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Similarly, though with less emphasis on social activism, partic­ individual experiences of masculinity along racial, ethnic, ipants in the 1960s counterculture sought personal liberation class, and sexual-preference lines. from mainstream institutions in an effort to recover what they considered an authentic, natural masculinity. BIBLIOGRAPHY Masculinity and individualism remained closely associ­ Hayden, Tom. Port Huron Statement: The Founding Manifesto of ated during the 1970s. As a turn away from the social activism Students fo r a Democratic Society. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, of the 1960s and a growing cultural emphasis on self-exami­ 1990. nation and self-realization led the writer To m Wolfe to dub Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New this period the "me decade," American men sought to assert York: Free Press, 1996. their masculinity through attention to personal health and Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in physical fitness. Bodybuilding, once deemed narcissistic, Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: enjoyed a new popularity among men seeking extreme physi­ Basic Books, 1993. cal fo rms of self-realization. Whyte, William H. The Organization Man. New Yo rk: Simon & Ronald Reagan's presidency suggested that rugged indi­ Schuster, 1956. vidualism once again became a primary element of American Wills, Gary. Reagan' s America: Innocents at Home. New Yo rk: manliness in the 1980s. Reagan sought to project an image of Doubleday, 1987. virile masculinity, an image he consistently associated with personal responsibility, individual initiative, and self-assur­ FURTHER READING ance. His probusiness and antiwelfare policies, which appealed Bellah, Robert, et al.Ha bits of the Heart: Individualism and particularly to male business leaders and other white men, Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California likewise signaled a return to traditional individualism. That Press, 1985. Reagan and his conservative political supporters simultane­ Clark, Keith. Black Ma nhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and ously ended feminists' hope fo r passage of the Equal Rights August Wilson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1982 suggests that his Connell, R. W. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California was a particularly male brand of individualism. Press, 1995. Yet the twentieth century also witnessed a gradual erosion of the traditional association between individualism and RELATED ENTRIES (white) masculinity. The growing success of movements advo­ Abolitionism; African-American Manhood; American Revolution; cating the rights of women and nonwhite men meant that Bodybuilding; Business/Corporate America; Capitalism; white males ceased to maintain their domination of the politi­ Confidence Man; Counterculture; Crockett, Davy; Darwinism; cal and economic worlds, and that others besides white males Douglass, Frederick; Great Depression; Market Revolution; Men's participated in established American patterns of individualism. Movements; Men's Studies; Organization Man, The; By the late 1980s and 1990s, the traditionally close rela­ Postmodernism; Reagan, Ronald; Reform Movements; tion between masculinity and individualism was further Republicanism; Self-Made Man; Slave Narratives challenged by new intellectual trends. Influenced by post­ -Erika Ku hlman modernism, scholars in gender studies emphasized that gen­ der definitions are socially constructed rather than innately connected to biological sex, and that masculinity thus varies INDUSTRIALIZATION across human societies. In addition, the unifiednotion of self­ hood that had informed the traditional concept of individual­ The process of industrialization, which began in the United ism in American culture gave way to a fr agmented sense of self States during the early nineteenth century, had an enormous that included multiple, and sometimes conflicting, self-identi­ impact on American constructions of masculinity. It compli­ ties. With the concepts of both masculinity and individualism cated preindustrial notions of manhood based on male patri­ called into question, the nature of the relation between archal control over family and household, while also them-or whether there was any meaningful relation at all­ generating new and often class-based definitions of gender. became unclear. The sense of a fixed, hegemonic model of For some segments of the male population, industrialization individualism associated with white men continues to be eroded two critical foundations of preindustrial male patri­ eroded by a dynamic, diverse model that recognizes differing archy: It reduced the importance of property ownership and a

