Abstract
It may seem premature to raise the possibility of a redundant specialism when, as recently as the mid-1980s, the history of masculinity did not yet exist in Britain. Indeed, the very idea was absent from academic and popular discourse. Its modest beginnings were associated less with the discipline of history than with sociology; politically and conceptually it was indebted to socialist feminism. Those influences were critical at what turned out to be foundational moment for the history of masculinity. In September 1988 the theory section of the British Sociological Association convened in Bradford. The event was dominated by academics in social theory and social policy. Interest in history on the part of the delegates was minimal.1 But the conference was attended by a small number of historians, and the outcome for them was an informal study group — the first forum of any kind in Britain in which the history of masculinity was discussed. In due course the group produced the first theorised collection of essays on the history of masculinity in Britain.2 Even so, progress thereafter was slow. A panel on masculinity at a History Workshop in 1992 was thinly attended. The following year the theme of the Institute of Historical Research’s annual Anglo-American Conference was gender, but only a few papers on masculinity were featured. R.W. Connell was not far wrong in stating in 1993 that serious historical work on themes of masculinity was ‘extremely rare’.3
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David H.J. Morgan and Jeff Hearn (eds), Men, Masculinities and Social Theory (London, 1990).
Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London, 1991). This volume was preceded by J.A. Mangan and James Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality (Manchester, 1987): an important collection of case studies, but lacking a theoretical overview.
R.W. Connell, ‘The big picture: masculinities in recent world history’, Theory and Society 22 (1993), 606.
Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell and John Lee, ‘Hard and heavy: toward a new sociology of masculinity,’ in Michael Kaufman (ed.), Beyond Patriarchy (Toronto, 1987), p. 176.
Editorial, Gender and History 20 (2008), 2.
Peter Filene, Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2nd edn (Baltimore, 1986); Peter Stearns, Be A Man! Males in Modern Society (New York, 1979).
Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982).
David Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning (London, 1961).
Donald Bell, ‘Up from patriarchy: men’s role in historical perspective’, in Robert A. Lewis (ed.), Men in Difficult Times (Englewood Cliffs, 1981).
E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood (New York, 1993); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1997).
R.W. Connell, Gender and Power (Cambridge, 1987). For an assessment of Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity, see John Tosh, ‘Hegemonic masculinity and the history of gender’, in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War (Manchester, 2004), pp. 41–58.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ‘The female world of love and ritual: relations between women in nineteenth-century America’, Signs 1 (1975), 1–30.
Robert Bly, Iron John: a Book About Men (Shaftesbury, 1990). It is interesting to note that, despite Bly’s high profile, there was very little that could be described as a backlash men’s history.
Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977); Randolph Trumbach, ‘London’s sodomites: homosexual behaviour and Western culture in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Social History 11 (1977), 1–13; Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England.
For a study which engages with Queer theory, see Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Basingstoke, 2005).
Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London, 2009).
June Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst (London, 2002); Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (London, 1995).
Konstantin Dierks, ‘Men’s history, gender history, or cultural history?’, Gender and History 14 (2002), 150.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987); Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995).
See also Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Cambridge, 1995).
George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: the Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York, 1996).
Patrick Joyce, ‘The end of social history?’, Social History 20 (1995), 73–91.
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: the ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). For her theoretical reflections along these lines, see Sinha, ‘Giving masculinity a history: some contributions from the historiography of colonial India’, Gender and History 11 (1999), 445–60.
Stefan Dudink, ‘The trouble with men: problems in the history of “masculinity”’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 1 (1998), 419–31.
Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: a useful category of historical analysis’, American Historical Review 91 (1986), 1053–75.
M.E. Kann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York, 1998).
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992); Joan Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 2001). For further examples, see Dudink, Hagemann and Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War.
Kathleen Canning, Gender History in Practice (Ithaca, 2005), p. 74.
Carolyn Steedman, ‘Culture, cultural studies and the historians’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies (New York, 1992), p. 617.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London, 1975), p. 30.
Robert A. Nye, ‘Western masculinities in war and peace’, American Historical Review 112 (2007), 438. Similarly, most of the contributors to Dudink, Hagemann and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics and War, write about politics or war at one remove from party meeting or the battlefield, as if experience can take care of itself while they focus on the complexities of representation.
Martin Francis, ‘A flight from commitment?’, Gender and History 19 (2007), 163–85.
R.W. Connell, Arena 6 (1996), quoted in D.Z. Demetriou, ‘Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity: a critique’, Theory and Society 30 (2001), 340.
Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard, ‘What have historians done with masculinity? Reflections on five centuries of British history, circa 1500–1950’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), 276.
Michael Roper, ‘Slipping out of view: subjectivity and emotion in gender history’, History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), 57–72.
James Randall to wife, 29 July 1872, quoted in Rollo Arnold, The Farthest Promised Land: English Villagers, New Zealand Immigrants of the 1870s (Wellington, 1981), p. 11.
Dane Kennedy, ‘Imperial history and postcolonial theory’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24 (1996), 345–63.
Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002).
A. James Hammerton, ‘Gender and migration’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford, 2004), pp. 247–81.
J.S. Bratton, Richard Allen Cave, Breandan Gregory, Heidi J. Holder and Michael Pickering, Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930 (Manchester, 1991); Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005).
For a fuller consideration of these issues, see my ‘“All the masculine virtues”: English emigration to the colonies’, in John Tosh (ed.), Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (Harlow, 2005), pp. 173–91.
Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost Further Explored (London, 1983), p. 120. For a corrective, see Bridget Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1989), pp. 120–22.
Claudia Nelson, Invisible Men: Fatherhood in Victorian Periodicals, 1850–1910 (Athens, 1995).
John Gillis, A World of their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York, 1996).
David Roberts, ‘The paterfamilias and the Victorian governing classes’, in Anthony S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family (London, 1978).
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London, 1999), ch. 4.
A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London, 1992).
Trev Lynn Broughton and Helen Rogers (eds), Gender and Fatherhood in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke, 2007). See also the chapters in this present volume by Joanna Bailey, Rachel Moss and Robert Rutherdale.
Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005), p. 189.
Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds), Cultural History in Australia (Sidney, 2004), p. 13.
Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and Anna Clark (eds), Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture (Basingstoke, 2007); Heather Ellis and Jessica Meyer (eds), Masculinity and the Other: Historical Perspectives (Cambridge, 2009).
Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England (Harlow, 1999), and Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003).
Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, c. 1885–1914 (Cambridge, 2003); Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, 2005).
Joanne Bailey, lecture delivered at conference on ‘Masculinities and the Other’, Balliol College, Oxford, 29 August 2007. See further Joanne Bailey’s chapter in this volume.
The argument of this chapter is explored in relation to the practice of historians in general in my Why History Matters (Basingstoke, 2008).
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© 2011 John Tosh
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Tosh, J. (2011). The History of Masculinity: An Outdated Concept?. In: Arnold, J.H., Brady, S. (eds) What is Masculinity?. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307254_2
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