Masculinity, Power, and Political Activity in Early America

Feminist scholars, female and male, have long warned that all too often the mantle of universal historical subject has been bestowed on men, especially middling and elite white men. Successive generations of scholars have worked to incorporate gender—along with race and status—as a tool of analysis in achieving a more faithful depiction and more complete comprehension of the past. Until relatively recently, however, the bulk of work on gender in American history has focused on the important task of illuminating the experiences of women. Most historians and authors in related fields continued to portray men as ungendered, even as scholars trumpeted the centrality of gender in structuring social, cultural, economic, and political activities and relationships. Challenging this long-standing practice, books on manhood in early America have appeared with increasing frequency in recent years, supplementing a greater number of articles and book chapters, as scholars have explored the confluence of gender, race, and status in examinations of masculinity. In the course of these studies, a unitary definition of American manhood has not emerged. Rather, scholars studying manhood have revealed a fascinating tableau of American masculine identities constructed as the result of personal attributes, cultural practices, and historical processes.

This review examines four works whose authors intentionally incorporated gender analysis of men into the questions they asked about society and culture in early America, especially during the eighteenth century (though some also document earlier periods and transatlantic connections as a baseline, since gendered identity did not suddenly emerge in North America during the late colonial period). To a greater or lesser degree, each author explores the parameters of both formal participation in the body politic and other modes of political activity in early America, questioning the extent to which constructions of masculinity shaped men's abilities to express their views and to have them taken into consideration by other individuals and institutions within their communities. In so doing, they stress that although race and status shaped men's expectations and experiences as political actors, other factors—such as marital status or emotional comportment—were also key ingredients in the formation of political discourse.

Critics might be tempted to make glib accusations that some of the authors too narrowly focus on the enterprises of white men, but to do so would overlook the realities of the world early Americans inhabited. For instance, John Gilbert McCurdy's analysis of bachelors examines free white men from a variety of backgrounds, while Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan largely restricts her study to a coterie of educated and elite white men. Both authors, however, acknowledge that their work by necessity does not apply to all men in early America. This is not a shortcoming or an attempt, either intentional or inadvertent, to overlook African and Indian men: instead, it is an opportunity to view aspects of political participation and other elements of men's lives through the lens of their contemporary culture. Rather than yield to a modern imperative to be all-inclusive, McCurdy's work focuses on the men whom colonial lawmakers and authors (and most settlers) defined as bachelors, a designation that depended on race, status, and, in some cases, religious affiliation. He points out that white indentured servants signed contracts that prohibited them from marriage (thus removing them from the category of bachelor in colonial laws), that slaves remained single based on the wishes of their masters, and that certain religious communities, such as...