232 INDUSTRIALIZATION moved productive, income-generating labor out of the home. Massachusetts, which were built later, involved no similar In doing so, it opened up opportunities for social and cultural effort to preserve preindustrial patriarchal relations. experimentation with definitions of manhood both in and outside the workplace. Men were able to shape these new artic­ The Breadwinner Ideal ulations of masculinity to some extent, but the impact of Across class lines, men counteracted the limitations that industrialization on their work and on the economic fo unda­ industrialization imposed on patriarchy by monopolizing tions of their lives also set the parameters for their redefinition income-generating productive labor. Accompanying and jus­ of themselves as men. tifying this development was a new definition of manhood, that of primary family breadwinner. This concept was Household Production, Proto-Industrialization, grounded in an increasing emphasis on gender difference, and Patriarchy and on the notion of men's unique suitability for the new Through the late eighteenth century, most American house­ forms of work generated by industrialization. The breadwin­ holds were sites of preindustrial production grounded firmly ner ideal had a mixed effect on male domestic authority and in patriarchal authority, which in turn was a fundamental masculine identity. On the one hand, it made men, their component of masculine identity. Between 1790 and 1815, manliness, and their ability to provide economic security for however, the nature of both household production and their families dependent on market fo rces beyond their con­ household patriarchy began to shift. Commodity production trol. By disrupting the link between men's work and their in the countryside and in urban households intensified as households, moreover, it reduced the time that most fathers merchants increased investment in domestic markets and the spent at home, which limited their control over their wives development of manufactures. This early commodity pro­ and children. It also rendered them less able to validate duction, or proto-industrialization, actually relied on the themselves by transmitting their skills to a son or apprentice patriarchal family unit and its social relations to organize, or by steering their sons into their own career paths. Yet at mobilize, and discipline a spatially dispersed workforce and the same time, the male breadwinner actually held a greater produce goods for expanding markets. In and around Lynn, share of domestic economic power than had the preindus­ Massachusetts, fo r instance, merchants and artisans began in trial patriarch, and breadwinning reinforced men's ability to the 1780s to create a thriving shoe industry based on a "put­ provide for their wives and children. ting out" system in which entrepreneurs supplied raw mate­ rials to widely dispersed farm families working out of their Masculinity and Class own homes. Such forms of household-based commodity Industrialization created a new social division between those production actually reinforced domestic patriarchy, since the who owned or managed business establishments (the emer­ father/husband mediated the relation between the income­ gent middle class) and those who worked under these owners generating family members and the artisan or merchant who and managers as working-class wage earners. Male experi­ supplied the raw material. ences, and the definitions of masculinity that these generated, Eventually, however, the success and profitability of this varied across this class line. In general, working-class men form of household production enabled master artisans, mer­ found that the craft-based skills in which they had tradition­ chants, and shopkeepers to relocate and concentrate work ally grounded their ideas of manly labor were undermined and processes into workshops, thus undermining traditional increasingly replaced by new technologies. Middle-class men, household patriarchy. This process was uneven in its applica­ meanwhile, were able to fo rm new definitions of masculinity tion. In the 1790s, Samuel Slater hired whole fa mily units for around their work, particularly the appropriation and adminis­ his textile mills in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and even tration of entrepreneurial and organizational prerogatives for­ purchased land fo r heads of households to support a combi­ merly under the purview of artisans and small-scale producers. nation of industrial labor and subsistence agriculture. He Both groups of men formed and expressed new class-based then sought to incorporate household patriarchy and the ideals of manhood inside and outside the workplace. family as a productive unit, and to channel the social disci­ For working-class men, a heightened emphasis on male pline these relations helped to generate into industrial man­ physical ability enabled them to reassure themselves of their ufacturing. But while the Slater Mills relied on the manliness and respond to the pressures of industrialization. patriarchal fa mily unit to maintain industrial discipline Although industrialization would ultimately result in the among its workers, the textile mills at Waltham and Lowell, mechanization and de-skilling of many work tasks, early INDUSTRIALIZATION 233 industrialization, with its demand fo r productivity and its notion of the working man as a consumer that emerged in the comparatively primitive machinery, actually increased the twentieth century. demand fo r physical strength in such industries as metallurgy, Whereas industrialization imposed more rigid fo rms of mining, and