(Global Masculinities.) Dominguez Andersen, Pablo - Wendt, Simon - Masculinities and The Nation in The Modern World - Between Hegemony and Marginalization-Palgrave Macmillan (2015) PDF

Global Masculinities
Edited by Michael Kimmel and Judith Kegan Gardiner
Michael Kimmel is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at

Stony Brook. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including: Men’s
Lives, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, The Gendered Society, The
Politics of Manhood, and Manhood in America: A Cultural History. He edits Men and
Masculinities, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal, and edited the Encyclopedia of Men
and Masculinities and the Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. He consults
with corporations, NGOs, and public sector organizations all over the world on gender
equity issues, including work-family balance, reducing workplace discrimination, and
promoting diversity.
Judith Kegan Gardiner is Professor of English and of Gender and Women’s Studies
at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books are Craftsmanship in Context: The
Development of Ben Jonson’s Poetry and Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy.
She is the editor of the volumes Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and
Practice; Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory; and a co-editor of the International
Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. She is also a member of the editorial board for
the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Studies.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism

By Daniel Worden
Men and Masculinities Around the World: Transforming Men’s Practices

Edited by Elisabetta Ruspini, Jeff Hearn, Bob Pease, and Keith Pringle
Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages

to the Present
Edited by Stefan Horlacher
Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern Masculinity,
1660–1815
By Jason D. Solinger
Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema

By Debbie Ging
The History of Fatherhood in Norway, 1850–2012

By Jørgen Ludvig Lorentzen
Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films

By Kirk Combe and Brenda Boyle
Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema
By Catherine O’Rawe
Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World

Edited by À ngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol
Masculinities in Black and White: Manliness and Whiteness in (African)
American Literature
Josep M. Armengol
Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary

Cinema
By John Champagne
Masculinities and the Nation in the Modern World: Between Hegemony and
Marginalization
Edited by Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt
M ASCULINITIES AND THE NATION IN
THE MODERN WORLD
Between Hegemony and Marginalization
Edited by
Pablo Dominguez Andersen
and
Simon Wendt
MASCULINITIES AND THE NATION IN THE MODERN WORLD
Copyright © Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-53609-9
All rights reserved.

Parts of chapter 10 have previously appeared in Maja Horn,
Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).
First published in 2015 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-56598-6 ISBN 978-1-137-53610-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137536105
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First edition: October 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C on t en t s
Introduction: Masculinities and the Nation 1

Pablo Dominguez Andersen and Simon Wendt
1 “The Crushing of Southern Manhood”: War,
Masculinity, and the Confederate Nation-State,
1861–1865 19
Craig Thompson Friend
2 Mormon Manhood and Its Critics: Polygamy and the
Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity in the
United States 39
Steve Estes
3 Eugenic Nationalism, Biopolitics, and the
Masculinization of Hysteria: Historical and
Theoretical Reflections 55
Anna Loutfi
4 Preserving the Family and the Nation: Eugenic
Masculinity Concepts, Expert Intervention, and the
American Family in the United States, 1900–1960 71
Isabel Heinemann
5 “Less than a Boot-Rag”: Procreation, Paternity, and the
Masculine Ideal in Fascist Italy 93
Martina Salvante
6 Martial Men in Virgin Lands? Nineteenth-Century
Filibustering, Nation-Building, and Competing Notions
of Masculinity in the United States and Nicaragua 113
Andreas Beer
7 Controlling Los Hombres : American State Power and the
Emasculation of the Mexican Community, 1845–1900 129
Brian D. Behnken
vi CONTENTS
8 “Failure to Provide”: Mexican Immigration,

Americanization, and Marginalized Masculinities in
the Interwar United States 149
Claudia Roesch
9 Marginal Centers: Martial Masculinities in Late
Meiji Japan 171
Denis Gainty
10 The Transnational Origins of Hegemonic Dominican
Masculinity 193
Maja Horn
11 Changing Heads and Hats: Nationalism and Modern
Masculinities in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic
of Turkey 217
Katja Jana
12 “Youth of Awo-Omama Will Boycott Their Girls”: Men,
Marriage, and Ethno-Cultural Nationalism in Southern
Nigeria, 1920–1956 243
Saheed Aderinto
Notes on Contributors 269

Index 273
Introduction: Masculinities
and the Nation
Pablo Dominguez Andersen

and
Simon Wendt
At the turn of the twenty-first century, feminist scholar Cynthia

Enloe made the oft-quoted observation that nationalist ideologies
tend to stem “from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation
and masculinized hope.”1 Focusing on male nationalists in colonial
Algeria, Enloe sought to convey how Algerian anticolonial national-
ists used women as passive symbols to affirm their masculine national
identity while denying them an active role in the country’s process of
nation-building. Her perceptive analysis is part of an ongoing effort
to better understand the intricate interrelationship between gen-
der and the nation. Scholars from various disciplines have studied
this interrelationship for more than three decades. Feminist schol-
ars in particular have demonstrated how male nationalists incorpo-
rated women as symbolic, cultural, and biological reproducers of the
nation into their “imagined communities.” Yet most studies on the
subject tend to focus solely on the tensions between women’s inclu-
sion in nationalist discourse and their exclusion from political deci-
sion making. Others have explored women’s active role in nationalist
movements. Masculinities have received surprisingly little attention in
these publications.2
This volume provides fresh perspectives on the connections
between gender and the nation by focusing on the role of mascu-
linities in various processes of nation-building in the modern world
between the early nineteenth century and the 1960s. In particu-
lar, it seeks to shed new light on the interrelationship between heg-
emonic masculinities, marginalized masculinities, and nationalism.
2 PABLO DOMINGUEZ ANDERSEN AND SIMON WENDT
Reconsidering this interrelationship requires a more thorough under-

standing of dominant notions of masculinity and nationhood as well
as the role of elites in the process of their construction, but scholars
will also have to go beyond an analysis of such dominant models. As
Thembisa Waetjen has noted, the constructed character and function
of masculinity in people’s attempts to create “imagined national com-
munities” cannot be fully understood if the exclusive focus of analysis
is the subjugation of women or dominant patterns of masculinity. To
understand hegemonic notions of masculinity and the nation, Waetjen
argues, scholars need to explore the tensions and the interrelation-
ships between these dominant ideals and their margins. Studying the
history of gender and the nation from the perspective of marginalized
masculinities means focusing on the conflicts among competing con-
cepts of masculinity as well as on the differences between them. Men
are far from being one ideologically monolithic bloc, and their access
to and interest in nation-building power varies considerably accord-
ing to such factors as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, or religion.3 The
period between the early nineteenth century and World War II is of
particular significance for an analysis of these complexities because it
saw the simultaneous emergence of new forms of masculinity as well
as the emergence of modern nation-states. Similarly important, it was
during this period that exclusionary ideologies such as scientific rac-
ism, imperialism, and eugenics became part and parcel of these gen-
dered nation-building processes.
Studying the strained connections between hegemonic masculin-
ity, hegemonic nationalism, and their margins also requires a global
perspective that takes seriously non-Western marginalized masculini-
ties as well as the transnational dimensions of gendered nationalism.
Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji have rightly lamented “the
pervasiveness of a Western-centric concept of men and masculini-
ties” in studies on men and masculinities. According to Jackson and
Balaji, “Masculinity studies has generally become ghettoized by a
Eurocentric paradigm of whiteness and its Others, the latter most
closely associated with the representations and assumed practices of
black masculinity.”4 When analyzed in a global context, the boundar-
ies between hegemonic and marginalized masculinities often become
blurred, as local, national, and globalized notions of masculinity
and the nation intersect and amalgamate. Similarly important, trans-
national processes of exchange, translation, and adaptation affect
nationalized masculinities in ways that can lead non-Western men
to adapt or to reject Western models in their attempts to make sense
of the role of manhood in their respective nation-building projects.
INTRODUCTION 3
This volume constitutes the first systematic attempt to study the com-
plex interdependencies between hegemonic and marginalized mas-
culinities in nation-building processes in the United States, Europe,
Latin America, Asia, and Africa between the 1830s and the 1960s. It
reconsiders the multiple ways in which hegemonic masculinities and
nationalisms are constructed, and sheds new light on the agency of
marginalized masculinities as well as the role of transnational dynam-
ics in processes of gendered nation-building.
When reconsidering the various dimensions of nationalized mas-
culinities and masculinized nationalisms, analytical terms and con-
cepts take on enormous significance. Australian sociologist Raewyn
Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity has become the most
influential analytical perspective in masculinity studies over the
past three decades. Hegemonic masculinity, as defined by Connell,
is “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the cur-
rently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriar-
chy, which guarantees (or is taken for granted) the dominant position
of men and the subordination of women.” As Michael Kimmel has
famously demonstrated in his pathbreaking historical study Manhood
in America, hegemonic masculinity typically emerges from the com-
petition between different masculine types and exerts a pervasive
influence on a given culture’s understanding of ideal male behavior.
This dominant notion of masculinity, which can be observed espe-
cially in Western national cultures and tends to be coded as white and
heterosexual, is not only grounded in patriarchal privilege but also
subordinates alternative forms of masculinity such as homosexual or
ethnic masculinities.5
Critics of Connell’s concept have argued that marginalized mascu-
linities have a greater effect on hegemonic masculinity than Connell
has acknowledged. Demetrakis Demetriou, for instance, has criticized
the dualistic interpretation of hegemonic masculinity and marginal-
ized masculinities and has proposed that this binary can be over-
come by conceptualizing hegemonic masculinity as “a hybrid bloc”
that combines “heterosexual, homosexual, black and white elements
and practices to reproduce patriarchy.” Demetriou argues: “It is its
constant hybridization, its constant appropriation of diverse elements
from various masculinities that makes the hegemonic bloc capable of
reconfiguring itself and adapting to the specificities of new histor-
ical conjunctures.”6 Another group of critics contend that Connell
neglects the agency of marginalized masculinities. These detractors
charge that she conceptualizes marginalized masculinities largely
as passive victims that are exploited by white heterosexual men.
Marginalized masculinity thus becomes primarily a negative referent

that validates hegemonic masculinity. In a detailed response to her
critics, Connell has hinted that the agency of these groups might be
more important than she previously acknowledged and it is especially
this debate over the agency of marginalized masculinities that many
of this volume’s chapters seek to reconsider.7
Defining the nation is even more fraught with obstacles than com-
ing to terms with the differences between hegemonic and margin-
alized masculinities, but it seems pertinent to operate at least with
a working definition to avoid analytical arbitrariness. The nation,
as Benedict Anderson has noted, is an “imagined community.”
Nationalists claim, however, that a unique and sovereign nation
exists, that its members have a common destiny as well as a national
“homeland,” and that loyalty to the nation trumps all other collec-
tive and individual loyalties. Although the nation is an “imagined
community” that is actively constructed by various elite and nonelite
groups, it tends to be perceived as real and natural through constant
repetition in nationalist discourses and practices.8 To make things
even more complex, nations tend to be closely connected to the idea
of the state, which appears to be primarily the bureaucratic appara-
tus that governs the nation but cannot be easily separated from it. As
Etienne Balibar has argued, “A state always is implied in the historic
framework of a national formation.”9 People rarely question that the
nation actually exists, but the forms of inclusion and exclusion that
membership in the nation entails are subject to continuous debates.
Scholars of nationalism have long differentiated between ethnic and
civic nationalism to analyze these debates. In the case of civic nation-
alism, people are accepted as members of a nation because they pledge
allegiance to that nation’s political institutions and values, regardless
of their ancestry. In the case of ethnic nationalism, membership qual-
ifications are tied to a specific ancestry and culture that is purportedly
shared by all members of the nation.10
Up to this point, theories of gendered nationalism and histori-
cal scholarship on masculinities and the nation have provided only
glimpses into their complex interrelationship. In the case of the theo-
retical literature, despite feminist scholars’ decades-long engagement
with the nexus of nationalism and gender, very few theorists have
focused explicitly on the connections between masculinities and the
nation. Scholars agree that the nation must be considered a funda-
mentally masculine enterprise, but they have surprisingly little to say
about the roles of different masculinities in nation-building processes
and the impact of nationalism on masculine ideals. Todd Reeser, who
INTRODUCTION 5
is one of only a handful of scholars who have explicitly addressed such

questions, stresses that there is an “endless number of cultural asso-
ciations made between masculinities and the nation.”11 While wom-
en’s central symbolic function in nation-building processes is widely
acknowledged, Reeser emphasizes that male figures can also become
personifications of the nation. Moreover, as Klaus Theweleit has
argued in his pathbreaking study of fascist masculinity, nations can
become people’s “fatherland” and are frequently imagined as hard
and impenetrable as part of nationalist allegories that liken nations
to male bodies.12 Due to the common symbolic equation of individ-
ual male bodies with the nation’s territory, nationalist ideologies fre-
quently call for improving the male population’s physical fitness as a
means to strengthen the national community as a whole. Echoing ear-
lier studies by George Mosse, Joanne Nagel’s research has underlined
that these gendered interdependencies were no coincidence, since the
nineteenth century saw the simultaneous emergence of modern con-
cepts of masculinity and the modern nation-state. The ideal of the cit-
izen soldier whose manliness was regarded as being closely connected
to his willingness to die a hero’s death on the battlefield as a service
to the nation is probably one of the most prominent examples of the
interconnectedness of masculine norms and nationalist ideologies. As
queer theorists and activists emphasize, this interconnectedness also
implies the nation’s dependence on a firmly heterosexual order, which
has frequently forced queer and trans persons into an oppositional
stance toward hegemonic nationalism. Masculinity, heterosexuality,
and the nation thus dovetailed and mutually reinforced each other in
multiple and complex ways.13
While Reeser and Nagel have begun to shed light on the intersec-
tions between masculinity and the nation, other scholars call for the-
ories of hegemonic masculinities that transcend the nation, arguing
that gender relations in the twenty-first century can be understood
only by analyzing its global dimensions. In their much-discussed
reformulation of the concept of hegemonic masculinity, Raewyn
Connell and James Messerschmidt have argued that globalization
has led to the creation of a transnational gender order that calls for
new analytical paradigms.14 Scholars like Christine Beasly disagree,
claiming that the concept of hegemonic masculinity in its current
usage may be too broad to capture the complexities of a global gender
order. Beasly proposes to define the concept more narrowly, which
would make possible “a more rigorous and culturally specific evalu-
ation of globalization as an uneven process entailing complex forms
of accommodation and resistance.”15 In a recent response to Beasly,
James Messerschmidt countered that he and Connell had specifically

