A Man’s World: Revisiting Histories of Men and Gender

Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, a group of historians gave defining shape to a literature on the history of masculinity in America. Building upon pathbreaking articles and essay collections in the previous decade, these scholars trumpeted a new direction for gender history. In quick succession, the definitive surveys and foundational monographs of a new history of men and masculinity appeared.¹ Not only had the formative texts surfaced during this prolific moment of new scholarship, but historians of gender stepped forward to assess critically the highlights and lowlights of what promised to be either an emerging subdiscipline of gender history or merely a fad of “men’s history.”²

As early as 1997, in a book review that should still be required reading for anyone wishing to write about the history of manhood, Gail Bederman wrote: “Two types of ‘men’s history’ are being written these days. One builds on twenty years of women’s history scholarship, analyzing masculinity as part of larger gender and cultural processes. The other . . . looks to the past to see how men in early generations understood (and misunderstood) themselves as men. Books of the second type mostly ignore women’s history findings and methodology.”³ Not every study of the lives and self-reflections of men has relied on the advances that feminist theorists and historians of women have brought to the analysis of gender. Bederman, along with Judith Allen and others, also observed that, too often, the new histories of men parroted the language of their historical subjects, positing American manhood in a perpetual state of “crisis,” a paradigm missing from histories of women in America.⁴

In 2004, nearing the end of this wave of pioneering scholarship, Toby Ditz questioned whether histories of manhood had progressed any further toward a truly gendered history. Ditz rightly observed that the first cohort of men’s history tended to focus on the sex-segregated spaces—fraternal orders, sporting venues, workplaces, and labor unions—where men developed conceptions of themselves in relation to other men but not necessarily in relation to women. In other words, women were not only excluded from these narratives, but these approaches, Ditz argued, encouraged histories of men “to downplay the deployment of gendered power over women by the men they studied.” By continuing to rely on the crisis paradigm, scholars produced narratives in which men defined themselves against other men and continually found themselves “anxious,” fragile, “imperiled,” and self-divided. Ditz issued a call instead for histories of masculinity that did not omit women but rather foregrounded the exercise of gendered power by men over women. Studies that investigate men’s access to women’s sexuality, reproduction, and labor offer the most promising directions for an integrative gender history.⁵

Practitioners of feminist history have long wished—even optimistically predicted—that specialized studies of men alone, even if these studies proposed to examine men as gendered beings, would one day be replaced by fully integrative histories of gender. Despite these hopes and critiques, it seems that histories solely about men and groups of men show no signs of retreating into a bygone pioneer era of men’s history. Brian P. Luskey’s Men on the Make and Richard Stott’s Jolly Fellows are two well-researched and elegantly written histories of men in primarily sex-segregated spaces in the nineteenth century. Although neither advances the history of masculinity in the directions advocated by Ditz, Luskey’s analysis is more in line with efforts to develop an integrative gender history.

On the Make tells the story of a group of young white men, commercial clerks, who captivated the interests of Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. The book is not so much a history of all...