to which all men aspired; indeed, some men self-consciously resisted or challenged this ideal. The differences between men, Shepard demonstrates, were as significant as the differences between men and women. Manhood was forged as much between men as between men and women, and this allows a shift in work on seventeenth-century manhood away from heterosociability and toward homosociability.

28 Trumbach, Randolph, “The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Duberman, M. B., Vicinus, M., and Chauncey, G. (Harmondsworth, 1989)Google Scholar; Weil, Rachel, “Sometimes a Sceptre Is Only a Sceptre: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England,” in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, ed. Hunt, Lynn (New York, 1994)Google Scholar. See Love, Harold, “Refining Rochester: Private Texts and Public Readers,” Harvard Library Bulletin 7 (1996): 40–49Google Scholar, on the changing reputation of Rochester based on his poetry.

29 The key text regarding Renaissance sodomites remains Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982)Google Scholar. See also Bray, Alan, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 1–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Alan Stewart, “Homosexuals in History: A. L. Rowse and the Queer Archive,” and Radel, Nicholas F., “Can the Sodomite Speak? Sodomy, Satire, Desire, and the Castlehaven Case,” both in Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550–1800, ed. O'Donnell, Katherine and O'Rourke, Michael (Basingstoke, 2003)Google Scholar. A queer version of this article is possible, but the focus is, I admit, almost exclusively heterosexual. For libertinism in the later eighteenth century, see Sainsbury, John, “Wilkes and Libertinism,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 26 (1998): 151–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Anna, “Wilkes and d'Eon: The Politics of Masculinity, 1763–1778,” in Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 19–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Trumbach, “Birth of the Queen,” 165. See also Trumbach, Randolph, “Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991): 186–203Google ScholarPubMed.

31 Carter, Philip, “Men about Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth-Century Urban Society,” in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Barker, Hannah and Chalus, Elaine (Harlow, 1997)Google Scholar.

32 Carter, Philip, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001)Google Scholar.

33 Carter, “Men about Town,” 53.

34 Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 23–50, 172–93.

35 Foyster, Elizabeth, “Boys Will Be Boys? Manhood and Aggression, 1660–1800,” in English Masculinities, 151–66Google Scholar.

36 Shoemaker, Robert B., “Reforming Male Manners: Public Insult and the Decline of Violence in London, 1660–1740,” in English Masculinities, 133–50Google Scholar.

37 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 190–91; Cohen, Michèle, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Ogborn, Miles, Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998), 88Google Scholar.

39 Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998), 195–223Google Scholar; Hunt, Margaret, “Domesticity and Women's Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,” Gender and History 4 (1992): 10–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foyster, Elizabeth, “Creating a Veil of Silence? Politeness and Marital Violence in the English Household,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 395–415CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

40 Quotation from Carter, Men and the Emergence, 140. See Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 116–56, on macaronis in Vauxhall Gardens.

41 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 66–67.

42 Ibid., 37–38.

43 Cowan, Brian, “What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England,” History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 127–57, 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Pincus, Steven, “‘Coffee Politicians does Create': Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture,” Journal of Moden History 67 (1996): 807–34, esp. 816CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berry, Helen, “‘Nice and Curious Questions': Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton's Athenian Mercury,” Seventeenth Century 12 (1997): 257–76Google Scholar.

45 Ellis, Markham, “Coffee-Women, ‘The Spectator’ and the Public Sphere,” in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Eger, Elizabeth, Grant, Charlotte, O' Gallchoir, Cliona, and Warburton, Penny (Cambridge, 2001), 37, 39Google Scholar; Berry, Helen, “Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King's Coffee House and the Significance of Flash Talk,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001): 65–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Quotation from Cowan, “What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere?” 141.

46 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 209.

47 Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 83–98, 322–46.

48 Ibid., 87.

49 Ibid., 83.

50 Ibid., xxii.

51 Shoemaker, Robert B., “Taming of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour, and Ritual Violence in London, 1660–1800,” Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 525–45, 542, 545CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Langford, Paul, “The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 311–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 322.

54 Ibid., 323.

55 Carter, Philip, “Polite ‘Persons’: Character, Biography and the Gentleman,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 333–54, 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 One exception to the lack of interest in seventeenth-century affect is queer history. Work on early modern sodomy and on same-sex relationships is struggling to locate both the identity and intimacy of men. Several of the essays in O’Donnell and O’Rourke, eds., Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, are about affect. In this regard, queer history is leading the way.

57 Carter, “Polite ‘Persons,’” 336.

58 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 29.

59 Klein, Lawrence E., Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 41–44.

61 Wesley, John quoted in John Miller, Religion in the Popular Prints, 1600–1832 (Cambridge, 1986), 36Google Scholar; Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987; London, 1992), 111Google Scholar.

62 Gregory, Jeremy, “Homo Religious: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 85–110Google Scholar.

63 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 214.

64 See also Cohen, Michèle, “Manliness, Effeminacy, and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in Eighteenth-Century England,” in English Masculinities, 44–62Google Scholar.