called for a more thorough analysis of the interplay between local,
regional, and global masculinities.16 However, none of these theorists
have considered the role of transnational dynamics in the interrela-
tionship between masculinities and nationalism, a form of interaction
to which this volume pays particular attention.
As in the case of gender theory, historical scholarship on the
connections between masculinities and the nation has been scarce,
although the last two decades have seen a number of publications
that can be seen as a foundation for a more thorough analysis of this
nexus. Some of these studies have focused on the role of elites in the
simultaneous creation of modern masculinities and the nation-state.
In Western nations in particular, dominant notions of masculinity
were inextricably intertwined with processes of nation-building. As
Joanne Nagel has argued, “The culture and ideology of hegemonic
masculinity go hand in hand with the culture and ideology of heg-
emonic nationalism.”17 Especially during the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, new forms of masculinity, nationalism, colonial-
ism, and imperialism engaged in a vital dialogue that consolidated
both western models of white, middle-class, heterosexual mascu-
linity and racial nationalism. A few historians have shed light on
these dynamics. Focusing on nineteenth-century Germany, Karen
Hagemann has analyzed the ways in which the Wars of Liberation led
to the emergence of a new Prussian notion of patriotic masculinity,
which revolved around valor, honor, and national loyalty. According
to this novel idea, “true” German men were intrepid citizen soldiers
who not only protected the home and the nation but were also will-
ing to sacrifice their lives for the fatherland on the battlefield. While
helping to integrate ordinary male citizens into the Prussian body
politic, such concepts of martial masculinity also exacerbated gender
dichotomies and helped to perpetuate women’s political powerless-
ness.18 In Australia, warfare was similarly used to strengthen ideas of
nationalized masculinity during and after World War I. As shown by
Marilyn Lake, Australian soldiers’ participation in this war became
a staple of national memory, which created the Anzac soldier as a
new national hero. As was the case in Prussia, his heroism hinged
on the willingness to die on the battlefield as a service to the nation.
While “citizen mothers” were valued for their ability and willingness
to bear children for the nation, the citizen soldier emerged as the
dominant model of “true” and active citizenship. Feminist activists
sought to use the idea of patriotic service for the nation to their
ends, arguing that mothers deserved as much recognition for their
INTRODUCTION 7
assistance in Australian nation-building as did heroic soldiers. Yet

their activism did little to alter the gendered dynamics of the con-
struction of Australian citizenship, which reflected and secured mar-
tial masculinity and male privileges.19
While a number of studies have examined the various efforts of
elites to construct dominant notions of masculinity and nationhood,
very few scholars have focused explicitly on the ways in which mar-
ginalized masculinities have reacted to their oppression vis-à-vis the
nation in Western countries. Perhaps the best-known example of mar-
ginalized men’s agency is that of Jewish nationalists, who in the early
twentieth century created the New Jew or Muscle Jew to repudiate
traditional European racial stereotypes, which belittled Jewish men
as cowardly and effeminate. The New Jew became the martial hero
of Zionists’ vision of Jewish nationhood.20 Jason Crouthamel has
provided important insights into similar forms of gendered reinter-
pretations of citizenship within the post–World War I homosexual
emancipation movement in Germany. According to Crouthamel, gay
rights activists utilized the prevalent ideal of the manly warrior to
highlight their patriotic service to the German nation on the battle-
field and to repudiate clichés of effeminate homosexual traitors who
were believed to share responsibility for Germany’s defeat in the Great
War. Calling attention to the multilayered meanings of masculinized
nationalism, his article demonstrates that ideals of the manly warrior
could paradoxically become both a means of marginalization and an
impetus for liberation from that marginalization.21
Another group of scholars has shed light on the relations between
marginalized masculinities and nationalism in colonial and postco-
lonial contexts. Western colonialists and imperialists tended to por-
tray the cultures they subdued in gendered and racialized terms.
Native men in particular were frequently disparaged as effeminate
racial “other” and contrasted with hegemonic models of white west-
ern masculinity. Such cultural strategies of oppression had a lasting
impact on anticolonial nationalism, particularly in countries that had
been subject to British colonial rule, among them India, Egypt, and
Ireland. In India, elite men constructed an oppositional form of mas-
culinity that challenged their marginalization and influenced the
nationalist ideologies that emerged before and after independence.
These oppositional gender identities frequently incorporated certain
elements of western hegemonic masculinity as well as western models
of nationalism. Around 1900, for instance, Indian men took up body-
building and favored Western ideas of rational thinking and individ-
ualism as part of their attempts to create a nationalist movement that
would counter British colonialist ideology.22 In Egypt very similar

developments took place between the 1880s and the 1940s, when
segments of the country’s upper middle class forged an “effendi mas-
culinity,” which used sports, fashion, and scouting to oppose their
marginalization under British rule.23 In Ireland, British colonialism
also led native men to adapt dominant colonial models of masculinity
to reject the conquerors’ efforts to mock and question their ability
to become “real” men. As in India and Egypt, competitive sports
became a key arena where these oppositional discourses were con-
structed, since athletic prowess was seen as undeniable proof of the
superiority of Irish “muscular Catholicism” vis-à-vis British “muscu-
lar Christianity.”24 As suggested by these studies, marginalized men’s
resistance to colonial and imperial rule was part and parcel of antico-
lonial nationalism, which frequently constituted a transnational amal-
gam of indigenous and Western ideas.
The chapters that are assembled in this volume confirm some of
the conclusions reached in the studies discussed above, but they also
reveal new aspects of the interrelationship between masculinities and
the nation that enhance our understanding of its complexities in the
history of the modern world. For one thing, they call attention to
the myriad ways in which nationalized hegemonic masculinities were
produced and perpetuated in Western societies. Most significantly,
they add a new analytical dimension to the long-standing dichot-
omy between hegemonic and marginalized masculinities by sug-
gesting that “marginal” white masculinities frequently constituted
an in-between category that helped strengthen collective notions of
a national “imagined community” that revolved around white heg-
emonic masculinity. While “marginal” masculinities were not sub-
dued in the same way that nonwhite or homosexual men were, they
similarly helped to perpetuate hegemonic masculinity in nation-
building projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Focusing on the American Civil War, Craig Thompson Friend
shows how southern white men, despite being representatives of heg-
emonic masculinity in their region, perceived themselves as a marginal
group vis-à-vis northern masculinity. These men therefore welcomed
the opportunity to create the Confederate States of America because
they believed that the new nation’s victory in the Civil War would
reestablish the supremacy of southern masculinity. Ironically, during
the war, this imagined isolation gave way to a real marginalization,
as white women and African American slaves challenged their subor-
dination while the victories of the Union army called into question
Confederate men’s ability to protect their new fatherland. Eventually,
INTRODUCTION 9
the memory of the war allowed southern men to retain the manly
status that they had sought to achieve through military action by
reinterpreting Confederate masculinity as a cause that had been
worth fighting for. Friend thus demonstrates that the interrelation-
ship between hegemonic masculinity and nationalism is much more
dynamic than gender theorists have suggested, cautioning us to be
aware of the limitations of these theories when attempting to explain
historical realities.
Steve Estes’s chapter reveals that the condemnation of American
Mormon men’s practice of polygamy between the 1850s and the
1890s was part and parcel of a gendered and racialized process of
nation-building in the Western United States. Polygamy seemed to
threaten the foundation of the American nation, which hinged on
heterosexual monogamy and the nuclear family. Although Mormon
men were white and heterosexual, they became “marginal” in the eyes
of the non-Mormon population and political authorities. Their sexual
mores were even likened to those of racial minorities, whose pur-
ported promiscuity was seen as a similar threat to the stability of the
nation because it would “contaminate” the white race. The attacks on
the Mormon Church and its subsequent decision to officially disavow
polygamy demonstrate the social and cultural power of nationalized
notions of hegemonic masculinity, which by the early twentieth cen-
tury stood for white, heterosexual, middle-class Protestant men. This
ideal of masculinity became inextricably linked to national author-
ity and national identity, which Mormons needed to adapt to if they
sought to be regarded as true members of the national community.
Anna Loutfi demonstrates how military psychiatrists in England,
Germany, and the United States strengthened nationalized notions of
hegemonic masculinity by linking male soldiers’ “manly will” to their
worth as defenders of the nation in the early twentieth century. Using
a trait approach, she argues that the medicalization of men’s psyche
transformed male citizenship into a form of biopolitics that linked
individuals’ masculinity to the collective body of the nation. Nervous
illness in particular became suspect in the eyes of medical experts,
who suggested that “hysteric” soldiers would jeopardize military
discipline and the security of the nation. Loutfi thus underlines the
ambiguity and fluidity of the interrelationship between hegemonic
masculinity and the nation, since the medicalization of men’s psyche
made virtually all male citizen-soldiers potential subversives whose
lack of “manly will” might endanger the national community.
Isabel Heinemann sheds light on the ways in which the ideal of
the nuclear family served to strengthen racialized gender roles that
determined which men were deemed exemplary members of the

American nation between 1900 and the 1960s. Focusing on the sig-
nificant influence of social experts in this process, she shows how soci-
ologists in particular established nationalized standards of “proper
and healthy” masculinity, which were reflected in their idealization
of vigorous male breadwinners who were expected to produce healthy
children and provide for their families. Against the backdrop of fears
of racial degeneration through immigration and Eugenic thinking,
which became increasingly popular in the United States in the early
twentieth century, social experts sought to safeguard the nation by
advising even white heterosexual men not to produce offspring if their
hereditary traits were considered “deficient.” Heinemann’s chapter
forces us to acknowledge the complexity of processes of masculinized
nation-building by showing how heterosexual white men became
“marginal” vis-à-vis the nation, assuming an ambiguous position
between hegemony and marginalization.
Focusing on Italian fascism during the interwar period and World
War II, Martina Salvante’s chapter calls attention to yet another
dimension of the interrelationship between hegemonic masculinity
and nationhood, which similarly revolved around men’s ability to
produce offspring in the name of the nation. Salvante examines the
important role of male reproduction in Italian fascists’ nationalist ide-
ology, showing how men who were unable or refused to marry and
start a family were rendered “marginal” vis-à-vis those male citizens
who produced offspring early in life. While motherhood and female
reproduction were important elements of Italy’s fascist ideology dur-
ing the 1920s and 1930s, Salvante suggests that male sexuality and
fatherhood were just as important in its vision of the nation. Although
men continued to enjoy special privileges as the heads of families,
which were regarded as the smallest units of the nation, they did
run the danger of losing at least some of these privileges if they did
not conform to heteronormative ideals of fascist citizenship. Fascist
nationalism thus strengthened hegemonic masculinity and served to
perpetuate gendered hierarchies in discourses on membership in the
national community.
The second significant contribution that this volume makes to the
study of masculinities and the nation is that it highlights the ambigu-
ities of hegemonic masculinities vis-à-vis the nation in transnational
contexts, which were created by colonialism, imperialism, and their
legacies. Although transnational processes of exchange, translation,
and adaptation allowed Western nations to subdue and marginal-
ize non-Western and nonwhite masculinities, a closer look at these
INTRODUCTION 11
processes reveals how marginalized men could retain agency vis-à-vis

Western nation-building efforts and creatively adapt Western nation-
alism in their efforts to create and bolster their own national “imag-
ined communities.” In fact, especially in transnational contact zones,
the boundaries between nationalized hegemonic and marginalized
masculinities became frequently blurred and have always defied sim-
ple dichotomous explanatory models. At the same time, the legacies
of colonialism and imperialism could create tensions among indige-
nous men because of the ways in which white rule affected the norms
that governed men’s social status and masculine national belonging.
Andreas Beer’s chapter about US filibusters in Nicaragua during
the 1850s demonstrates how the analysis of transnational processes
of adaptation and exchange can help us better understand the ways
in which different masculinities interacted with and influenced one
another during nation-building processes in imperial contact zones.
During the US intervention in the country, Nicaraguan Mestizo men
embraced a restrained type of masculinity that was completely at odds
with the martial masculinity propagated by the majority of American
adventurers who advocated annexation of Nicaragua. Emphasizing
Nicaraguan men’s resistance to American gender ideals and their com-
pliance with Enlightenment ideas about masculinity and civilization,
Beer argues that American imperialism decisively shaped Nicaraguan
concepts of nationalized masculinity. In turn, Nicaraguan men’s
strategy of gendered “othering” had a profound impact on mascu-
linity discourses in the United States, testifying to the importance of
studying transnational processes of exchange and translation in gen-
dered processes of nation-building.
Focusing on the border zone between the expanding United
States and Mexico in the second half of the nineteenth century, Brian
Behnken’s chapter makes a similar point, showing that the marginal-
ization of Mexican men was part and parcel of US nation-building in
the American Southwest. White lynch mobs, the US military, county
sheriffs, and police officers used violent force not only to subdue
Mexican men but also to prove their inferiority as men. However,
Mexicans resisted their emasculation at the hands of law enforcement
agencies in different ways. Some engaged in open revolt while others
constructed their own, alternative ideal of Mexican masculinity to
counter American gendered stereotypes. Consequently, in their own
communities, Behnken argues, Mexican men were far from being
marginalized but forged their own version of nationalized hegemonic
masculinity. Behnken thus demonstrates that the boundaries between
marginalized and hegemonic masculinities become frequently blurred
in transnational spaces like the southwestern frontier of the United

