Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale (review)

Pronounced enough to warrant a feature article in the May 11, 1998 issue of Newsweek magazine, the spate of books analyzing America's "crisis of boyhood" that made their appearance in the late 1990s sent shockwaves through the American media. Titles such as Michael Gurian's The Wonder of Boys: What Parents, Mentors, and Educators Can Do to Shape Boys into Exceptional Men (1996), William Pollack's Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), and James Garbarino's Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them (1999) varied somewhat in their approaches, but were in common agreement that America's boys had indeed become a "problem," which was getting increasingly more dangerous and required immediate attention. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone was concerned about America's boys.

This crisis of boyhood is the subject matter of the final chapter of Kenneth B. Kidd's Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale, in which the author makes the case that this sudden and pronounced anxiety about America's sons, and the many boy-rearing manuals it inspired, was in fact nothing new, but rather a revisitation of early twentieth-century "boyology," coupled with an insistence that boys needed to reassert their ferity against the domesticating (i.e., feminizing) forces of contemporary society. In this interesting and thoughtful study of twentieth-century American boyhood, Kidd examines the cultural history behind these two dominant and influential narratives about America's boys, arguing that "the ideological and practical work of boy education and supervision in America has been shaped by two main discourses: boyology, comprising descriptive and prescriptive writing on boyhood across a variety of genres, and . . . the feral tale, a narrative form derived from mythology and folklore that dramatizes but also manages the 'wildness' of boys" (1).

The term "boyology" is most commonly associated with YMCA leader and author Henry William Gibson, whose 1916 book Boyology or Boy Analysis guided the largely urban, white, middle-class "boy work" that was so popular in the early years of the twentieth century. In his opening chapters, however, Kidd traces the beginnings of this uniquely American movement much earlier, to conduct manuals aimed ostensibly at boys on the farm (in particular, the 1868 book Farming for Boys), the YMCA journal Rural Manhood, and the Bad Boy books of the postbellum period. This contextualization makes Kidd's book a refreshing complement to some of the existing treatments of boyology and boy work, such as Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992) and David I. Macleod's Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (1983). Both widening and deepening the scope of what is often seen as a turn-of-the-century phenomenon, Kidd argues that "even if boyology did not go industrial until the 1890s, it emerged as a discourse much earlier and survives still. Boyology was first literary in form, then also institutional, then also psychological" (18).

Kidd's main contribution to existing scholarship, however, is the unique and convincing connection he makes between boyology and what he calls the "feral tale," a "literary but still folkloric narrative of animal-human or cross-cultural encounter, in which childhood figures prominently" (3). The Boy Scout and Cub Scout movements, with their indebtedness to the animal stories of Rudyard Kipling, are of course the most obvious examples of the intersection between boyology and the feral tale, but Kidd makes a strong case that on a much broader scale "[b]y the early twentieth century, the feral boy had come to represent the ideal American male self, very much in the tradition of Emerson's 'aboriginal Self' and the literary boy-savage" (105). Evidence of this is found in the emergence of mass-market boy's literature, which featured everything from wolf-reared children in New York City to the forlorn (yet plucky!) reclusive naturalist's son with amnesia named "Bomba the Jungle Boy." Kidd examines...