Essay On Masculinity In America

Masculinity in America: The legacy of the self-made man

According to Kimmel, the earliest embodiments of American manhood were landowners, independent artisans, shopkeepers, and farmers. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution started to influence the way, American men thought of themselves. Manhood was now defined as through the man’s economic success. This was the origin of the “Self-Made Man” ideology and the new concept of manhood that was more exciting, and potentially more rewarding for men themselves. The image of the Self-Made Man has far reaching effects on the notion of masculinity in America. Thus, the emergence of the Self-Made Man put men under pressure. As Kimmel states,

American men’s political, social and economic identity was no longer fixed. If social order, permanence could no longer be taken for granted and a man could rise as high as he aspired, then his sense of himself as a man was in constant need of demonstration. Everything became a test- his relationship to work, to women, to nature, and to other men. (43) According to Kimmel, men’s reactions to the new situations were self-control, exclusion or escape- themes that continue to characterize American masculinity still

The workplace became masculinized, and the home feminized. By the separation of the masculine and feminine spheres that had been promoted, men and women now lived in separate worlds. By the turn of the twentieth century, men realized that their exclusion from the domestic sphere was, in fact, harmful to them: It left men “unable to experience the love, nurture and repose that the home supposedly represented” (Kimmel 158). Men were also worried at the “feminization” that potentially threatened their sons: men feared that women, who had the main responsibility for the upbringing of the children, would make the sons into