States.
Claudia Roesch’s analysis of Mexican immigration to interwar
California also highlights the agency of marginalized masculinities
in transnational contexts. Examining the Americanization programs
of the California Immigration and Housing Commission (CIHC)
during the interwar period, Roesch shows how Mexican men’s “fail-
ure to provide” became a recurrent accusation to deny their families
financial assistance. Institutions such as the CIHC established the
patriarchal nuclear family as a marker of American national identity,
thus constructing a hegemonic ideal of American masculinity while
marginalizing Mexican men in their quest for membership in the
national community. However, the Mexican-American elite organi-
zation League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which
was founded in the 1920s, attempted to counter such forms of dis-
crimination. Its members demanded civil rights for Spanish-speaking
men in the United States, arguing that they were actually members
of the white race and had European ancestry. LULAC activists thus
sought to win acceptance as members of the nation by accepting white
notions of hegemonic masculinity and gendered patriotism. Roesch’s
analysis thus shows that marginalized masculinities’ agency, even if
it was meant to challenge their marginalization, could also help to
strengthen dominant ideals of nationalized masculinity.
In his chapter on nationalist masculinities in late Meji Japan,
Denis Gainty emphasizes the processes of adaptation and translation
that the transnational dissemination of nationalist gender ideologies
entailed in the era of European and American imperialism. Gainty
argues that Japanese men used Western ideals of nationhood, mas-
culinity, and modernity to construct their own, localized notions
of gendered nationalism. While American commentators frequently
belittled Japanese men as effeminate, Japanese authors often reversed
such ascriptions, emphasizing the strength and virility of martial
Japanese men. In addition, in local bodily practices such as martial
arts, Japanese men experienced and forged their own vision of nation-
alized masculinity that were unaffected by Western standards. Using
the example of the Dainippon Butokukai (Greater Japan Martial
Virtue Association), Gainty emphasizes that scholars’ sole focus
on hegemonic norms cannot adequately capture the agency that is
reflected in men’s local gendered practices. This chapter calls atten-
tion to the processes of adaptation and the multiplicity of the various,
intersecting notions of masculinity that were involved in the con-
struction of modern Japanese nationhood.
INTRODUCTION 13
The transnational implications of nationalist ideologies are also

revealed in Maja Horn’s examination of the dictatorship of Rafael
Leónidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic between 1930 and
1961. Horn argues that the new national ideal of masculinity that
Trujillo introduced during his reign, the tíguere, was in part shaped
by transnational impulses. According to Horn, the reconfiguration of
the country’s hegemonic notions of masculinity during the Trujillato
cannot be understood without taking into account the influence
of US imperialism. The occupation of the Dominican Republic by
American troops between 1916 and 1924, coupled with the language
of racialized imperial masculinity that was used to justify it, deci-
sively influenced the hypermasculine tíguere identity that Trujillo
promoted. Horn argues that female and male Dominicans’ tendency
to reassert the virility of the Dominican nation and its men has to be
regarded primarily as a response to the emasculating experience of
US occupation. It is only against this historical backdrop that we can
fully understand the success of Rafael Trujillo’s rhetoric of hyperbolic
masculinity and virile nationalism.
Katja Jana’s analysis of nationalized styles of headgear in the late
Ottoman Empire and in the early Turkish Republic provides addi-
tional evidence that the emergence of specific forms of gendered
nationalism in colonial and postcolonial societies were intertwined
with and frequently constituted a result of Western imperialism. Jana
shows that the debates about male headgear and styles of dress in
the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic reflected gendered
conflicts over the influence of Westernization on national identity.
Headgear symbolized changing ideals of nationalized masculinity,
standing either for resistance to or acceptance of Western norms and
values. Jana interprets the Turkish Hat Law of 1925, which prohib-
ited men from wearing non-Western headgear, as an attempt to con-
struct a modern Turkish national identity as well as a new ideal of
hegemonic masculinity that was based on Western models. As Jana
argues, this process of nation-building relied heavily on the margin-
alization of traditional notions of masculinity, which were deemed
premodern and uncivilized. Her chapter also demonstrates, however,
that this process was met with myriad forms of resistance from those
men who now found themselves marginalized in the Turkish nation.
The volume’s concluding chapter—in which Saheed Aderinto
examines the relationship between intergenerational conflict and
gendered nationalism among Nigerian men between the 1920s
and the 1960s—provides a final example of the powerful but rarely
acknowledged impact of colonialism on notions of masculine national
belonging. Focusing on young men’s grievances over the increase of

bride price in southern Nigeria, Aderinto shows that the monetiza-
tion of this marriage ritual in colonial and postcolonial African soci-
eties led many unmarried men to challenge the hegemonic position
of rural patriarchs as well as their idea of a united and multicultural
Nigerian nation. Voicing their grievances in English-language news-
papers, these young men regarded themselves as an unjustly margin-
alized group and articulated a form of ethnic-cultural nationalism
that was at odds with elders’ vision of a modern Nigerian nation-state.
Inadvertently, the economic and social changes that had taken place
under British imperialism affected the ways in which unmarried men
could gain and maintain their status as men and as members of their
community, their ethnic group, and the Nigerian nation.
This volume, with these various chapters, makes an important con-
tribution to the study of the history of the interrelationship between
masculinities and the nation by calling attention to the myriad ways
in which nationalized hegemonic masculinities are produced and
to the important impact of transnational dynamics on the blurring
distinctions between hegemonic and marginalized masculinities in
nation-building processes. However, this volume makes no claim to
geographical or topical comprehensiveness and might raise as many
questions as it answers. In terms of geography, for instance, Australia,
Southeast Asia, China, and North Africa would be other important
places to apply or to reconsider the methodological approaches that
were utilized by this volume’s contributors. Future studies should
also consider new analytical perspectives that this volume’s authors
chose not to pursue. Queering the history of masculinities and the
nation would be a crucial task for future research. Although mas-
culinities are socially constructed, many scholars continue to equate
masculinity with men and their bodies. Queer theorists such as
Judith Halberstam deem such approaches too simplistic and call
upon scholars to take seriously female masculinities as a legitimate
form of gender identity rather than dismiss it as a seemingly defi-
cient imitation of male masculinities.25 Students of masculinities and
the nation have much to gain from this critique because it forcefully
reminds us that our scholarship frequently runs the danger of repro-
ducing the same heteronormative constructions it seeks to challenge.
Questions that future research could attempt to answer include the
role of female masculinities in the tensions between nationalized heg-
emonic and marginalized masculinities as well as the ways in which
female masculinities affected nation-building processes in the mod-
ern world. Related to this new analytical approach is the challenge of
INTRODUCTION 15
incorporating women into research on masculinities and the nation.

In their assessment of the impact of the concept of hegemonic mas-
culinity on gender studies, Raewyn Connell and her colleague James
Messerschmidt have exhorted gender scholars to take a closer look
at the role of women in the construction of hegemonic masculinity.
They write: “We consider that research on hegemonic masculinity
now needs to give much closer attention to the practices of women
and to the historical interplay of femininities and masculinities.”26
Scholars of the interrelationship between masculinities and nation-
alism should also heed their exhortations. While most scholars of
masculinity have insisted that it is produced primarily in homosocial
environments, it should not be forgotten that what women say about
masculinity does matter to men. Incorporating women and feminini-
ties into analyses of the interrelationship between masculinities and
the nation would mean to take women seriously as historical actors
who actively shape this interrelationship, intervening in a process that
current scholarship appears to treat primarily as the domain of men.
It is to be hoped that this volume’s findings as well as its blind spots
will ultimately lead to new and innovative scholarly contributions to
what continues to be a nascent field of inquiry.
Notes
1. Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense
of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000),
44.
2. See, for example, Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, Woman-Nation-
State (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender
and Nation (New York: Sage, 1997); Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris
Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexuality (New
York: Routledge, 1992); Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine
Hall, eds. Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long
Nineteenth Century (New York: Berg, 2000); Tamar Mayer, ed., Gender
Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (New York: Routledge, 2000);
Yasmeen Abu-Laban, ed., Gendering the Nation-State: Canadian and
Comparative Perspectives (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).
3. Thembisa Waetjen, “The Limits of Gender Rhetoric for Nationalism: A
Case Study from Southern Africa,” Theory and Society 30, no. 1 (2001):
123–124.
4. Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji, “Introduction: Conceptualizing
Current Discourses and Writing New Ones,” in Global Masculinities and
Manhood, ed. Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 2011), 21.
5. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995),
37–38, 77; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History
(New York: Free Press, 1997), 13–42. On the theoretical development of

masculinity studies, see Jü rgen Martschukat and Olaf Stieglitz, Geschichte
der Männlichkeiten (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2008), 33–50; Michael
Kimmel, Jeff R. Hearn, and R. W. Connell, eds., Handbook of Studies
on Men and Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004); Rachel
Adams and David Savran, eds., The Masculinity Studies Reader (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002); Bryce Traister, “Academic Viagra: The Rise of
American Masculinity Studies,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June
2000): 274–304.
6. Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic
Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society 30, no. 3 (June 2001):
337–361.
7. Ibid.; Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic
Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6
(December 2005): 829–859; Martin Summers, Manliness and Its
Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity,
1900–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004),
10–13.
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. Rev ed. (New York: Verso, 1991); John Breuilly,
Nationalism and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993),
2; Craig Calhoun, Nationalism (Buckingham: Open University Press,
1997), 4–5; Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 21; Michael Billig, Banal
Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995).
9. Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” Review 13,
no. 3 (Summer 1990): 331.
10. Anderson, Imagined Communities ; David Brown, “Are There Good and
Bad Nationalisms?” Nations and Nationalisms 5, no. 2 (April 1999):
281–302. See also Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race,
Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).
11. Todd Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010), 171–199.
12. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Male
Fantasies, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),
77–94.
13. See Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman, “Queer Nationality,”
Boundary 2 19, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 149–180; V. Spike Peterson,
“Sexing Political Identies/Nationalism as Heterosexism,” International
Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 1 (June 1999): 34–65; José Esteban
Mu ñoz, Dissidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Eithne
Luibhéid and Lionel Cant ú, eds., Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S.
Citizenship, and Border Crossings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2005); Aren Z. Aizura, “Transnational Transgender Rights
and Immigration Law,” in Transfeminist Perspectives in and Beyond
Transgender and Gender Studies, ed. Anne Enke (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2012), 133–153; George Mosse, The Image of Man: The
INTRODUCTION 17
Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);

Joanne Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in
the Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March
1998): 242–269.
14. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 849. See also R.
W. Connell, “Masculinities and Globalization,” Men and Masculinities
1, no.1 (July 1998): 3–23.
15. Christine Beasly, “Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity in a Globalizing
World,” Men and Masculinities 11, no. 1 (October 2008): 86–103, 99.
For a related critique, see Jeff Hearn, “From Hegemonic Masculinity to
the Hegemony of Men,” Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (April 2004): 49–72.
16. James Messerschmidt, “And Now, the Rest of the Story: A Commentary
on Christine Beasley’s ‘Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity in a
Globalizing World,’” Men and Masculinities 11, no. 1 (October 2008):
104–108.
17. Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 249. See also Wolfgang Schmale,
“The Construction of Masculinity and the National,” Wiener Zeitschrift
zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 10, no. 1 (2010): 164–172.
18. Karen Hagemann, “Of ‘Manly Valor’ and ‘German Honor’: Nation, War,
and Masculinity in the Age of the Prussian Uprising Against Napoleon,”
Central European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 187–220.
19. Marilyn Lake, “Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the
Australian Nation—Nationalism, Gender and Other Seminal Acts,”
Gender and History 4, no. 3 (September 1992): 305–322. For simi-
lar studies that focus on the United States, see Christina Jarvis, The
Male Body at War: American Masculinity during World War Two
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003); Gail Bederman,
Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995).
20. Tamar Mayer, “From Zero to Hero: Masculinity in Jewish Nationalism,”
in Gender Ironies of Nationalism, 283–308.
21. Jason Crouthamel, “‘Comradeship’ and ‘Friendship’: Masculinity and
Militarisation in Germany’s Homosexual Emancipation Movement
after the First World War,” Gender and History 23, no. 1 (April 2011):
111–129.
22. Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and
the “Effeminate” Bengali in the late Nineteenth Century (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, 1995); Sikata Banerjee, Make Me
a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2005); Sikata Banerjee, Muscular
Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland (New
York: New York University Press, 2012).
23. Chacko Wilson Jacob, Working Out of Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and
Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011). For a case study on South Africa, see Thembisa
Waetjen, Workers and Warriors: Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation
in South Africa (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). See also

Natasha Erlank, “Gender and Masculinity in African Nationalist
Discourse, 1912–1950,” Feminist Studies 29, no. 3 (2003): 653–671.
24. Patrick F. McDevitt, “Muscular Catholicism: Nationalism, Masculinity,
and Gaelic Team Sports, 1884–1916,” Gender and History 9, no. 2
(1997): 262–284. Similar developments took place in Palestine, where
native men sought to equal their Zionist enemies through “martial
prowess” and “muscular strength.” Joseph Massad, “Conceiving the
Masculine: Gender and Palestine Nationalism,” Middle East Journal 49,
no. 3 (1995): 467–483.
25. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press,
1998). See also Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics
in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York: Feminist Press, 2013);
Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational
Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). For a histor-
ical study, see Katie Sutton, The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).
26. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 848.
C H A P T E R 1
“The Crushing of Southern Manhood”:

