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8 From Lord and Master to Cuckold and Fop Masculinity in 17th-Century England T hat many men are today “confused” about what it means to be a “real man”—that masculinity is in “crisis”—has become a cultural commonplace , staring out at us from every magazine rack and television talk show in the country. American men are increasingly cast as bumping up against the limits of traditional concepts of masculinity, attempting to push beyond the rigid role prescriptions that constrain male behavior and prevent men from more fully expressing intimacy and vulnerability, becoming more devoted and loving fathers, more sensitive lovers, and more compassionate friends to both women and other men. But to observe a crisis of masculinity begs three related questions. First, we must ask what we mean by the term “masculinity” at any particular moment. How is masculinity defined? What are its constituent elements? Second, how do we know this? What types of evidence can be examined to decipher normative prescriptions about appropriate behavior? And, finally, what types of events precipitate a “crisis” of masculinity, those moments of painful confusion and normless searching for new definitions of masculinity? Why do some historical eras evince such crises, while in other eras most men seem to possess a stable certainty in both attitudes and behaviors? In this essay, I will address these questions by examining one historical era in which masculinity was seen to be in crisis, an era in which radical challenges to inherited definitions of masculinity accompanied challenges to traditional gender relations. Through an empirical discussion of the renegotiation of gender relations in late 17th- and early 18th-century England, I will suggest the ways in which masculinity is defined as part of the larger social construction of gender relations, discuss the remarkable series of pamphlets that appeared in England that were devoted to renegotiating gender, and indicate those historical events that serve as the longer run precursors and the more immediate precipitants of a gender crisis.1 125 The Social Construction of Masculinity For decades, social science research on masculinity and femininity was dependent upon a “sex-role socialization” model in which biological males and biological females were socialized to fit into static containers based upon the appropriate enactment of a sex role. However, recent research from feminist scholars has demonstrated the inadequacy of this model, and instead has suggested a model of “gender relations” in its place. The gender relations model is dynamic and responsive to historical and social changes and emphasizes the ways in which masculinity and femininity are relational constructs that reproduce existing power relations between women and men in the normative definitions for either gender.2 The gender relations model also allows the observer to specify not only the reconstitution of gender over time, but also the directionality of changes in gender relations. The historical evidence from Restoration England suggests that while both masculinity and femininity are socially constructed within a historical context of gender relations, definitions of masculinity are historically reactive to changing definitions of femininity. Such a claim runs counter to traditional formulations of gender, such as David Riesman’s comment in The Lonely Crowd that “characterological change in the west seems to occur first with men” (1950, p. 18). But since powerful men benefit from inherited definitions of masculinity and femininity, they would be unlikely to initiate change. In particular, dominant men as a group have also benefited from the sex-role socialization model that has governed social and behavioral science’s treatment of gender, since it uses the dominant class’s concept of masculinity as the normative standard of reference and maximizes the distance between the two genders, while it minimizes the extent to which these definitions reproduce existing power relations, are historically variable, and are therefore open to challenge. If masculinity is socially constructed within a larger frame of a historical dynamic of gender relations, questions of crisis and change remain. To the historical sociologist, crises in gender relations occur at specific historical junctures , when structural changes transform the institutions of personal life, such as marriage, sexuality, and the family, and hence the possibilities of gender identity. These larger structural changes—in the organization of both agricultural and industrial work, in political relations—alter dramatically the organization of personal life. This new terrain of personal life allows some women to press claims for reorganization of family life and relations between women and men, that is, to redefine femininity. At these moments, as Smith-Rosenberg writes, “when the...

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