textiles. In many trades, working-class men workplace discipline and control over working-class men, it expressed their class-based masculinity by asserting their inde­ generated outlets fo r masculine self-expression at work fo r pendence, craft skills, and control over the shop floor, thus middle-class men. With the onset of new technologies, admin­ challenging managerial prerogatives and control of work istrative and scientific functions (such as engineering, processes. In trades such as steel, glass blowing, or printing, accounting, and chemistry) gained significance in industry craft skills remained significant in many aspects of the pro­ around the mid-nineteenth century. As new machinery duction process, and craftworkers continued to define their replaced craft and physical skills, it generated demands for identities as workers and as men around their craft-based administrative skills and produced an inclination among mid­ autonomy on the shop floor. dle-class men to distinguish between their intellectual labor Resistance at work represented another such outlet avail­ and what they considered the inferior, and even animalistic, able to working-class men. Labor and crowd action, bread physical labor of working-class men. Middle-class men riots, and price riots did not represent a new phenomenon, but increasingly definedtheir masculinity in terms of those quali­ in the eighteenth century such social uprisings were commu­ ties that characterized business in industrializing America: nity-based rather than work- or class-based, and they also rationality, competitiveness, efficiency, and frugality. With the included both men and women. While women workers in such growing bureaucratization of American business that accom­ industries as textiles and needlework went on strike just as panied advancing industrialization later in the nineteenth cen­ men did, the nineteenth century witnessed a masculinization tury, definitions of middle-class manhood expanded to of such fo rms of protest, which were increasingly organized include teamwork, loyalty, and professionalism. Off the job, through labor and trade unions that grew out of men's middle-class men of the nineteenth century cultivated a gen­ homo social workplace bonds. teel model of manly deportment that-in conscious distinc­ Working-class men also defined and asserted their mas­ tion from working-class behavioral patterns-embraced culinity off the job. The industrializing city offered a range of temperance, social etiquette, and refinement. boisterous amusements that became key settings fo r public Industrialization also generated new patterns of fathering demonstrations of manliness. Drinking alcohol-a traditional in the middle class. Whereas working-class fathers had to element of artisanal labor, but increasingly stigmatized by worry about how they might prepare their sons fo r the new middle-class men as incompatible with productive effi­ industrial workplace, middle-class fathers had to provide their ciency-became fo r the new industrial labor force both an offspring with more formal education to enable sons to choose important badge of one's physical stamina and a rejection of their own career paths. Middle-class men, in particular, meas­ middle-class morality. Theaters in working-class neighbor­ ured their manhood through their ability to ensure their sons' hoods, where middle-class male patrons were often unwel­ upward social mobility, and thereby preserve their families' come and risked fo rced removal, served a similar function. often tenuous middle-class status. For these men, the role of By the late nineteenth century, as advancing mechaniza­ the breadwinner included the expectation to provide their tion increasingly de-skilled more and more tasks and work children with increasing numbers of years of schooling. Their processes and undermined craft-based prerogatives at work, sons, meanwhile, enjoyed greater autonomy than had their working-class men's responses to industrialization began to preindustrial counterparts in choosing their own careers, and change. More traditional segments of the working class, they viewed their freedom in determining their professional inspired by a craft-based ideal of manhood, sought to resur­ life as an expression of their own achievement of manhood. rect artisanal production and a community of producers by organizing the relatively short-lived Knights of Labor organi­ Gender Hierarchy in the Industrial Wo rkplace zation, which did not survive a series of strikes in 1886. A more Industrialization posed a potential threat to the traditional gen­ accommodationist wing of the labor movement, represented der hierarchy of preindustrial patriarchy by creating opportuni­ by the American Federation of Labor, accepted the loss of ties fo r women to enter the labor fo rce and achieve economic workplace prerogatives and sought better financial compensa­ independence. But in such industries as textiles and needlework, tion of its members to attain the newer breadwinner ideal. which relied heavily on female workforces, men held supervi­ This mostly male labor organization paved the way for the sory positions, in effect restoring some measure of patriarchal a