War, Masculinity, and the Confederate
Nation-State, 1861–1865
Craig Thompson Friend
In March 1861, one month into his term as vice president of the
newly formed Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens
stood before a Savannah audience, in Georgia, and declared that the
government’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the
great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery,
subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condi-
tion. . . . ” The crowd roared with approval, confident that their great
experiment of secession and nation-building would meet with suc-
cess. Hence was the birth of the Confederate nation-state announced:
“the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical,
philosophical, and moral truth.”1
If racial slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy, gender
was the mortar that bound that cornerstone to the nation-state aris-
ing atop it. In the decades before the formation of the Confederacy,
southern white men had defended their wives’ and daughters’ purity
from the perceived unrestrained sexuality of black men, bolstering
their own sense of masculine authority in the process. White women
had interpreted their husbands’ and sons’ visits to the slave quarters
as the supposed allure of hypersexualized black women whose siren
calls supposedly threatened white female domesticity and security.
Children produced by the latter circumstances had been easy enough
to manage: the law in every southern state required that they follow
their mothers into slavery. But the children born of white women and
black men had defied not only race, status, and the law but patriarchy
20 CRAIG THOMPSON FRIEND
itself—the most fundamental and universal form of gender inequality,

privileging men based on their gender. Antebellum southern white
gender, and manhood in particular, took shape partially as a response
to such perceived threats.2
Confederate manhood was a momentary manifestation of mas-
culinity, formed out of the gender and race relations of the Old
South and shaped specifically in relationship to wartime Confederate
nation-building. White southern men did not go to war because
they were “faithful servants to archaic customs” as Bertram Wyatt-
Brown once wrote. Despite their hegemony in the Old South, in the
decades leading to war, they had imagined themselves marginalized
in the American nation: they believed their way of life increasingly
incompatible with a modernizing United States, and their status as
men underappreciated by fellow Americans. They willingly fought
a war because they sought to create a nation in which their imag-
ined marginalization would be transformed into an unquestioned
hegemonic masculinity. As the war progressed, new and real threats
to that hegemony emerged, making real their fears of marginalized
manhood. When the war ended in 1865, not only did the dream of
a Confederate nation die, so too did Confederate manhood. Even
before the war’s conclusion, the South’s white wives and daughters
abandoned Confederate manhood and began redefining masculinity
in order to salvage their husbands’ and fathers’ self-worth.3
From colonial gentlemanliness to republican patriarchy to antebel-
lum paternalism, southern white masculinity had manifested itself in
multiple and evolving ways prior to the Civil War, and had always con-
tributed to the region’s political and cultural structures.4 When the Old
South transformed into the Confederacy, masculinity became central to
the war effort and national formation. The relationship manifested in
three ways: First, Confederate men sought women’s appreciation (and
emotional support) to justify their national cause and to verify their own
manhood. Antebellum southern culture had linked white masculinity
to white female approval: as historian Stephen Berry explained, “Women
were witnesses to male becoming.” The civil war that was required
to secure nationhood, therefore, drew upon that dynamic to inspire
men’s martial heroism. While offering a way to create a nation-state,
the war simultaneously provided a forum in which to produce a new,
Confederate manhood. One could not happen without the other.5
Second, while Confederate soldiers dreamed of the emotional sup-
port and gender validation of their mothers and wives, a man didn’t
need to survive the war to achieve Confederate manhood. Indeed,
death in the pursuit of their noble cause ensured a “rebirth” into the
“THE CRUSHING OF SOUTHERN MANHOOD” 21
community of martyrs, thereby guaranteeing masculine immortality.

As one survivor of the war penned, what remained in the wake of
death was the martyrs’ manliness:
A king once said of a prince struck down:

“Taller he seems in death,”
And this speech holds truth, for now as then,
’Tis after death we measure men.
And as mists of the past are rolled away,
Our heroes who died in their tattered gray,
Grow taller and greater in all their parts,
Till they fill our minds, as they fill our hearts.
Confederate heroes gained power and immortality through death,

and in their sacrifices, they gave structure to the chaos of death—
both theirs and that of their nation. “A tear—’tis all that we can
give:/Thy country, with thee, ceased to live;/Thy banner with thee
lies,” mourned another postwar poet.6
Third, a nation built upon manhood (and the politicians and sol-
diers involved in that project) had to differentiate itself from the fem-
inine. Much of the language of the Confederate cause—from official
speeches to soldiers’ letters—described women and women’s virtue
as a reason for war, despite men’s presence on the field for their own
manliness. Confederates assumed southern white women’s loyalty
and support, making that dedication an attribute of Confederate
femininity. Still, femininity also served as a symbol of insufficient
manliness: the enemy was mocked as effeminate, and deserters and
cowards were compared to women.7 White men, white patriarchy,
white nationhood—the relationship was irrefutable.
By all measures, antebellum southern white manhood had been a
“hegemonic masculinity” that empowered white men over women and
other, marginalized men, specifically black men. As a category of critical
analysis, R. W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity has exerted
hegemonic influence (if you will) over the development of manhood
studies. While the theory has met its share of criticism, hegemonic mas-
culinity has established some of the most important benchmarks of
masculinity studies: the institutionalization of men’s dominance over
women; the ascendancy of one group of men over other subordinate,
or marginalized, men; and the cultural production of “ideal” mascu-
linities intended to inspire reproduction of patriarchy.8
American masculinity studies have added to Connell’s definitions
by situating American manhood as always in crisis. As scholars have
portrayed them, despite the dominance and perpetuation of American
hegemonic manhood, American men seemingly have never been quite

sure of themselves or the patriarchal structures meant to solidify their
status. They expressed uncertainty about what they are supposed to
be, and they always had to perform manhood, thereby leaving it con-
tingent and open to interpretation.9 These ideas have been particu-
larly evident in studies of southern white manhood where scholars
have traced both the scripts of ideal manhood and the resulting anx-
ieties about failing to achieve that ideal.10
But such constructs disappear when historians approach
Confederate manhood in which southern men appear confident,
determined, sure of their cause and themselves. In conceptualizing
the difference between antebellum southern white manhood and what
emerged during the Civil War, historians traditionally have employed
three historiographical traditions: traditional Civil War scholarship,
women’s history, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s honor thesis. More tra-
ditional scholarship focused on soldiering and politics, emphasizing
what men did and coming to simplistic explanations as to why men
did it. Consider, for example, James McPherson’s What They Fought
For, a title with some promise as far as masculinity studies are con-
cerned. His conclusion that most soldiers acted out of patriotic and
ideological commitment may have countered a long-standing belief
that Civil War soldiers had little idea about the larger ideological con-
text of the war, but it said nothing of masculinity as a reason for sol-
diers’ participation. Not surprisingly, then, when women’s historians
of the 1980s and 1990s approached the Civil War, their conclusions
about how war disrupted and reconfigured women’s domestic lives
contrasted sharply with the implied consistency of men’s martial lives
found in the traditional political and military narratives.11
This historiographical incongruence persisted because of the power
of the honor thesis. Every scholar of antebellum southern white man-
hood has to begin with Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor, in
which honor—specifically primal honor—is presented as the dom-
inant system of white male-female relationships in the Old South.
Wyatt-Brown argued that this ancient ethical code made the South
and southern men distinctive. The ethical traditions that white south-
erners inherited from their European forebears led to a particular
understanding of kinship and gender roles, and within that discourse
of honor, certain things were accepted as true: the essentialist differ-
ences between men and women—and between white and black; the
family as the bedrock of a stable society; and the threat posed to fam-
ily, gender, and race by northerners, Republicans, and blacks. Honor
was the measure by which southern white men claimed self-worth,
social prominence, and community authority, and it was the means by

which the community acknowledged manliness. Patriarchy formed
the social hierarchy of southern honor, situating all in a system of
domination and dependency designed to prop up the white man and
the larger public will that he represented.12
I have never been comfortable with honor as the motivating factor
behind southern manhood (or as a rationale for the war as Wyatt-
Brown concluded: “A close reading of Southern rhetoric on the eve
of war should make clear the fact that white Southerners were certain
their cause was justified by the prehistoric code”). Wyatt-Brown unin-
tentionally exposed a great fiction in the antebellum South: that by
defining manhood through relationships of domination and depen-
dency, southern white men actually exerted their “independence.” If
men of honor depended upon the dominated—women, slaves, chil-
dren, marginalized white men—for validation, then their state was
hardly one of independence. Instead, they were completely dependent
on others to define masculinity.13
Honor was always more aspirational than actual, a discourse
through which white southerners talked about manhood rather than
the construction of manhood itself. The discourse of honor, then, was
the medium through which power was expressed and people were
governed, but it was not the structure itself. The motivation to pur-
sue honor as a societal structure arose from southerners’ fears of what
would happen if they did not succeed: in other words, as historian
Steven Hahn put it, “Honor necessarily fed upon the fear and dread of
its own negation.” Indeed, fear of powerlessness and potential public
humiliation is central to interpretations of American manhood, and
it seems to have been fully realized in the Confederacy. The creation
of a Confederate nation-state, then, was always problematic because
fear and dread underlay its foundational “truths” of white superiority,
black subordination, white male patriarchy, and white female virtue.14
Finally, honor seems problematic to me in defining southern white
manhood—and Confederate manhood specifically—because, as a cat-
egory of historical analysis, Wyatt-Brown framed it as timeless. We have
a very static notion of southern white men because patriarchy and honor
have been portrayed as unchanging and constant. Wyatt-Brown char-
acterized honor as “ancient,” “primal,” and “prehistoric.” Similarly,
Catherine Clinton in The Plantation Mistress described patriarchy as
“old,” “entrenched,” and “bedrock.” As exciting as their studies were,
these historians and others have persisted in portraying manhood, in
Joan Scott’s words, as “epiphenomenal, providing endless variations
on the unchanging theme of a fixed gender inequality.” Imagining
southern honor, patriarchy, and manhood as timeless categories of

historical analysis impedes our efforts to write what Jeanne Boydston
described as “a history—or many histories—of gender as historical pro-
cess.” But if we accept that honor was always aspirational rather than
actual, that patriarchs were always in search of personal independence
by depending on a changing casts of dependents, and that manliness is
a historical process rather than a timeless category, then we can begin
to imagine the dynamic relationship between Confederate manhood
and the Confederate nation-state between 1861 and 1865.15
Concerns over southern white manly identity were evident as early
as 1848 when the South’s leading political voice, John C. Calhoun,
enunciated a political theory by which the rights of a minority would
be protected from the whims of the numerical majority. According
to Calhoun, men are naturally self-interested, jealous, and vengeful:
in his own words, “While man is created for the social state, and is
accordingly so formed as to feel what affects others, as well as what
affects himself, he is, at the same time, so constituted as to feel more
intensely what affects him directly, than what affects him indirectly
through others.” While waxing philosophically about human nature,
Calhoun also offered an evaluation of American gender identities.
“In asserting that our individual are stronger than our social feelings,
it is not intended to deny that there are instances, growing out of
peculiar relations—as that of a mother and her infant—or resulting
from the force of education and habit over peculiar constitutions, in
which the latter have overpowered the former.”16 For Calhoun, unless
purposefully taught to individuals, social feelings or compassion were
innately feminine characteristics. Men, in contrast, because of their
inabilities to rise above individual feelings, had to be restrained by the
state from imposing their self-interests on others.
Calhoun then rejected the notion of natural rights, making a case
for patriarchal authority. “Instead of being born free and equal,”
Calhoun wrote, men “are born subject, not only to parental authority,
but to the laws and institutions of the country where born, and under
whose protection they draw their first breath.” Thomas Jefferson had
erred egregiously when he wrote that “all men are created equal,”
a statement that Calhoun claimed “caused him [Jefferson] to take
an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the
white race in the South; and to hold, in consequence, that the former,
though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled
to both liberty and equality as the latter; and that to deprive them
of it was unjust and immoral.” Liberty, according to Calhoun, was a
reward bestowed upon a people for their virtue and patriotism and,
inevitably, based upon the patriarchal subjugation of others.17
Finally, Calhoun turned to what differentiated southern white men

from northern white men. Stimulated by market and industrial revo-
lutions, the North’s white population grew over the first half of the
nineteenth century, gaining a numerical advantage over the South’s
white population. Calhoun feared that the numerical majority would,
in time, impose its will on the minority. Consequently, he enunciated
an idea of white southern men as an enfranchised minority that had
to be protected from the tyranny of the northern majority, and put
forth his doctrine of the concurrent majority which argued that “mere
numbers have not the absolute control; and the wealthy and intelligent
being identified in interest with the poor and ignorant of their respec-
tive portions or interests of their communities, become their leaders
and protectors.” It was quite simply a rejection of democratic politics
and a plea to return to the patriarchal structures of republicanism on
which the United States had been founded, a political system in which
white men of status and wealth oversaw families and communities com-
prising dependents—women, children, slaves, and poorer white men.
As Chief Justice Roger B. Taney expounded in the 1857 Dred Scott
decision, proper republican government was one in which women and
blacks “form a part of the political family, [but] cannot vote.”18
Southern manhood stood apart from womanhood because of
men’s inabilities to escape their own self-interests; it stood apart from
black manhood because white men could attain liberty; it stood apart
from northern manhood because it championed the revolutionary
heritage of republican patriarchy, including the white man’s right to
hold and dispose of human property. Calhoun’s construction of white
male citizenship became the foundation of southern political rhetoric
for the next 17 years, reaching as far as the United States Supreme
Court where Taney employed it to deny black male citizenship in the
Scott decision.19
Calhoun was only the most formal political thinker about what
was increasingly taken for granted among southern whites: that
southern manhood was different from northern manhood, and it was
constructed in opposition to both womanhood and blackness. White
southern men employed this logic to argue that they and their brand
of manhood were marginalized in the United States. “We are to be
deprived in the Union of rights which our fathers bequeathed to us,”
Senator Jefferson Davis declared in the US Senate. But he and other
Southern politicians and intellectuals—white men all—became ener-
gized in the 1850s to establish the viability of their own particular
brand of masculinity, and the political rights they claimed accompa-
nied manhood. The Confederacy’s future secretary of the treasury
C. G. Memminger professed that “the Slave Institution at the South
increases the tendency to dignify the family. Each planter in fact is

a Patriarch—his position compels him to be a ruler in his house-
hold.” Pro-slavery intellectual George Fitzhugh, who published two
books in the 1850s justifying southern white men’s dominance over
white women and black men and women, explained how patriarchy
benefited the dependents: “Two-thirds of mankind, the women and
children, are everywhere the subjects of family government. In all
countries where slavery exists, the slaves also are the subjects of this
kind of government. Now slaves, wives, and children have no other
government; they do not come directly in contact with the institu-
tions and rulers of the State.”20
And then, with the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln—a man
whose path from log cabin to the White House epitomized the
democratization of politics and self-made manhood, which Calhoun
denounced—southerners chose to leave the United States and form
their own nation-state, one firmly grounded in this vision of patriar-
chal manhood. In declaring the “scientific truth” of Negro inferior-
ity, Alexander Stephens implicitly recognized white men as a naturally
and morally privileged class. The “Constitution was made for white
men—citizens of the United States,” exclaimed fellow secessionist
Thomas R. R. Cobb: “This Union was formed by white men, and
for the protection and happiness of their race.” In the view of these
new Confederates, this was the intent of the Founding Fathers: that
whiteness and maleness indicate citizenship, and that citizenship, in
turn, buttress white manhood.21
Blackness and whiteness were not the only racial categories upon
which southerners constructed their nation-state. A curious piece
of literature titled “The Difference of Race between Northern and
Southern People” was published in June 1860 in the Southern Literary
Messenger. The author characterized northerners as “more immedi-
ately descended of the English Puritans . . . [who] were descended of
the ancient Britons and Saxons.” Julius Caesar once described the
Britons as “wild, savage, bold, fond of freedom, and greatly given to
religious rights, exercises and belief, and quite as greatly under the
influence of the Druid priests and ‘sacred women’”—attributes which
the author found “eminently descriptive of our Northern people.” In
contrast, the southern colonies had been peopled by “the blood and
race of the reigning family, and belonged to that stock recognized
as CAVALIERS . . . directly descended from the Norman Barons of
William the Conqueror, a race distinguished . . . for its warlike and fear-
less character, a race, in all time since, renowned for its gallantry, its
chivalry, its honour, it gentleness and its intellect.” And there we have
it—honor, alongside intellect, gallantry, gentleness, and chivalry—as

