The history of masculinity, circa 1650-1800

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 44, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 296-311

  Harvey, Karen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33744788525     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/427126     Document Type: Review

References (117)

1. June Purvis and Amanda Weatherill, "Playing the Gender History Game: A Reply to Penelope J. Corfield," Rethinking History 3, no. 3 (1999): 333-38, 335. Some of us working in history departments know that gender history is just as embattled as women's history, however
2. Catherine Hall, "Politics, Post-structuralism and Feminist History," Gender and History 3, no. 2 (1991): 204-10, 210
3. See also Puras and Weatherill, "Playing the Gender History Game."
4. Judith Bennett, "Feminism and History," Gender and History 1 (1989): 251-72, 258
5. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 2
6. Michael Roper and John Tosh, "Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity," in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London, 1991), 1
7. See, e.g., many of the entries in "What Is Women's History?" History Today 35 (1985): 38-48
8. Juxtapose them with the comments in Penelope J. Corfield, "History and the Challenge of Gender History," Rethinking History 1, no. 3 (1997): 241-58
9. Bennett, "Feminism and History," 259
10. Judith Bennett - prompted by the publication of Joan Scott's Gender and the Politics of History -worried that the emphasis of gender history was on symbols, not material realities of inequality. See Bennett, "Feminism and History." This is part of a revival of the "social," as evidenced in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, "Introduction," in Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1999)
11. The same is called for in Elizabeth A. Clark's "The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the 'Linguistic Turn,'" Church History 67, no. 1 (March 1998): 1-31
12. Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (Harlow, 1999), 3
13. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1996), 3
14. David Turner's Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England, 1660-1740 (Cambridge, 2002) is another example of the latter
15. Robert W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, 1995), 77
16. See Bernard Capp, "Separate Domains? Women and Authority in Early Modern England," in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (Basingstoke, 1996), 126-27
17. Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 195-205
18. Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (1977; Cambridge, 1978), table 1.4, 26. These figures are based on a population of 7 ,837 from six parishes between 1599 and 1796
19. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England, 55
20. Karen Harvey, "'The Majesty of the Masculine Form': Multiplicity and Male Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Erotica," in English Masculinities, 1660-1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (Harlow, 1999), 194
21. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (1995; New Haven, CT, 1999), xvi
22. Bennett, "Feminism and History," 263-66
23. Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 345
24. Randolph Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. M. B. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey (Harmondsworth, 1989)
25. Rachel Weil, "Sometimes a Sceptre Is Only a Sceptre: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England," in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York, 1994)
26. See Harold Love, "Refining Rochester: Private Texts and Public Readers," Harvard Library Bulletin 7 (1996): 40-49, on the changing reputation of Rochester based on his poetry
27. The key text regarding Renaissance sodomites remains Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982)
28. See also Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England," History Workshop Journal 29 (1990): 1-19
29. Alan Stewart, "Homosexuals in History: A. L. Rowse and the Queer Archive," and Nicholas F. Radel, "Can the Sodomite Speak? Sodomy, Satire, Desire, and the Castlehaven Case," both in Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800, ed. Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke (Basingstoke, 2003)
30. A queer version of this article is possible, but the focus is, I admit, almost exclusively heterosexual. For libertinism in the later eighteenth century, see John Sainsbury, "Wilkes and Libertinism," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 26 (1998): 151-74
31. Anna Clark, "Wilkes and d'Eon: The Politics of Masculinity, 1763-1778," in Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 1 (1998): 19-48
32. Trumbach, "Birth of the Queen," 165
33. See also Randolph Trumbach, "Sex, Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment London, '"Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991): 186-203
34. Philip Carter, "Men about Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth-Century Urban Society," in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (Harlow, 1997)
35. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660-1800 (Harlow, 2001)
36. Carter, "Men about Town," 53
37. Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 23-50, 172-93
38. Elizabeth Foster, "Boys Will Be Boys? Manhood and Aggression, 1660-1800," in English Masculinities, 151-66
39. Robert B. Shoemaker, "Reforming Male Manners: Public Insult and the Decline of Violence in London, 1660-1740," in English Masculinities, 133-50
40. Carter, Men and the Emergence, 190-91
41. Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996)
42. Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680-1780 (New York, 1998), 88
43. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998), 195-223
44. Margaret Hunt, "Domesticity and Women's Independence in Eighteenth-Century London," Gender and History 4 (1992): 10-33
45. Elizabeth Foyster, "Creating a Veil of Silence? Politeness and Marital Violence in the English Household," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 395-415
46. See Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 116-56, on macaronis in Vauxhall Gardens
47. Brian Cowan, "What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in Post-Restoration England," History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 127-57, 136
48. Steven Pincus, '"Coffee Politicians does Create': Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture," Journal of Moden History 67 (1996): 807-34, esp. 816
49. Helen Berry, '"Nice and Curious Questions': Coffee Houses and the Representation of Women in John Dunton's Athenian Mercury," Seventeenth Century 12 (1997): 257-76
50. Markham Ellis, "Coffee-Women, 'The Spectator' and the Public Sphere," in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O' Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton (Cambridge, 2001), 37, 39
51. Helen Berry, "Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King's Coffee House and the Significance of Flash Talk," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 11 (2001): 65-81
52. Quotation from Cowan, "What Was Masculine about the Public Sphere?" 141
53. Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 83-98, 322-46
