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1 Invisible Masculinity A merican men have no history. Sure, we have stacks of biographies of the heroic and famous, and historical accounts of events in which men took part, like wars, strikes, or political campaigns. And we have group portraits of athletes, soldiers, and the men who run unions and political parties. There are probably thousands of histories of institutions that were organized, staffed, and run by men. So how is it that men have no history? Until the intervention of women’s studies, it was women who had no history, who were invisible, the “other.” Still today, virtually every history book is a history of men. If a book does not have the word “women” in its title, it is a good bet that the book is about men. But these books feel strangely empty at their centers, where the discussion of men should be. Books about men are not about men as men. These books do not explore how the experience of being a man structured the men’s lives, or the organizations and institutions they created, the events in which they participated. American men have no history as gendered selves; no work describes historical events in terms of what these events meant to the men who participated in them as men. What does it mean, then, to write of men as men? We must examine the ways in which the experience of manhood has structured the course and the meanings of the activities of American men—great or small. We must chart the ways in which meanings of manhood have changed over the course of American history. And we must explore the ways in which the pursuit of that elusive ideal of manhood, and our relentless efforts to prove it, have animated many of the central events in American history. This is not to say that simply looking at the idea of manhood, or injecting gender into the standard historical approach, will suddenly, magically, illuminate the American historical pageant. We cannot understand manhood without understanding American history—that is without locating the changing definitions of manhood within the larger context of the economic, political , and social events that characterize American history. By the same token, 3 American history cannot be fully understood without an understanding of American men’s ceaseless quest for manhood in the evolution of those economic , political, social, and cultural experiences and events. Such a perspective should shed new light on the events that dot our history and the lives of the men who made them. Composer Charles Ives insisted that Impressionistic music was “sissy” and that he wanted to use traditional tough guy sounds to build a more popular and virile music. Architect Louis Sullivan , the inventor of the skyscraper, described his ambition to create “masculine forms”—strong, solid, tall, commanding respect. Political figures, like the endless parade of presidential hopefuls, have found it necessary both to proclaim their own manhood and to raise questions about their opponents’ manhood. Think about the 1840 presidential campaign, when William Henry Harrison ’s supporters chastised Martin Van Buren as “Little Vanny,” and a “used up man.” Andrew Jackson vented his manly rage at “effete” bankers and “infantilized” Indians. Theodore Roosevelt thundered about the strenuous life while he prepared invasions of Panama and the Philippines. Then there was Lyndon Johnson’s vainglorious claim during the Tet offensive of the Vietnam War that he did not just “screw” Ho Chi Minh, but “cut his pecker off!” After the vice-presidential debate with Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, George Bush boasted that he had “kicked a little ass.” Then he squared off with television commentator Dan Rather in 1988 to dispel his wimp image. From the founding of the Republic, presidents have demonstrated their manhood in the political arena and have sent millions of America’s young men to die to prove it. If the pursuit of manhood has been a dominant theme in American history , at least rhetorically and metaphorically, why do American men still have no history? In part because they do not even know what questions to ask. In the past 25 years, the pioneering work of feminist scholars, both in traditional disciplines and in women’s studies, has made us increasingly aware of the centrality of gender in shaping social life. In the past, social scientists would have only listed class and race as the master statuses that defined and proscribed social life. But today, gender has joined race and class as one of the...

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