an expression of southerners’ warlike and fearless character (but not
southerners’ character itself). One can only imagine the elation among
the South’s Irish, Scots, Germans, and Scots-Irish when they read that
they had been elevated to the level of Normans.22
Secession transformed anxious southern manhood into confident
Confederate manhood, but the Confederacy was not in a conventional
war between two nation-states: it was in a revolution trying to become
a nation-state that embodied white masculinity. “Fellow Citizens and
brethren of the Confederate States of America,” the new Confederate
president Jefferson Davis proclaimed in 1861, “For now we are breth-
ren, not in name merely but in fact, men of one flesh, one bone,
one interest, one purpose, and of identity of domestic institutions.”
As he looked over the crowd before him in Montgomery, Alabama,
Davis did not see the white women or the enslaved black men and
women; he saw his white brothers—the voters and soldiers—who had
attained hegemonic manhood through identifying with the South’s
domestic institutions: patriarchy and slavery. When Davis identified
his Confederate brethren as a racialized and gendered political body
(reinforcing the Otherness of blacks and women in the process), he
also cast the new nation-state, and himself as president, as the embodi-
ment of that masculinity. Enslavement of blacks constituted white
men as a privileged class, substantiating their hegemonic masculinity
and turning citizenship into a valuable mark of manhood. Whether
Confederates fought the Civil War to preserve slavery, secure states’
rights, or ensure self-determination, success in any cause would prove
their manhood equally hegemonic to the “tyrannical” manhood of
the northern oppressors.23
The new Confederate nation-state was essentially a masculine
institution: the fatherland. Of course, the process of masculinizing
requires a contrast with the feminine, and white southerners had
portrayed their northern counterparts as effeminate for decades. But
Confederates needed to look no further than their own colonial and
early national past. “Where is the REBEL Fatherland?/Is it VIRGINIA’S
dear ‘Motherland?’” enquired a southern woman during the war.
No, the motherland was not sufficiently martial for the poet. She
dismissed Virginia as well as ten other geographical regions of the
Confederacy before concluding that
Where “Boys in Grey” fill martyr graves,

From Chesapeake to Tampa’s waves;
From where the hoarse Atlantic roars
To Rio Grande’s quiet shores,

This is OUR land, our SOUTHERN land;
This, THIS, our own dear Fatherland.
Manly sacrifice would transform the motherland of the colonial and

early national past into the fatherland of the new Confederate nation-
state.24
If the Confederacy was a fatherland, however, white southern-
ers’ insistence on states’ rights undermined its imagery. Fatherlands
are ruled by symbolic fathers who represent sovereign masculinity.
President Jefferson Davis was “not Commander-in-Chief only, but the
whole Southern Confederacy himself—carrying upon his shoulder the
heavy weight of the public care,” reflected Virginian John Esten Cooke
in 1867. But during the war, the Confederate Constitution inhibited
this type of figurehead. Throughout the war, state governors impeded
his efforts to fulfill his role as commander in chief, basically situat-
ing themselves as alternative fathers in their individual fatherlands.
Particularly when compared to the distinguished gentlemanliness of
the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, Davis appeared weak: after Lee
had surrendered at Appomattox in April 1865, Davis appeared obsti-
nate and, according to one Louisianan, determined to place his own
self-interest over that of the Confederacy, eager to “make a last effort
to sustain himself, but his efforts will be all in vain. . . . the soldiers are
disheartened & disgusted and determined not to sacrifice their lives to
glorify anyone’s ambition.” Over the course of the nation-state’s brief
history, Davis found his sense of masculine sovereignty increasingly
divergent from the Confederacy’s political and military realities.25
Thousands of Confederates rushed off to war because they believed
it offered a transformative event, not only for their fledgling nation
but for themselves as men. Confederates politicians employed lan-
guage that bound the military success of the Confederacy to the viril-
ity of southern manhood, glorifying duty, bravery, patriotism, martial
honor, and the defense of white women and children. Through both
the rhetoric of manliness and the bravery and military sacrifices of
Confederate soldiers, the war masculinized the Confederacy.26
Confederate manhood, in turn, rendered the war intelligible and
acceptable. Southern manhood had always been performed for others
and validated by them. Before the war, southern men acquired manli-
ness through mastering dependents in a household, and they demon-
strated masculinity through public recognition of that mastery. Now
they had a war, the grandest of public rituals, in which to demonstrate
mastery over themselves and their enemies. “Those of us who enlisted
felt that we were great heroes and were going forth to participate in
a kind of holiday excursion, soon to return crowned with victori-

ous laurels,” remembered William Robert Houghton. Mastery and
its accompanying political rights were latent in the body of the male
soldier whose actual or potential sacrifice earned him the nation’s
gratitude and justified the new fatherland.27
The Confederacy’s relationship to wartime masculinity, however,
quickly faced a new challenge: the feminization of the war. If women
were the feminized Other, then as the war descended into chaos and
white women assumed more autonomy and influence in domestic pol-
itics, Confederates’ hegemonic masculinity began to erode. Southern
white women who had previously existed outside the political sphere
found themselves in more intimate and frequent contact with state
and Confederate governments during the war. Years earlier, Chief
Justice Taney had iterated how white women were part of the polit-
ical community, despite their being deprived of the vote. Unable to
participate in the Confederacy as equal citizens, soldier’s wives found
ways to act upon that membership, demanding that the state ensure
the survival of their families. By 1863, their demands escalated into
food riots across the Confederacy, disrupting the myth of hegemonic
Confederate patriarchal control that had been so carefully crafted.
Their petitions and actions arose from personal and familial desper-
ation, but they also evidenced a separate (and to Confederate patri-
archs, an unexpected) arena of political activism.28
More significantly, as Union troops pushed farther and farther
into the South, Confederate men came to realize that they failed in
protecting their women and families. Rumors spread throughout
Confederate camps of Union aggressions—crops destroyed, houses
burned, property stolen, slaves freed, women raped, if not physically,
then symbolically through the violation of their domestic spaces. As
one southern woman put it, the enemy desecrated “the holy sanctu-
aries of a private family.” Confederate men were no longer available
to protect those sanctuaries, undermining much of the rhetoric that
bound protection of the fatherland to Confederate manhood.29
Further challenging Confederate hegemonic masculinity were
enslaved black men whose own masculinity had been marginalized and
subordinated. Exclusion of black men from the polity was foundational
to the Confederacy. Still, unlike white women, who were under the
protection of the nation-state and were indeed members of the nation,
slaves had no rights or obligations of citizenship, including the burdens
of national allegiance and military service. Plantations became sites of
local politics as enslaved, marginalized men exerted influence over their
masters and mistresses. They revolted, primarily by running away. In the
first year of the Confederacy, reports came to President Davis of “the
alarming attitude of our slave population” and “signs of insurrection.”

Slave activities worried local patriarchs who petitioned the Confederate
government to limit military conscriptions of white men: “We need the
remainder of them to keep the slaves down and save ourselves from the
horrors of insurrection.” The petitioner declared that this was necessary
before “anarchy will prevail and the slaves become our masters, if they
can.” Despite rhetoric that insurrecting slaves threatened the sanctity of
the white family and the purity of white women, the petitioner revealed
the ultimate fear: that slave revolt would destroy Confederate patriar-
chy, exposing to all the lie that family government meant control over
“our family, white and black.” Like the emergence of femininity, the
unexpected power of marginalized masculinity shocked Confederates
who believed that hegemonic masculinity would win the day. Instead
of creating Alexander Stevens’s reactionary racial and gendered order,
the war exposed fissures within Confederate patriarchy and proffered
its destruction instead. Facing empowered femininity and marginalized
masculinity, white men found it difficult to sustain positions of privilege
and their self-proclaimed hegemonic manhood.30
While these internal challenges undermined the formation of the
Confederate nation-state, they had a simultaneous impact on the ideal
of Confederate manhood. Not enough Confederates enlisted, forc-
ing the government to conscript soldiers, including boys. The first
Confederate conscription law of 1862 applied to men between 18 and
35; an 1864 act expanded the ages to 17 and 50. With parents’ or
guardians’ permission, minors enlisted, and thousands of underage
boys who went off to war as regimental musicians and stretcher bear-
ers often found themselves in the heat of battle. Boy soldiers chased
Confederate manhood, but for most, there was little real possibility
of reaching it. As boy soldiers died, Confederate men faced their own
failure at passing manliness on to the next generation.31
On the battlefields, the rhetoric of marginalized manhood that
had given cause for war evolved into the reality of marginalized man-
hood. Marching off to war took Confederate men away from the
domestic institutions of patriarchy and slavery that southern mascu-
linity required them to defend. They left behind families and commu-
nities who became vulnerable to invading Union armies, marauding
thieves, and insurrecting slaves. And they lost the ability to dem-
onstrate mastery over their slaves as African Americans challenged
patriarchy and escaped to freedom. If a soldier fought to demonstrate
military mastery and hence manliness, failure to protect women, sus-
tain control over slaves, and exert influence at home demonstrated
manly weakness.
The horrors of war brought large-scale death and dismemberment,

providing a metaphorical intersection between individual male bod-
ies and the Confederacy’s body politic. Soldiers’ mutilated bodies,
abandoned on the battlefield or hastily buried in unmarked graves,
recalled the indignities inflicted on the corpses of marginalized peo-
ples such as the poor, slaves, and criminals. Even the living came to
resemble the dead. “Their lank, emaciated forms and pale, cadaverous
faces made them seem like an army of phantoms. . . . They were terri-
ble . . . and fearful from their fierce hate,” wrote one Federal general of
the Confederate soldiers captured at Cold Harbor. One could barely
recognize humanity in such cases, much less manliness.32 Physically
and psychologically maimed, Confederate men, once able to construct
their hegemonic authority in contradiction to the dependent situation
of white women, now faced the prospects of always being dependent on
women. If the condition of the male body and the nation-state can be
metaphorically compared, then the maiming of the male Confederate
body certainly represents the subversion of the new nation.
If Confederate manhood were to be accomplished by individual
heroism, the war quickly erased that opportunity by diminishing indi-
vidualism. “You can hardly tell one man from another,” penned a
young Alabama soldier, “Everybody’s hair, whiskers, skin and clothes
are the same color.” “There was an end to all individuality,” concluded
a Georgia soldier. “I don’t believe I am the same being I was two
weeks ago, at least I don’t think as I used to and things don’t seem
as they did,” opined a North Carolinian. If and when they did return
home, physical and psychological trauma forced men who had once
measured manhood through mastery over women and slaves to rely on
many of their former dependents for assistance and even survival.33
The collapse of the fatherland also meant the de-masculinization of
its leader. In late May 1865, Union troops captured Jefferson Davis,
supposedly wearing his wife’s shawl. Rumors, news reports, and polit-
ical cartoons from the North spun the story, claiming that Davis was
dressed as a woman. The New York Times mockingly questioned
both southern manhood and southern womanhood, asking “Who is
President of the Confederacy?” and deciding that “Mrs. DAVIS is the
legitimate successor to her husband’s duties. When he ran off with her
petticoats she had no alternative but to put on the breeches. And in view
of the language she used on the occasion, we venture to predict that
foreign nations will make all haste to recognize her as a belligerent.”34
The defeat of the Confederate nation forced wholesale recon-
figuration of southern white manhood. Men had identified with
the nation because they viewed themselves as masculinized by their
roles in its political and military formation. Late in the war, General
Patrick Cleburne worried that defeat would “mean that the history of
this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy: that our youth will
be trained by Northern school teachers: learn from Northern school
books their version of the war: will be impressed by all the influences
of history to reguard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed
veterans as fit subjects for derision. It means the crushing of southern
manhood. . . . ” In other words, as Cleburne concluded, “It means the
loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal
property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood.”
Assuming that the North would “colonize” the South, Confederates
sought to recodify masculinity. Only one year after the Confederacy’s
surrender, Virginian Edward A. Pollard wrote The Lost Cause: A New
Southern History of the War of the Confederates, revising not only the
Confederacy’s history but rewriting Confederate manhood as roman-
tic, chivalrous, and honor-bound. The Lost Cause quickly became
the myth through which southern men could retain masculine dig-
nity despite the Confederacy’s failure. But they lived in a region over
which they no longer had control. They found themselves displaced in
southern state houses by carpetbaggers, scalawags, and former slaves.
They found themselves living in houses where wives and daughters
had assumed new and significant influence over family governments.
No matter how southern men chose to package it, the cause and
Confederate manhood were indeed lost. But they were not forgotten,
and the South’s white women immediately began their own project of
rebuilding southern manhood through the myth of the Lost Cause.35
Masculinity can only be hegemonic as long as women, margin-
alized men, and indeed hegemonic men themselves accede to its
authority. Despite their political calculations to situate themselves
as subjected to northern hegemonic manhood, southern white men
exerted unquestioned hegemony in the Old South and used that sta-
tus to initiate war and a new Confederate nation. Scholars have been
too quick to proclaim the ancient and fixed qualities of hegemonic
masculinity. Confederate manhood demonstrates the dynamic nature
of masculinity, even in a brief, four-year era. Within the context of
war and the emerging nation-state, the meaning and influence of
Confederate masculinity shifted. If hegemonic masculinity is con-
structed through contrasts with marginalized masculinities and in
contradiction to femininity, then the Confederacy’s failure to keep
enslaved black men and white women “in their places” did much to
shake the foundation of Confederate manhood and its nation-state.
But ultimately it was the war itself that eroded white male hegemony.
Physically and psychologically scarred, faced with tremendous loss