234 INDUSTRIALIZATION control. Furthermore, in those industries that tended to rely on bodies and their bodily conduct with an emerging capitalist women as a cheap labor supply, male workers and middle-class regime of accumulation and delayed gratification. As middle­ reformers demanded a reduction in working hours fo r women class men emphasized self-restraint and self-control to the on the grounds that women either lacked men's physical point of repressing their libidos, they also linked definitionsof strength and stamina or were required in their homes as moth­ manliness to class difference, as working-class men did not fol­ ers. Working men who supported such laws most probably had low the same mandates. the well-being of their daughters and wives in mind, yet their aspiration to the domestic power of the sole breadwinner was Conclusion probably also a factor. Middle-class men, on the other hand, jus­ Industrialization affected definitions and cultural construc­ tified the gender division of labor and their dominance of tions of manliness by undermining patriarchal control over emerging entrepreneurial, professional, and bureaucratic work the household, cutting the spatial link between work and not on technological or physical necessity, but on what they home, and prompting the fo rmation of new class-based mas­ considered to be women's lack of capacity fo r rational thought culinities. Men redefined manliness through the role of the and self-control. New codes of manliness that emphasized breadwinner, by generating new codes of manliness on the job, expertise, knowledge, and mental power supported this belief. and through sexuality. While the separation of masculinity fromproperty ownership and household patriarchy cut across Masculinity and Sexuality in Industrializing class lines, industrialization also affected men and masculinity America in class-specificways . Middle-class men had more cultural and Industrialization and the accompanying process of urbaniza­ economic resources at their command to actively generate new tion provided one final arena for defining and demonstrating articulations of manliness than did working-class men. As a masculinity: sexuality. During the nineteenth century, sex social and cultural construct, American masculinity took new became an increasingly important signifier of manliness (par­ forms as industrialization generated the social and cultural ticularly among working-class men) and the age at which men dynamics of a modern society. tended to become sexually active dropped from twenty-five to eighteen. No longer able to rely on property as a means of BIBLIOGRAPHY patriarchal control and with work often no longer an integral Barker-Benfield, Graham J. The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: part of household activities, sex became a last resort fo r the Male Attitudes toward Wo men and Sexuality in Nineteenth­ exercise of patriarchal power among men. As industrialization Century America. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. made the achievement of manhood through work dependent Blumin, Stuart. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience on the shifts in labor markets, and as the acquisition of prop­ in the American City, 1760-1900. Cambridge, England: erty became uncertain, men could validate themselves through Cambridge University Press, 1989. sexual domination of women. Indeed, antebellum New York Coontz, Stephanie. The Social Origins of Private Life : American City witnessed an increase in rapes and sexual assaults on Families, 1600-1900. New Yo rk: Verso, 1988. women. Industrialization made sex available as a compensa­ Gorn, Elliot J. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in tory outlet for men in more direct ways as well: Female needle America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. workers, working out of their own homes in New Yo rk under Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New abysmal conditions in the 1830s and 1840s, frequently had to York: Free Press, 1996. resort to casual prostitution to make ends meet. Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. For middle-class men, meanwhile, sexuality became a new Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. territory fo r asserting the self-control so crucial to middle-class McGaw, Judith A. Most Wo nderfu l Machine: Mechanization and definitions of manhood. Advice writers such as William Alcott, Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885. Princeton, Sylvester Graham, Augustus Kingsley Gardiner, and John To dd N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. counseled self-restraint in all bodily matters, and especially in Stearns, Peter N. Be a Man! Males in Modern Society. 2nd ed. New all sexual matters. Masturbation, while never encouraged in York: Holmes & Meier, 1990. preindustrial society, was now condemned as wasteful of potentially productive male energy. Sexual activity, contempo­ FURTHER READING rary observers advised, was best restricted to procreation only. Baron, Ava, ed. Wo rk Engendered: Toward a New History of American Middle-class men, then, were admonished to synchronize their Labor. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.