A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
for hegemony often involves the culture of manhood. Male elites promote a “hegemonic masculinity” that deploys norms of manhood to justify dominant authority and encourage mass deference to it. Elites also foster “conservative” or “complicit masculinities” that urge men to accept and benefit from dominant male norms and institutions; and they identify, stigmatize, and punish “subordinated” or “marginal masculinities” that potentially undermine political stability. Unlike ideologies that appeal to men’s minds, hegemonic masculinity taps into the deepest recesses of men’s psychosexual, social, and political identities. Many scholars believe that one of men’s strongest motives has involved male rivalry. Men have found it exhilarating to be elevated above other men; and they have felt degraded when treated “as a boy and not a man.”61 By controlling the criteria for male elevation and degradation, elites who join hegemony to manhood significantly strengthen their ability to secure men’s consent and quiescence.
That is what American founders did. They promoted hegemonic masculinity as part of their effort to restrain disorderly male passions, temper men’s democratic desires, restore fraternal order, and reconstitute political authority. They advanced a coherent conception and language of manhood based on the consensual norms that enjoined males to establish independence, start families, and govern dependents to achieve manhood and procreate new generations. They stigmatized, sanctioned, and reformed disorderly men, whose marginal masculinity associated them with dependency, effeminacy, immaturity, and sterility. They rewarded the complicit masculinity of men who conformed to consensual norms by recognizing their social merit and citizenship. And they promised immortal fame along with social status and political authority to extraordinary men who, like themselves, procreated a new nation and glorious future for humankind.
The founders also appropriated aspects of America’s contested ideals of manhood to stabilize and fine-tune the male pecking order of the new republic. For example, they attacked the self-interested manhood of males who failed to settle into family life, but they generally applauded the self-interested manhood of married men who worked to protect and provision their families. Moreover, they emphasized the ideal of republican manhood when defining citizenship but drew more heavily on images of aristocratic manhood and traditional patriarchy to legitimize the political authority and prerogative of national leaders. The founders rarely debated the alternative ideals of manhood, but they habitually relied on them to educate the consent of the governed.
Judith Sargent Murray’s call for every American “to play the man for his country” conveyed two implicit but unmistakable messages. First, greater sexual equality may have been conceivable for the home, but men were to be the sole arbiters of the nation’s political fate. Second, all men may have been born free and equal, but each male had to measure up to standards of manhood to earn citizenship or merit leadership status. Murray’s language was not unusual. Indeed, it was a representative sample of the “grammar of manhood” that the founders used to promote hegemonic norms of manhood, secure men’s consent, define citizenship, and legitimize political authority.
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The Grammar of Manhood
The American founders coupled the concept of manhood to the language of liberty. Benjamin Franklin proclaimed that his grandfather’s essay on liberty was written with “manly freedom” and Thomas Paine explained that Common Sense was meant to prepare the way for “manly principles of independence.” John Adams praised his Puritan ancestors for their “manly assertion of. . . rights” and “manly pertinacious spirit” against tyranny while Thomas Jefferson applauded his American brethren for demonstrating “manly firmness” and “manly spirit” by renouncing British authority and declaring independent nationhood.1 Manhood modified liberty and thereby injected an element of masculine merit into the rhetoric of early American citizenship.
One reason the founders joined manhood to liberty was to motivate males to be warriors in the struggle against Great Britain. They delivered the message that men who trumpeted the glories of liberty and triumphed over its enemies merited the honor and respect due to manhood as well as the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. Thomas Paine and Abigail Adams sent a complementary message to men who opposed the patriot cause or did not join it. Paine wrote that any male who lent credence to Tory propaganda was “an apostate from the order of manhood.” Adams declared that men who did “not fight and defend their own particular spot. . . deserve the slavery and subjection which awaits them.”2 The unmistakable implication was that those men who failed to measure up to martial manhood were unworthy of liberty and citizenship.
A second reason the founders joined manhood and liberty was to promote an ethic of self-restraint. Patrick Henry applauded the “manly fortitude” that encouraged men to sacrifice popularity for moral integrity while James Otis, Jr., honored “manly sentiments” that enjoined men to sacrifice “health, ease, estate, or even life” for freedom. Paine gloried in the “manly and martial spirit” that disciplined soldiers and Benjamin Franklin cheered the “manly constancy” that kept men calm in the midst of hardship. George Washington called for “manly conduct” to transform demobilized soldiers into self-disciplined citizens and others pleaded for “manly reflection” to inhibit licentiousness, “manly graces” to cure conflict, “manly confidence” to bind citizens to officials, and “manly reverence” to foster obedience to the U.S. Constitution and its “manly government.”3 Men who engaged in licentious conduct and democratic excess deserved to be marginalized, stigmatized, ostracized, and even deprived of liberty, while those who exhibited manly self-restraint earned the freedom to practice responsible citizenship and promote the public good.
The founders promoted the idea that men should be enthusiastic in the cause of liberty but restrained in the exercise of liberty by elaborating a grammar of manhood. Their grammar drew on hegemonic norms of manhood to encourage disorderly men to conform to a standard of manly conduct conducive to individual self-restraint, good citizenship, and public order. Their grammar of manhood also articulated consensual criteria for sorting out the ranks of men, restoring order to them, and legitimizing leadership authority in the new republic. The founders’ main motivation for deploying the grammar of manhood was to encourage men to discipline democratic desire; a crucial consequence of their use of it was to develop and disseminate ideas of citizenship and leadership that precluded women from political participation.
Manhood in Time
George Washington saw the American Revolution as a test of whether Americans could “act like men and prove themselves worthy of the blessings of freedom.” What did it mean to act like men? The founders drew on consensual norms embedded in the culture of manhood to emphasize male independence and family responsibility in opposition to female dependence and slavery. They sang “The Liberty Song” in praise of “worthy forefathers” who “bequeathed us their liberty,” and they committed themselves to protect and perpetuate liberty “for our children.” When “each manly breast” was “call’d to bleed” in defense of liberty, those who answered the call made themselves “dear to every free-born mind” and eligible for “deathless fame,” while those who exhibited fear or lethargy deserved to be “stripp’d of their freedom,” “robb’d of their right,” and shamed by patriotic “Daughters of Liberty.” To act like men, concludes Philip Greven, meant to inherit, defend, and transmit the liberty that enabled citizens to be “self-assertive and self-willed in public,” not dependent, effeminate, or enslaved.4 The founders elaborated this hegemonic vision of manhood in an autobiographical story about procreative men giving bloody birth to a new people, land, fraternity, leadership, and nation.
The founders’ saga was based on the ancient assertion that fertile males procreated children. Gerda Lerner recalls that the Bible told of man generating woman from his rib and planting the active seed of life “in the passive receptacle of woman’s womb.” Anna Jønasdøttir adds that Greek philosophers elevated the status of the male seed by asserting that “light and beautiful male seminal fluid” was the source of humanity’s higher sensibilities and the conduit of civilization from generation to generation. Seventeenth-century Englishmen idealized male fecundity.