of Confederate brothers, and reminded daily of their failures both
on the battlefields and in nation-building by the presence of black
freemen and the new burdens placed on white wives and children,
Confederate men were broken. Given the dynamic nature of mascu-
linity, however, it is no surprise that they would recover, in time, and
so too would their hegemonic authority.
Notes
1. Alexander H. Stephens, “Cornerstone Address, March 21, 1861,” in
The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events with Documents,
Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, etc., ed. Frank Moore, 12 vols.
(New York: O. P. Putnam, 1862), 1: 45.
2. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old
South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), chap. 11; Brenda E. Stevenson,
Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious
in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia,
1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 182;
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation
South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), chapter 1; Martha Hodes, White
Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 120.
3. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 217. On the revision of
Confederate manhood following the war, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The
Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chapters 9 and 10;
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); W. Fitzhugh Brundage,
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2005), chapters 1 and 3.
4. The literature that touches on southern men’s roles and responsibilities
is vast. For a few examples on colonial gentlemanliness, see Daniel Blake
Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century
Chesapeake Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), and
Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary and Life of William Byrd II of Virginia,
1674–1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). For
samples of works on republican patriarchy, see Anya Jabour, Marriage in
the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate
Ideal (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), and Jan
Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Antebellum paternal-
ism has enjoyed the most attention. Among the more important works
are Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black
and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1988); Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World
the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); Drew Gilpin Faust, James
Henry Hammond and the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1985); and Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in
the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987).
5. Stephen W. Berry, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the
Civil War South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 191; Aaron
Sheehan-Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil
War Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007);
Peter S. Carmichael, The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace,
War, and Reunion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2005).
6. Anonymous, “The Confederate Dead,” in Cullings from the Confederacy,
comp. Nora Fontaine M. Davidson (Washington, DC: Rufus H. Darby
Printing, 1903), 147; Captain James Barron Hope, “Our Heroic Dead,”
in Davidson, Cullings from the Confederacy, 141; Nancy C. M. Hartsock,
“Masculinity, Heroism, and the Making of War,” in Rocking the Ship of
State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics, ed. Adrienne Harris and Ynestra
King (New York: Westview Press, 1989), 133–152; Amy S. Greenberg,
Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 12–13.
7. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender
Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low
Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 90; Greenberg,
Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, 26.
8. Nancy E. Dowd, The Man Question: Male Subordination and Privilege
(New York: New York University Press, 2010), chapter 3; Tom Carrigan,
Robert Connell, and John Lee, “Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity,”
in Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change, ed.
Michael Kaufman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 156–168;
Robert W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual
Politics (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 47–54; Robert W. Connell,
Masculinities (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 21–27; R. W. Connell
and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking
the Concept,” Gender & Society 19 (2005): 29–59; Demetrakis Z.
Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critic,”
Theory and Society 30 (June 2001): 337–361.
9. Bruce Traister, “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity
Studies,” American Quarterly 52 (June 2000): 276; Craig Thompson
Friend and Lorri Glover, “Rethinking Southern Masculinity: An
Introduction,” in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in
the Old South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2005), vii–xvii; Judith Butler, Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990); LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta,
Georgia, 1860–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); E.
Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity
from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993);
Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York:
Free Press, 1996).
10. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old
South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Bertram Wyatt-
Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture ; Kenneth Greenberg, Honor
and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers,
Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument,
Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1996); Craig Thompson Friend, “Sex, Self, and the
Performance of Patriarchal Manhood in the Old South,” in The Old South’s
Modern Worlds: Slavery, Religion, and Nation in the Age of Progress, ed.
L. Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 246–264; Lorri Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming
Men in the New Nation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2007); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious
Patriarchs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);
McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds ; Kenneth A. Lockridge, “Colonial
Self-Fashioning: Paradoxes and Pathologies in the Construction of
Genteel Identity in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Through a Glass
Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America , ed. Ronald
Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredricka J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1997), 274–339.
11. Nina Silber, “Colliding and Collaborating: Gender and Civil War
Scholarship,” in Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American
Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 2–18; James M. McPherson, What They Fought
For 1861–1865 (New York: Anchor Press, 1995); Berry, All That Makes
a Man; Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses:
Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in
the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1996); Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the
Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville Press, 1995); Laura Edwards,
Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War
Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
12. Steven Hahn, “Honor and Patriarchy in the Old South,” American
Quarterly 36 (Spring 1984): 145–153.
13. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, xviii; Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern
Culture, chap. 9.
14. Hahn, “Honor and Patriarchy in the Old South,” 146; Michael Kimmel,
The Gendered Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Susan
Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: Morrow,
1999); David Levernez, “Manhood, Humiliation, and Public Life: Some
Stories,” Southwest Review 71 (Fall 1986): 442–462.
15. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor ; Clinton, Plantation Mistress ; Joan Scott,
“Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review
91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1067; Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a
Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender & History 20, no. 3 (November

2008): 559.
16. John C. Calhoun, “A Disquisition on Government,” in Union and
Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun, ed. Ross M. Lance
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992), 6; H. Lee Cheek Jr., Calhoun
and Popular Rule: The Political Theory of the Disquisition and Discourse
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 77–124.
17. John C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Oregon Bill,” June 27, 1828, in Lance,
Union and Liberty, 569–570.
18. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, 36; Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60
U.S. 393 (1857), 26; Lacy K. Ford, “Inventing the Concurrent Majority:
Madison, Calhoun, and the Problem of Majoritarianism in American
Political Thought,” Journal of Southern History 60, no. 1 (February
1994): 19–58.
19. Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern Culture, 209; Dred Scott v. Sandford,
26–27; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of
Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 54–59.
20. Jefferson Davis, “Farewell Address,” January 21, 1861, in The Papers
of Jefferson Davis, ed. Lynda Lasswell Crist, 13 vols. (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 7, 21; C. G. Memminger, quoted
in William Sumner Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 210; George Fitzhugh,
Sociology for the South; or, the Failure of Free Society (Richmond: A.
Morris, 1854), 105.
21. Thomas R. R. Cobb, “Secessionist Speech,” November 12, 1860, in
Secession Debated: Georgia’s Showdown in 1860, ed. William W. Freehling
and Craig M. Simpson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8;
Ryan L. Dearinger, “Violence, Masculinity, Image, and Reality on the
Antebellum Frontier,” Indiana Magazine of History 100 (March 2004):
25–55; John Mayfield, “Being Shifty in a New Country: Southern
Humor and the Masculine Ideal,” in Friend and Glover, Southern
Manhood, 113–135.
22. “The Difference of Race between the Northern and Southern People,”
Southern Literary Messenger 30 (June 1860): 401–409.
23. Jefferson Davis, “Inaugural Address,” Montgomery, Alabama, February
18, 1861, in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 7: 46–47; Stephanie
McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War
South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 17–19; Rotundo,
American Manhood, 21; Kimmel, Manhood in America, 50–51; Edward
Ayers, “The American Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction on
the World Stage,” in The Old South’s Modern Worlds, eds. Diane Barnes,
Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 288; Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism:
Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1988); Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern Culture, 209.
24. John Mayfield, Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the
Old South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); Mrs. M.J.P.,
“Where is the Rebel Fatherland?” in Davidson, comp., Cullings from the

Confederacy, 40–41.
25. Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (West Sussex,
UK.: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 173, 178, 181; Thomas Cutrer and Michael
Parrish, eds., Brothers in Gray: The Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 260.
26. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire,
12–13; Kimberly Hutchings, “Making Sense of Masculinity and War,”
Men and Masculinities 10 (June 2008): 389–404; Steven Watts, The
Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); Kristin Hoganson,
Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1998); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization:
A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
27. Wyatt-Brown, Shaping of Southern Culture, 214; W.R. Houghton and
M.B. Houghton, Two Boys in the Civil War and After (Montgomery:
Paragon Press, 1912), 18; Friend and Glover, “Rethinking Southern
Masculinity,” ix-x; Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs:
Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army (New York: New York
University Press, 2010), 3–4; Robert A. Nye, “Western Masculinities
in War and Peace,” American Historical Review 112 (April 2007): 418;
Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the
Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998):
251–254.
28. McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, chapter 5; Connell and Messerschmidt,
“Hegemonic Masculinity,” 829–859.
29. Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 254–256; Lisa Tendrich Frank,
“‘Between Death and Dishonor’: Defending Confederate Womanhood
during Sherman’s March,” in Southern Character: Essays in Honor of
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, ed. Lisa Tendrich Frank and Daniel Kilbride
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2011), 116–17; Loula Kendall
Rogers Diary, May 11, 1865, Loula Kendall Rogers Papers, Special
Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University, Atlanta.
30. G.W. Gayle to Jefferson Davis, May 22, 1861, in Freedom: Volume 1, Series
1: The Destruction of Slavery: A Documentary History of Emancipation,
1861–1867, ed. Ira Berlin et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 781–782; McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, chapter 6.
31. Jim Murphy, The Boys’ War: Confederate and Union Soldiers Talk about
the Civil War (Sandpiper Press, 1993), chapters 1–5; Regulations for the
Army of the Confederate States, 1864 (Richmond: J.W. Randolph, 1864),
390; Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, 192.
32. Thomas B. Buell, The Warrior Generals: Combat Leadership in the Civil
War (New York: Random House, 1997), 335; Franny Nudelman, John
Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence, & the Culture of War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3.
33. Joshua Callaway to Dulcinea Callaway, September 6, 1863, in The Civil

War Letters of Joshua K. Callaway, ed. Judith Lee Hallock (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1997), 131; Lafayette McLaws to wife, June
24, 1861, in ‘Dear Mother: Don’t Grieve About Me. If I Get Killed, I’ll
Only Be Dead’: Letters from Georgia Soldiers in the Civil War, ed. Mills
Lane (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1990), 21; Walter Lee to mother, June
15, 1862, in Forget-Me-Nots of the Civil War: A Romance, Reminiscences,
and Original Letters for Two Confederate Soldiers, ed. Laura Elizabeth
Battle (St. Louis: A.R. Fleming Printing, 1909), 67.
34. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, 173; “Who is President of the
Confederacy?” New York Times, May 17, 1865; Joan E. Cashin, First
Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War (Cambridge: Belknap
Press, 2006), 162–163.
35. Patrick R. Cleburne to Joseph E. Johnston, January 12, 1864, in
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series I, 53 vols.
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1900), 52: 587–588;
Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, 187; Brundage, The Southern Past, chap-
ter 1; Blight, Race and Reunion, chapters 1 and 2; Edward A. Pollard,
The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates
(New York: E.B. Treat, 1867); Nancy C.M. Hartsock, “Masculinity,
Heroism, and the Making of War,” in Rocking the Ship of State: Toward
a Feminist Peace Politics, eds. Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King (New
York: Westview Press, 1989), 133–152.
C H A P T E R 2
Mormon Manhood and Its Critics:

Polygamy and the Construction of
Hegemonic Masculinity in the
United States
Steve Estes
Some time in the late nineteenth century, a man named Archie Barber
married a farmer’s daughter in the American West. According to the
folksinger who chronicled Barber’s brief, sad marriage, the bride was
not satisfied by the union. On their wedding night, she “expected
female sporting,” but found her husband was not up for it. The frus-
trated young woman complained to her mother the next day: “Mother,
you have ruined me by choosing me this man, I tried his courage all
night long, but his hobo wouldn’t stand.” The young woman went
before a jury of her peers; all of them were women and all agreed
that, given the circumstances, the marriage should be annulled. “Six
weeks or two months later this maiden married again,” the folksinger
explained. “She married a Mormon cowboy who understood his
game.” In contrast to the young woman’s first husband, the Mormon
cowboy “knocked her up with a double stroke, with this you under-
stand. She’s got a nine inch hobo now, all at her own command.”1
It is not clear when “The Mormon Cowboy” was written or by whom,
but musicologists place the song in a tradition of bawdy cowboy tunes
that satirized the sexual politics of the American West.2 I would suggest
that this song also reveals one of the many ways that Mormon manhood
was used to delineate the borders of non-Mormon masculinity in nine-
teenth-century America. The sexual prowess of the “Mormon cowboy”
most likely emerged from his religious mandate to practice polygamy,
40 STEVE ESTES
though this is left implicit in the lyrics. The Mormon cowboy’s sexual
abilities and extraordinary physical endowment also fit into an American
tradition of depicting minority men as hypersexual. In this view, minor-
ity masculinity was both something powerful to be envied, but also
something savage or uncivilized that threatened mainstream American
manhood and, perhaps by extension, American national identity.
Founded in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
(the LDS Church or Mormon Church) was stigmatized throughout
the nineteenth century for its support of polygamy. This chapter ana-
lyzes criticism of LDS men and their beliefs to help us better under-
stand how attacks on polygamy contributed to the construction of
hegemonic masculinity and national identity in the United States dur-
ing the second half of the nineteenth century. I argue that criticism
of Mormon polygamy and federal attempts to cow Mormon men into
submission to the laws and sexual mores of the United States were parts
of a much larger nation-building campaign and evolution of racial/
gender identities in America. Mormon polygamy was seen as a threat
to monogamy, morality, and the secular authority of the American
nation-state. Federal campaigns against polygamy coincided with the
reconstruction of the country after the Civil War and expansion of
the United States in the West. By the time the LDS church bent its
dogma to the will of the US government in 1890, officially banning
the practice of polygamy, the western frontier had “closed,” the nation
had largely been built, and Mormon men had begun to embrace (or be
incorporated by) hegemonic white American masculinity.
Studies of Mormons and polygamy have served as something of a
Rorschach test for American scholars, reflecting evolving interests in
race, immigration, gender, sexuality, marriage, and the role of the federal
government in everyday life. Recent scholarly interest in Mormon man-
hood has been inspired, in part, by the Mormons’ strong commitment
to conservative family values and opposition to gay marriage. Scholars
of women’s history and legal history have viewed the campaign against
polygamy as a vehicle for middle-class women’s political empowerment
and for the federal government to regulate family relations. Other schol-
ars have explored the ways that anti-Mormon novels and social science
studies in the nineteenth century connected Mormon polygamists with
racial minorities and immigrants as part of the expanded hegemony of
white, Protestant, middle-class, American culture. Most recently, Amy
Hoyt and Sarah Peterson have examined the LDS internal struggles
over changing notions of Mormon manhood from 1890 to 1920 when
polygamy was officially banned by the Mormon Church. No scholars,
however, have looked at the ways that gendered attacks on the Mormons
MORMON MANHOOD AND ITS CRITICS 41
underpinned the construction of both the American nation-state and