65 Hitchcock, Tim and Cohen, Michèle, “Introduction,” in English Masculinities, 22Google Scholar.

66 Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar.

67 Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England, 212, 213–14.

68 Ibid., 213.

69 Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 407, 295.

70 Harvey, Karen, “The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Eighteenth-Century Representations of the Body,” Gender and History 14, no. 2 (2002): 202–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Gender, Space and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century England: A Place Called Sex,” History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 158–79Google Scholar.

71 Wahrman, Dror, “Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, no. 159 (May 1998): 113–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Gender in Translation: How the English Wrote Their Juvenal, 1644–1815,” Representations 65 (Winter 1999): 1–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 116.

73 Klein, Lawrence E., “Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century,” Historical Journal 45 (2002): 869–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Langford, “Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness,” 312.

75 Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation.”

76 Sweet, R. H., “Topographies of Politeness,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 355–74, 355CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; see also Shoemaker, “Taming of the Duel,” 526. See Solkin, David, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 1992), 100Google Scholar, on rural resistance to politeness.

77 Langford, , A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), 463ff.Google Scholar, and “Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness.”

78 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 6, and “Men about Town,” 39.

79 Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation,” 897.

80 The important works are by Anna Clark. See her Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (London, 1987)Google Scholar, and The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995)Google Scholar. Meldrum, Tim's Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London House (Harlow, 2000)Google Scholar is also useful. Works on later periods include Rose, Sonya O., Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 Thompson, E. P., “Patricians and Plebs,” in Customs in Common (1991; Harmondsworth, 1993), 18, 19Google Scholar.

82 Foyster's book Manhood in Early Modern England is based largely on court depositions. She discusses this on pp. 10–15. Carter uses a range of sources, but his discussion of Dudley Rider and John Penrose is based on Rider's diary and Penrose's letters. See Men and the Emergence, 164–83.

83 Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation,” 898. Peter King suggests, though, that the “consumer revolution” was demonstrated in the possessions of the very poor. King, Peter, “Pauper Inventories and the Material Lives of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840, ed. Hitchcock, Tim, King, Peter, and Sharpe, Pamela (Harlow, 1997)Google Scholar.

84 For a helpful review of how the early modern middling sort has been identified, see French, Henry, “The Search for the ‘Middle Sort of People’ in England, 1600–1800,” Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (2000): 277–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Hunt, Margaret, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, 1996), 48Google Scholar.

86 See Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989), 104–9Google Scholar, where Brewer discusses the skill and expertise of the excisemen, for example.

87 See Harvey, Karen, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2005), chap. 4Google Scholar, for further discussion.

88 Miller, Vincent [pseud.], The Man-Plant; or, A Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed (London, 1752), 38Google Scholar.

89 Quoted in Rogers, Nicholas, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), 237Google Scholar.

90 Quoted in Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 180Google Scholar.

91 Ibid., 188–90.

92 Shoemaker, “Taming of the Duel,” 544.

93 Runge, Laura L., “Beauty and Gallantry: A Model of Polite Conversation Revisited,” Eighteenth-Century Life 25, no. 1 (2001): 43–63, 44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

94 Clark, Peter, British Clubs and Societies, 1500-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), 203Google Scholar.

95 Harvey, Reading Sex, chap. 1.

96 Compare the contrasting visions of the eighteenth century in Langford, Polite and Commercial People, and Porter, Roy, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1982)Google Scholar.

97 Carter, “Men about Town,” 129.

98 Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 345, 346.

99 Anthony Fletcher's coverage in Gender, Sex, and Subordination is, I think it is fair to say, much better for the seventeenth century.

100 Turner, Fashioning Adultery; Foyster, “Creating a Veil of Silence?”

101 Tosh, John, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History Workshop Journal 33 (1994): 179–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities,” in English Masculinities, 217–38, and A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 1999)Google Scholar.

102 Tosh, “Old Adam,” 223.

103 Vickery, Amanda, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), 237–81Google Scholar.

104 For example, the chapter “Prudent Economy,” on women as domestic managers, in Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter, 127–60, could be matched with an equivalent investigation into men as housekeepers.

105 See, e.g., the autobiography of Benjamin Shaw. Crosby, Alan G., ed., The Family Records of Benjamin Shaw, Mechanic of Dent, Dolphinholme and Preston, 1771–1841 (Chester, 1991), 32–33 and passimGoogle Scholar.

106 Carter, Men and the Emergence, 130–31; Harvey, Reading Sex, chap. 4.

107 Post, John D., Food Shortage, Climatic Variability, and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe: The Mortality Peak in the Early 1740s (Ithaca, NY, 1985)Google Scholar; Schiebinger, Londa, “Gender and Natural History,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Jardine, N., Secord, J. A., and Spary, E. C. (Cambridge, 1996), 166–67Google Scholar.

108 Laura Gowing challenges this idea of crisis in Domestic Dangers, 28–29, arguing instead that gender “is always in contest.” We must allow room to talk about intensifications in debates, though.