54. Robert B. Shoemaker, "Taming of the Duel: Masculinity, Honour, and Ritual Violence in London, 1660-1800,"
55. Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 525-45, 542, 545
56. Paul Langford, "The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 311-31
57. Philip Carter, "Polite 'Persons': Character, Biography and the Gentleman," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 333-54, 335
58. One exception to the lack of interest in seventeenth-century affect is queer history. Work on early modern sodomy and on same-sex relationships is struggling to locate both the identity and intimacy of men. Several of the essays in O'Donnell and O'Rourke, eds., Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, are about affect. In this regard, queer history is leading the way
59. Carter, "Polite 'Persons,'" 336
60. Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), 10
61. John Wesley quoted in John Miller, Religion in the Popular Prints, 1600-1832 (Cambridge, 1986), 36
62. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (1987; London, 1992), 111
63. Jeremy Gregory, "Homo Religious: Masculinity and Religion in the Long Eighteenth Century," in English Masculinities, 85-110
64. See also Michèle Cohen, "Manliness, Effeminacy, and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in Eighteenth-Century England," in English Masculinities, 44-62
65. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen, "Introduction," in English Masculinities, 22
66. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex; Body and Gender front the Greeks to Trend (Cambridge, MA, 1990)
67. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England, 212, 213-14
68. Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 407, 295
69. Karen Harvey, "The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence in Eighteenth-Century Representations of the Body," Gender and History 14, no. 2 (2002): 202-23
70. and "Gender, Space and Modernity in Eighteenth-Century England: A Place Called Sex," History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 158-79
71. Dror Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England," Past and Present, no. 159 (May 1998): 113-60
72. and "Gender in Translation: How the English Wrote Their Juvenal, 1644-1815," Representations 65 (Winter 1999): 1-41
73. Lawrence E. Klein, "Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century," Historical Journal 45 (2002): 869-98
74. Langford, "LTses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness," 312
75. Klein, "Politeness and the Interpretation."
76. R. H. Sweet, "Topographies of Politeness," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002): 355-74, 355
77. see also Shoemaker, "Taming of the Duel," 526
78. See David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, 1992), 100, on rural resistance to politeness
79. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), 463ff., and "Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness."
80. and "Men about Town," 39
81. Klein, "Politeness and the Interpretation," 897
82. The important works are by Anna Clark. See her Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 (London, 1987)
83. and The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995)
84. Tim Meldrum's Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750: Life and Work in the London House (Harlow, 2000) is also useful
85. Works on later periods include Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992)
86. E. P. Thompson, "Patricians and Plebs," in Customs in Common (1991; Harmondsworth, 1993), 18, 19
87. Foyster's book Manhood in Early Modern England is based largely on court depositions. She discusses this on pp. 10-15
88. Klein, "Politeness and the Interpretation," 898
89. Peter King suggests, though, that the "consumer revolution" was demonstrated in the possessions of the very poor. Peter King, "Pauper Inventories and the Material Lives of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," in Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640-1840, ed. Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, and Pamela Sharpe (Harlow, 1997)
90. For a helpful review of how the early modern middling sort has been identified, see Henry French, "The Search for the 'Middle Sort of People' in England, 1600-1800," Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (2000): 277-93
91. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley, 1996), 48
92. See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688-1783 (London, 1989), 104-9, where Brewer discusses the skill and expertise of the excisemen, for example
93. See Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2005), chap. 4, for further discussion
94. Vincent Miller [pseud.], The Man-Plant; or, A Scheme for Increasing and Improving the British Breed (London, 1752), 38
95. Quoted in Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989), 237
96. Quoted in Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 180
97. Shoemaker, "Taming of the Duel," 544
98. Laura L. Runge, "Beauty and Gallantry: A Model of Polite Conversation Revisited," Eighteenth-Century Life 25, no. 1 (2001): 43-63, 44
99. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1500-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), 203
100. Harvey, Reading Sex, chap. 1
101. Compare the contrasting visions of the eighteenth century in Langford, Polite and Commercial People, and Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1982)
102. Carter, "Men about Town," 129
103. Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 345, 346
104. Anthony Fletcher's coverage in Gender, Sex, and Subordination is, I think it is fair to say, much better for the seventeenth century
105. Turner, Fashioning Adultery
106. Foyster, "Creating a Veil of Silence?"
107. John Tosh, "What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain," History Workshop Journal 33 (1994): 179-202
108. "The Old Adam and the New Man: Emerging Themes in the History of English Masculinities," in English Masculinities, 217-38
109. and A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 1999)
110. Tosh, "Old Adam," 223
111. Amanda Vickery, "Golden Age to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History," Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383-414
112. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, 1992), 237-81
113. For example, the chapter "Prudent Economy," on women as domestic managers, in Vickery, The Gentleman's Daughter, 127-60, could be matched with an equivalent investigation into men as housekeepers
114. See, e.g., the autobiography of Benjamin Shaw. Alan G. Crosby, ed., The Family Records of Benjamin Shaw, Mechanic of Dent, Dolphinholme and Preston, 1771-1841 (Chester, 1991), 32-33 and passim
115. John D. Post, Food Shortage, Climatic Variability, and Epidemic Disease in Preindustrial Europe: The Mortality Peak in the Early 1740s (Ithaca, NY, 1985)
116. Londa Schiebinger, "Gender and Natural History," in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge, 1996), 166-67
117. Laura Gowing challenges this idea of crisis in Domestic Dangers, 28-29, arguing instead that gender "is always in contest." We must allow room to talk about intensifications in debates, though