hegemonic masculinity in the nineteenth century.3
The concept of hegemonic masculinity, first articulated by Raewyn
Connell, is a normative construction of gender that embodies the “most
honored way of being a man,” requiring “all other men to position
themselves” in relation to the hegemonic construct. Connell recognized
that hegemonic masculinities emerge in specific historical contexts and
that they have evolved over time. This evolution depended on several
factors. One of these was the changing relationship between hegemonic
masculinity and marginal or subordinate masculinities. Scholars of
nineteenth-century American manhood have analyzed several marginal
masculinities, with particular attention to racial and ethnic minorities
(e.g., African American, Native American, Mexican American, and
Asian American men). As David Roediger and others have argued, Irish
Catholics, Italians, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants were all
“working toward whiteness” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. At the same time, the men of these communities also struggled
against marginalization from hegemonic masculinity. Mormon reli-
gious and cultural differences—like those distinguishing other “white
ethnics”—elicited challenges to the racial and gender identity of LDS
men in nineteenth-century America. By denigrating and distancing
themselves from marginalized men, white American men were able to
define a hegemonic masculinity as much by what it was not as by what
it was. Whether hegemonic masculinity was embodied by the self-made
man of the early nineteenth century or the civilized Victorian man of
the late nineteenth century, the boundaries of hegemonic masculinity
were limned by subordination of marginal men.4
The definition and defense of hegemonic masculinity in nineteenth-
century America was also intimately linked to the construction of the
nation-state. According to gender theorist Joane Nagel, “Nationalist
politics is a masculinist enterprise,” written with a script that is “by
men, for men, and about men.” Although Nagel may be universaliz-
ing too much with this claim, it certainly seems apt for describing the
relationship between masculinity and nationalism in the nineteenth-
century United States. Uncle Sam, the dominant American icon of the
era, embodied a paternalistic masculinity and strong nationalism both
at home and abroad. Hegemonic masculinity and nationalism rein-
forced one another as justifications for American federalism in the Civil
War and continental conquest in westward expansion. Southern white
men, historian Craig Friend has argued elsewhere in this volume, were
once closely aligned with American hegemonic masculinity, but they
were marginalized as a result of their ardent defense of slavery and their
42 STEVE ESTES
rebellion during Civil War. Manhood in the American West exhibited

a similarly complex relationship with American nationalism and heg-
emonic masculinity, though for different reasons. On the one hand,
the ideology of Manifest Destiny rested on the ability of Easterners
to civilize and Christianize the savage West. On the other hand, that
process of taming the “wild” West revitalized American manhood,
most famously in the form of Teddy Roosevelt’s transition from effete
Easterner to a rough riding Western cowboy. Western manhood, Laura
McCall concludes, “was often mobilized in conjunction with race,
class, gender, and national identity as a stratagem for defining, disrupt-
ing, and maintaining privilege.” Yet, as much as gender historians like
McCall have taught us about the pluralism of Western manhood, they
have not addressed the role of Mormon men in this diverse constel-
lation of regional masculinities. This chapter on Mormon manhood
and its critics reveals how subordinate or marginal masculinities are
entangled with American hegemonic masculinity and America itself.5
Founded by Joseph Smith in upstate New York in 1830, the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was unpopular among nonbelievers
since its inception. The Mormons (or “Saints”) moved progressively
westward in repeated attempts to escape persecution. A few years after
Joseph Smith was lynched in Illinois in 1844, the church’s new leader,
Brigham Young, led a migration of Mormons to the area around the
Great Salt Lake in what became the Utah Territory. The arduous jour-
ney was a rite of passage for the faithful. “The suffering was terrible,”
recalled one Mormon who later made the overland trip. “Fathers tug-
ging at the carts fell exhausted in their tracks. Mothers with babes at
their breasts moaned and prayed.” Tales of superhuman strength and
perseverance as well as familial devotion on the journey became cen-
tral parts of Mormon lore. A century and a half later, popular writers
used the migration to place the Mormons squarely within the narra-
tives of westward expansion and frontier manhood. The church was
“a major factor in settling the American West,” explained one such
account. Summing up a historiographical consensus in the 1990s, two
authors concluded that Mormons had heeded the call to “Go West
Young Man” for “freedom, opportunity, and a fresh start.”6
The Mormons needed a fresh start in the mountain west, in part,
because the practice of polygamy practiced by church leaders set them
outside of the mainstream of American family relations and sexual
mores. Church founder Joseph Smith had practiced what he called
“plural marriage” since the early 1830s. Smith issued an official proc-
lamation about the practice to other church leaders in 1843. Although
the LDS church did not publicly acknowledge polygamy as integral to
the faith until 1852, rumors about plural marriages had long inspired
anti-Mormon sentiment. According to the Mormons, there were

both spiritual and practical justifications for polygamy. Spiritually,
Joseph Smith argued that care for multiple wives and devotion to
a husband through plural marriage ensured that Mormon men and
women would get into heaven. In practical terms, Mormon leaders
also believed that polygamy would quickly increase church member-
ship through reproduction and recruiting. Finally, Mormons pointed
to numerous references to polygamy in the Bible as proof that God
supported such plural marriages. Around 20–30 percent of church
members practiced polygamy in the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Because the practice was most pervasive among Mormon lead-
ers, polygamy became nearly synonymous with the LDS Church.7
With the discovery of gold in California not long after the settlement
of Salt Lake City, the Mormons’ isolation in the Utah territory proved
short-lived. Thousands of Americans passed through Mormon territory
on their way west, leading to conflicts with the US government and
non-Mormon migrants. Mormon religious leaders were also political
leaders in the territory, and this theocratic structure did not fit well with
the larger American political system. Mormon leaders compounded the
problem with saber rattling rhetoric. “The sound of polygamy is a ter-
ror to the pretended republican government,” Brigham Young averred,
“because this work is destined to revolutionize the world and bring all
under subjection.” Or as one church leader joked: “I have wives enough
to whip out the United States.” In response, President James Buchanan
sent a detachment of US troops to install a secular governor in the
“Utah War” of 1857. Media coverage of the military campaign illus-
trated the gendered nature of conflict between the US government and
the Mormons. A favorite theme of non-Mormon cartoonists depicted
Mormon men hiding behind the “breastworks” of Mormon women, an
image that some historians later argued “maligned both Mormon men
and women.” Perhaps recognizing the ineffectual nature of the mili-
tary campaign, which only nominally removed Brigham Young from
territorial leadership, these illustrations also questioned the courage
and manhood of US forces, seen as fleeing from Mormon women. A
final cartoon from the Utah War reassured non-Mormon readers that
US soldiers remained paragons of manhood, depicting the American
forces as winning the war after a Mormon female militia surrenders to
the “dashing” American troops.8
Non-Mormon migration through the Utah Territory also provoked
conflict in the late 1850s. Brigham Young ordered Mormons not to
resupply one group of Missouri émigrés passing through the territory
in 1857 after the American travelers taunted the Saints over their earlier
expulsion from Eastern states. In an attempt to shield their identity, a
44 STEVE ESTES
group of Mormons dressed up as Indians and attacked the émigrés along

with real Native American allies in what became known as the Mountain
Meadows Massacre. Anti-Mormon writers relished the opportunity to
give grizzly details of the massacre. One account (based on third-hand
reports) described a young émigré girl, who supposedly kneeled before
a Mormon militia leader, “entreating him to spare her life” before he
“dragged her into the bushes, stripped her naked, and cut her throat
from ear to ear.” Whether such lurid details were accurate, they certainly
fed negative stereotypes about Mormon men as hypersexual and unciv-
ilized. The tragic attack at Mountain Meadows would be included in
nearly all subsequent accounts of the Mormons, linking them with “sav-
age” Indians in the minds of Eastern readers. It was not the last time that
Mormons’ racial identity would be clouded in the American mind.9
As more American travelers went west, particularly after the com-
pletion of the transcontinental railroad in the late 1860s, published
accounts of visits to “Mormon Country” became a cottage industry.
The most famous account was written by Samuel Clemens, a young
journalist writing under the pen name Mark Twain. Twain mocked the
tropes of travel literature on the Mormon territory even as he repeated
them in his narrative. Upon arriving in Salt Lake City, Twain wrote that
he and his fellow travelers “experienced a thrill every time a dwelling
house door opened and shut . . . for we longed to have a good satisfying
look at the Mormon family in all its comprehensive ampleness.” Twain
claimed that he arrived with an idealist’s zeal to reform plural marriage,
“until I saw the Mormon women,” who were “poor, ungainly, and
pathetically ‘homely’ creatures.” “The man that marries one of them,”
he continued, “has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him
to the kindly applause of mankind . . . and the man that marries sixty of
them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the
nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”
Twain quipped that Brigham Young had so many wives that he could
not remember their names without the list in his family Bible and that
the Young house must have had an especially large bed, measuring at
least 96 feet wide. Young had so many children, Twain wrote, that he
barely noticed when a Native American woman painted her baby white
and claimed that the Mormon leader was the father. As one American lit-
erary scholar observed, Twain’s jokes about Mormon sexuality reflected
his “own sexual squeamishness,” but his account nonetheless set the
standard for caricatures of Mormon polygamy for decades to come.10
The most universal critique of polygamy in traveler accounts focused
on the patriarchal nature of the Mormon family. Carmon Hardy, the
leading Mormon scholar of polygamy, acknowledged that LDS propo-
nents of plural marriage exhibited “almost an obsession with patriarchal
order” in the nineteenth century. Non-Mormon American families

were also patriarchal, but over the course of the 1800s, middle-class
American marriages were evolving into romantic partnerships within
which the woman’s assumed moral superiority gave her authority in
the domestic sphere and even, at times, the public sphere. The suppos-
edly unbridled dominance of Mormon men seemed as antiquated in
this regard as the practice of polygamy itself. Before and during the
Civil War, Mormon patriarchs were often compared to southern slave-
holders. Critics believed that the institutions of slavery and polygamy
gave men unchecked power, leading to sexual abuse, exploitation,
violence, and dysfunctional family relations. According to this argu-
ment, Mormon polygamists were tyrannical patriarchs, who—like
southern slaveholders—threatened monogamy and the family in ways
that undermined the moral foundations of American exceptionalism.
Writing the introduction to an ex-Mormon woman’s memoir, famed
abolitionist Harriett Beecher Stowe described polygamy as “a slav-
ery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, and the
family.” Based on her own experiences in a plural marriage and those
of Salt Lake City friends, one ex-Mormon (or “apostate”) memoirist
observed that “intelligent women [were] subjected to the grossest tyr-
anny on the part of ignorant and fanatical husbands” in Utah.11
No travel account or apostate Mormon memoir was complete with-
out some description and analysis of Brigham Young, the man who led
the LDS church from the mid-1840s until his death in 1877. Young
had 55 wives, though many of these were “sealed” to him for ritualistic
purposes, not for cohabitation or conjugal relations. With 16 of his wives,
Young sired 57 children over the course of his life. Many travel accounts
started with descriptions of Young’s plain dress and average appear-
ance, before titillating readers with tales of his family life. One observer
reported the rumor that Young had a “fast” (i.e., sexually adventurous)
reputation as a young man, before joking that “as matrimony is said to
sober a man down, he has already had enough of it to bring him down
to a fair standard of sobriety.” Still, Mormon critics admitted that Young
was “pleasant and manly,” a leader with the “magnetism of person and
character which commands respect and love from all classes of his peo-
ple.” The grudging respect for Young’s accomplishments in carving a
city out of the desert wilderness and of Mormon men’s industriousness
more generally tapped into an older model of American masculinity—
the “self-made man.” If Mormon men were seen as tyrannical patriarchs
at home, many observers agreed with the French traveler who noted:
“All the males in [the church] are usefully employed; we met neither
sluggards, idlers, gamblers, nor drunkards.” Under Young’s direction the
church amassed an impressive amount of wealth and property, much of
46 STEVE ESTES
it from lucrative businesses that served Americans going to the West. As

