A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
achievement and produce a personality type that was . . . the hero of Horatio Alger.”29
America’s mainstream culture of manhood was further complicated by economic, religious, and regional variations of the traditional ideal and its alternatives. Farmers, artisans, gentlemen, Baptists, Congregationalists, northern commercial men, southern planters, and various fraternal groups relied on selective aspects of manhood to isolate dissenters, forge solidarity in their own ranks, build influential coalitions, and defeat opposing interests. Simultaneously, a libertine counterculture cast doubt on all major variations of manhood, while the uncertain gender status of African and Indian males added confusion to the mix. No one knew with confidence whether one alternative or another would predominate, what syntheses might emerge, or if America’s multiple masculinities pointed in any discernible direction. The contested old ideal endured alongside the competing newer ones.30 The chief limit on the cultural diversity of manhood was a general consensus that three norms were central to all manly ideals.
One consensual norm was that manhood required the economic and political independence sometimes known as “manly freedom.” A traditional patriarch relied on rents; a male in search of aristocratic manhood was likely to have a profession; a republican farmer worked his land, a craftsman his shop; and a self-made man acquired and invested capital. An independent man was self-supporting. He determined the nature and pace of his labor and kept free of others’ patronage and government relief. He could afford to have his own conscience and demanded the liberty to exercise his conscientious will in public. He claimed a right to resist any government that threatened to rob him of liberty and property, and he felt entitled to participate in public deliberations and decision making. A “man” was an independent agent of his personal and public destiny.31
The second consensual norm was that a mature man was a family man. A traditional patriarch governed a family estate, assisted by his wife and perpetuated by his sons; an aspirant to aristocratic manhood established a respectable family dynasty by wedding a genteel lady and teaching proper manners to his children; a republican farmer or artisan called on his wife to contribute to family welfare and passed on his land and skills to his sons; a self-made man entered into a lifetime partnership with his wife to build a family business and produce sons to sustain and enlarge it. The ubiquitous belief that every man should mature into the head of a family was predicated on the expectation that married men were relatively responsible and trustworthy men. For most Americans, manhood, marriage, and stability were nearly synonymous.
The third consensual norm was that manhood opposed womanhood. Joan Gundersen suggests that Americans used “a system of negative reference” to define manhood. An independent man was someone who was not a dependent woman or a slave to “effeminacy.” Americans also defined a mature man as someone who controlled women. Many years after the Revolution, Americans could still describe a married man as a “king in his family.” Critics of tyrannical husbands rarely questioned their authority over women but simply demanded that they conduct themselves with greater civility toward women. Even Judith Sargent Murray’s argument for “Equality of the Sexes” conceded male “superiority” to the extent that man was naturally meant to be woman’s “protector” and woman was naturally suited to transact “domestick affairs.”32
Manhood as an Oppositional Concept
Scholars have demonstrated that Western culture commonly defined manhood in opposition to womanhood. Nancy Hartsock writes that classical Greek theorists associated manhood with wisdom, virtue, and citizenship but tied womanhood to “dangerous, disorderly, and irrational forces” in conflict with truth and the public good. Hanna Pitkin reads Machiavelli’s republicanism as a story about male protagonists who seek manhood by conquering Fortuna, a symbol for treacherous women and antagonistic female forces such as sexuality, dependence, seduction, manipulation, fury, mystery, and chance. Men strive for independence, but Fortuna”threatens a man’s self-control, his mastery of his own passions.” Men who overcome destructive female forces achieve the liberty and civic virtue that constitute manhood and citizenship; those who fail suffer personal instability, social disorder, and political chaos. As such, “The feminine constitutes the other . . . opposed to manhood and autonomy in all their senses: to maleness, to adulthood, to humanness, and to politics.” Carole Pateman provides a complementary reading of modern liberal theory as a tale about men who forge a sexual contract to subordinate women and insulate political society against “the disorder of women,” whose “bodily natures and sexual passions” threaten to subvert the rule of law.33
Similarly, late-eighteenth-century Americans assessed male worth in opposition to female disorders. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that Americans equated manhood to self-control, productivity, virtue, and independence but linked womanhood (a “negative other”) to seduction, deceit, luxury, and dependence. Linda Kerber dissects Americans’ “gender-specific” citizenship to reveal concepts of ownership, military service, suffrage, and civic virtue that wed public life to male prerogative over disorderly women. Ruth Bloch states that Americans reproduced gender domination by urging patriots to seek manly “glory” and conquer female vices such as “idleness, luxury, dependence.” Philip Greven suggests that Americans construed the Revolution as a choice between republican “manliness” and monarchic “femininity” and, Susan Juster adds, they carried on the Revolution “against, not merely without, women.” Joan Gundersen, Christine Stansell, and Judith Shklar all agree that patriots “heightened and reinforced” their claim to independence by contrasting it to female dependence. Joan Hoff contends that the framers institutionalized male rights, interests, and opportunities in a market society regulated by a “masculine system of justice” and “the masculinity of the Constitution.” Joyce Appleby summarizes the result: “The liberal hero was male.” His proper companion, Jan Lewis concludes, was the “republican wife” who managed her family’s moral reclamation and civic education.34
Scholars of American manhood generally agree that late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans perpetuated gender opposition. Rotundo identifies the liberal language of the founding era with “the male self,” and Kimmel pinpoints “femininity” as the “negative pole” against which men defined themselves. David Pugh argues that the Sons of Liberty displaced their anxieties onto malignant “female qualities” such as “smothering materialism and effeminate inaction,” while Michael Rogin suggests that the Jacksonian Era’s male mystique was part of men’s struggle “to rescue sons from maternal power.” Joe Dubbert characterizes the nineteenth century as an era when male “domination, supremacy, and control” in public life stood in opposition to women’s moralism in private life. Finally, Kimmel and Peter Filene ascribe a late-nineteenth-century “crisis of masculinity” to male fears that women were making boys effeminate.35
Remarkably, the academic accord that Americans defined manhood against womanhood is supported by a wealth of cultural evidence but a dearth of direct political evidence. One can review thousands of pages of foundingera political documents that dwell on virtually every aspect of men’s relations without encountering more than a rare reference to women’s existence. Political discourse was male-centered, as if men were doing what came naturally when they presumed to monopolize power and ignore women’s potential or presence as public persons. Christine Stansell points out that female figures were omnipresent in literature but “almost invisible” in politics. The Federalist Papers was typical. It spoke volumes about male power and politics but provided only two tertiary comments about women. When writers and speakers actually injected women into political discourse, they usually did so to make a point about men. For example, John Adams discussed women’s exclusion from suffrage to show that unpropertied men also should be excluded. Anna Jónasdóttir’s insight into Hobbes and Locke also applies to Adams and his contemporaries: “Women are used as a device of argument only to be deftly shuffled out of sight once they have served their purpose.”36
Still, gender opposition did have a substantial indirect influence on political discourse. To begin, it shaped the philosophical foundations of American political thought. Genevieve Lloyd observes that “the maleness of reason” was deeply embedded in Western political thought. Conceptions