one observer concluded, Young might have wanted to keep Utah iso-
lated and independent, “but when he found that impossible, he manfully
accepted the situation, and made the world pay for its intrusion.”12
If Young and other leaders seemed to fit the model of self-made men
in America, their polygamous practices and struggles with the US gov-
ernment complicated their national and racial identities, which in turn,
undercut their claims to manhood. Among the LDS faithful, one apos-
tate Mormon explained, “The teachings of Christianity had been sup-
planted by an attempt to imitate the barbarism of Oriental nations.” For
critics, polygamy unmoored Mormons from whiteness and civilization.
As another ex-Mormon explained in a letter to his son, “We need but to
observe India, Africa, and the Malay Peninsula, where there is a system
of polygamy . . . and we find those nations at the lowest ebb of civiliza-
tion.” After a visit to the Utah Territory in the 1850s, one American
official wrote that the “scourge” of polygamy “now belongs to the indo-
lent and opium eating Turks and Asiatics, the miserable Africans, the
North American savages, and the Latter-day Saints. It is the offspring
of lust and its legitimated results are soon manifest in the degeneracy of
the races.” Though Mormon men were often compared to slave masters
before the Civil War, an ideological shift after Reconstruction linked
them to the supposed sexual licentiousness of African Americans and
Chinese immigrants afterward. Some critics suggested that Mormons
were not only similar to these “lesser” races, but that they also practiced
miscegenation with nonwhite individuals (usually women). Political car-
toons in the second half of the nineteenth century conflated Mormons
with racial minorities or depicted Mormon men with mixed-race prog-
eny. Even though critics often denied that Mormons were truly “white,”
the support of polygamy by LDS church leaders linked them to misce-
genation in the minds of non-Mormons and raised fears of race suicide.
Ironically, Mormons pursued formal strategies of white supremacy in
both the church hierarchy and in their missionary work for over a cen-
tury after the Church’s founding. LDS leaders did not allow African
American men to become “priests” (or full-fledged members) of the
Church until the late 1970s. Like Irish immigrants and other “white
ethnics,” the Mormons may have embraced white supremacy, in part, to
shore up their own contested claims to white privilege.13
Still, the Mormons’ public commitment to white supremacy did not
protect them from the denunciations of nineteenth-century racial scien-
tists. More scientifically inclined critics of Mormon polygamy argued
that plural marriage led to not only inevitable cultural decline, but also
biological degradation. “The woman who acknowledges more than one
husband is generally sterile,” observed Dr. George H. Naphreys, despite
copious evidence to the contrary. “The man who has several wives, has
usually a weakly offspring, principally males,” he explained, before pre-
dicting, “The Mormons of Utah would soon sink into a state of Asiatic
effeminacy were they left to themselves.” Another doctor added physical
descriptions of this problem in an 1860 health report on the Mormons.
“One of the most deplorable effects of polygamy is shown in the genital
weakness of the boys and young men,” reported Dr. Robert Bartholow,
because “the sexual desires are stimulated to an unnatural degree.”
Dr. Bartholow catalogued a long list of other maladies resulting from
plural marriage, including the “yellow, sunken cadaverous visage; the
greenish-colored eyes; the thick protuberant lips; the low forehead; the
light, yellowish hair; and the lank, angular person.” This type of racial
science, also called Eugenics, would not really become the norm in
America until much later in the nineteenth century and the early twenti-
eth century, but Mormon critics used it to argue for federal intervention
in Mormon society and family relations.14
The anti-Mormon campaign in the second half of the nineteenth
century coincided with the greatest challenge to and expansion of
American federalism since the Revolution. If Mormon polygamy and
theocracy were allowed to continue in the Utah territory during and
after the Civil War, would this moral and political challenge inspire
other forms of rebellion? By depicting the Mormons as a threat and
suppressing them, the federal government could solidify its author-
ity in the West and further extend its influence in American society.
Though it is far from a perfect analogy, Margot Canaday’s analysis of
the ways that the “straight state” redefined and regulated homosex-
uality in the twentieth century is instructive for understanding the
ways that Americans critiqued and curtailed Mormon sexuality in the
nineteenth century. This is not to say that the lived experiences of
Mormon polygamists and gay Americans were the same or that dis-
crimination against these groups was comparable. Yet the belief that
Mormon sexuality challenged hegemonic masculinity and the state
justified federal intervention in the nineteenth century just as the
homosexual “menace” did in the twentieth century.15
The political and legal intrusion into Mormon territorial sover-
eignty paralleled the rise of the Republican Party. The party’s first
presidential campaign platform in 1856 demanded reform of the
“twin relics of barbarism,” polygamy and slavery. Republicans did not
gain enough clout to deal with the “Mormon problem” until the Civil
War. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862 made polygamy a federal
crime punishable by a $500 fine and up to five years in prison. Lack
of enforcement by Mormon-dominated Utah courts and the diversion
of energies to fight the Civil War meant that no Mormons were found
48 STEVE ESTES
guilty of breaking this law for more than a decade. From the late 1860s
through the mid-1870s, Republicans in Congress struggle to enact
stiffer anti-polygamy legislation. In 1870 Representative Hamilton
Ward from New York threw down a challenge to his colleagues. “After
redeeming [the nation] from the stain of human slavery,” Ward asked if
his fellow congressmen “had not the . . . manhood [or] the nobility” to
protect Mormon women and children from polygamy. Congressional
Republicans passed a bill in 1874 moving polygamy cases out of Utah
territorial court jurisdiction into federal courts, leading to the first real
test case for plural marriage.16
In 1874, George Reynolds, a secretary to the president of the
Mormon Church, married his second wife in Salt Lake City and agreed
to participate in a test case, challenging the anti-bigamy law. Mormon
leaders argued that the law was unconstitutional because it abridged
the freedom to practice their religious faith. The US Supreme Court
disagreed. The unanimous 1879 decision in Reynolds v. U.S. used con-
temporary racial and regional assumptions to denounce plural mar-
riage. “Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and
western nations of Europe,” wrote Chief Justice Morrison Waite, “and
until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclu-
sively a feature of the life of Asiatic and African people.” Drawing a
shocking analogy between polygamy and ritual human sacrifice, Waite
argued that the freedom of religion offered no defense for such horri-
ble acts. The Court ruled that neither the Mormon Church nor indi-
vidual Mormon patriarchs were above the law, using this polygamy
case to extend federal power over the Utah Territory and Mormons.
“As a law of the organization of society under the exclusive dominion
of the United States, it is provided that plural marriages shall not be
allowed,” Waite concluded. “Can a man excuse his practices to the
contrary because of religious beliefs? To permit this would be to make
the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the
land, and in effect permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
Reynolds v. U.S. was a resounding denunciation of polygamy, but it
was not enforced. After serving time in prison, George Reynolds was
received to a hero’s welcome in Salt Lake City, where he then married
a third wife and was promoted in the church hierarchy.17
Whipping up anti-Mormon sentiment became a favorite strategy of
American politicians and political cartoonists throughout the 1870s
and 1880s. This was a low-risk political gambit since Congress con-
tinually rejected Utah’s applications for statehood in these decades,
and Mormons had little political clout east of the Mississippi. “That
polygamy should exist in a free, enlightened, and Christian country,
without the power to punish so flagrant a crime against decency and
morality, seems preposterous,” President Ulysses S. Grant declared in

1875. One political cartoonist lampooned both Grant and Brigham
Young in an 1871 illustration titled “The Mormon Problem Solved.”
In the cartoon, Young says, “I must submit to your laws—but what
shall I do with these [wives]?” Known for his corrupt administration,
President Grant replies: “Do as I do—give them offices.” The subtext
of the cartoon reveals Young giving up patriarchal authority to the
president, a theme that infused many of the contests between territo-
rial and national authority over polygamy.18
The anti-Mormon campaign of the 1880s continued to underscore
the role of gender, and particularly masculinity, in the struggle over
polygamy, often pitting a manly American figure against a weaker
Mormon tainted by plural marriage. With no real progress against
polygamy by 1881, the Daily Graphic urged President James Garfield
to “Complete the Work Begun by the Republican Party Twenty Years
Ago,” depicting the newly elected president as a gladiator wielding the
sword of “national authority” against the dragon of polygamy. That
same year, a periodical called the Judge espoused a muscular response
to Mormon polygamy, precisely because its editors viewed monoga-
mous marriage as the bedrock of a strong nation-state. The Judge urged
legislators “to rise in their might and with their strong voices blast
from this continent the foul blot of Mormonism, . . . permitting every
American to shout, ‘one flag, one country, and one wife!’” Democrats
were seen as more sympathetic to Mormon home rule, but when
Democrat Grover Cleveland ran for president, the illustrated magazine
Puck depicted him in a similar contest with Mormons. In “Foes in His
Path—The Herculean Task Before Our Next President,” Cleveland
wields a club of “honest legislation” against a host of marginal groups,
including a Mormon man with demon wings, a halo, and a belt of
“wives.” As Congress debated a stronger anti-polygamy law in the late
1880s, the Judge reimagined the fight against Mormons as a modern
version of the seventeenth-century French folktale “Bluebeard” about
a man who marries multiple wives and then kills them. In this case,
Congress uses a sword dubbed “The Edmunds Bill” to deliver swift
justice to a Mormon Bluebeard. Perhaps, no single source articulates
the role of gender in the anti-polygamy campaign better than an 1885
editorial in the anti-Mormon Salt Lake City Tribune. The newspaper
contrasts the Mormon practice of polygamy with the evolution of gen-
der and nationhood in the “civilized” world:
When the tribes of Europe were touched with the first sunbeams of
civilization, . . . woman was a slave and beast of burden. Gradually they
drew together in families; slowly the conviction was pressed upon them
50 STEVE ESTES
that woman was as free and more sacred than man; gradually the one
wife and mother became the queen of home, the most sacred figure in
the household. . . . By this new reverence given to wives and mothers, the
men themselves became exalted and the women, performing their part,
became the mothers of the rulers of the world. The homes thus created
became the stay and glory of the State, and when tried, the men who
were nurtured under the influences of those homes [were] so brave so
self-poised, and self contained, that against all foes they were invincible.
As these examples suggest, the anti-polygamy campaign tells us as

much about non-Mormon gender constructions as about the “pecu-
liar” practices of the Mormons. Critics of the Mormons saw the evolv-
ing (monogamous) marital partnership between a virtuous woman
and strong man as crucial to the success of the nation-state and to the
construction of real American manhood.19
Responding to the rising vehemence of the anti-Mormon campaign
in the 1880s, Congress finally acted to cow the rebellious religious
group into submission. A Republican senator from Vermont, George
F. Edmunds was the driving force behind this legislative assault. The
1882 Edmunds Act made “unlawful cohabitation” a federal crime.
This was much easier to prosecute than plural marriage, because the
Mormon Church had intentionally kept marriage records from federal
officials. By the late 1880s, southern Democrats had joined with north-
ern Republicans to rein in the Mormons in a bipartisan spirit that legal
scholar Kelly Elizabeth Phipps sees as vital to reconciliation of the bit-
ter regional divisions left over from the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Cosponsored by Edmunds from Vermont and Virginia’s Democratic sen-
ator John Randolph Tucker, the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act represented
the climax of the legislative attack on the Mormons. Edmunds-Tucker
confiscated much of the property owned by the church other than tem-
ple grounds, dissolved the church corporation, all but forced plural wives
to testify against their husbands, and mandated that voters, jurors, and
judges swear an oath that they did not practice or believe in polygamy.
Interestingly, the law also revoked woman suffrage in the territory. Utah
had become the first place in America to provide women with the right
to vote in 1870, claiming that this proved women supported polygamy
and polygamous leaders of their own free will. Mormon critics wrote
this off as simply a cynical tactic in defense of Utah’s political and reli-
gious sovereignty. But there was more than a little irony in the fact that
US Congressmen took away the right to vote from Utah women in an
attempt to save them from supposedly authoritarian Mormon men.20
Pressure from the Edmunds-Tucker Act and a desire to join the
union as a state forced the LDS Church to reconsider its official support
for polygamy. In 1890 the church president issued a short manifesto,

asking fellow Mormons “to refrain from contracting any marriage for-
bidden by the law of the land.” The manifesto did not annul previous
plural marriages, and the Church solemnized more than 250 addi-
tional polygamous marriages over the next 20 years, but the manifesto
signaled the beginning of the end of Mormon polygamy. Utah became
a state in 1896. It took several more years of wrangling over the polyg-
amous practices of leading Mormons for congress to seat Utah del-
egates. Religious studies scholars, Amy Hoyt and Sara Patterson, have
suggested that the public denunciation of polygamy led to a “crisis” of
masculinity in the Mormon Church. “In order to be more American,”
Hoyt and Patterson argued, “Mormons had to re-make their men.”
Maintaining a strict health code (e.g., abstaining from alcohol and
tobacco) and serving as missionaries were two “pillars” of this new
Mormon manhood. Missionary activity had always been important
to Mormon men, but at the end of the nineteenth century, missions
became required rites of passage to test young men’s faith in a poten-
tially hostile world. Although these pillars of Mormon masculinity
continued to set LDS men somewhat apart from the broader American
culture, dietary strictures and missionary activities were not affronts to
mainstream American culture the way that polygamy had been. At the
same time that the Mormons were turning away from polygamy, the
social context in which they were viewed by non-Mormon Americans
was also changing. Perhaps, newly reformed Mormons seemed less of
a social threat when compared to a wave of Catholic and Jewish immi-
grants arriving on America’s shores from southern and eastern Europe
in the first two decades of the twentieth century. External criticisms of
Mormons in the early twentieth century captured this paradigm shift.
The illustrated weekly Puck, which had savaged Mormons in the nine-
teenth century, depicted an LDS politician as a puppet of the Church in
1904, but in doing so, Puck represented Mormon leaders in the style of
Uncle Sam, a clear if subconscious indication of Mormon men’s grad-
ual assimilation into hegemonic American manhood.21
Over the course of the twentieth century, Mormon men came to
embrace monogamy, traditional family values, and patriotism to such
an extent that they came to see themselves (and to some extent were
seen as) exemplars of American manhood. Just as the Irish “became
white” in the nineteenth century, I argue that male Mormons became
American men, and in the process, became full citizens. With lead-
ers in both the Republican and Democratic Parties, Mormons today
are well integrated into the fabric of American politics. A century ago,
Mormon men were lampooned as hypersexual cowboys. A few decades
52 STEVE ESTES
before that, they had been placed outside of the realm of white mascu-
linity and civilization altogether. This journey of Mormon men from
the margins to the mainstream tells us much about the construction
of hegemonic masculinity and evolving national identity in the United
States. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, American heg-
emonic masculinity was increasingly exemplified by white, middle-
class, heterosexual, Protestant men. In this era, Mormon’s religious
beliefs and sexual practices placed them outside of the mainstream,
even though they were, for the most part, economically successful
people of European ancestry who considered themselves upstanding,
white, American Christians. The very exclusion of Mormon men from
mainstream society helped to construct a hegemonic masculinity in the
nineteenth century that would continue to dominate American cul-
ture for much of the twentieth century. Yet, like other marginal men,
Mormons adapted to (or were co-opted by) the dominant ideal of gen-
der identity. Although they retained many unique religious doctrines,
the Mormons jettisoned the practice of polygamy and assimilated into
mainstream American culture. The success of Mitt Romney’s 2012
campaign to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee was
the best indication of this assimilation, just as it served to underscore
the power of hegemonic masculinity in America. For some Americans,
particularly conservative ones, the contest between Mitt Romney and
Barack Obama was about more than party affiliation or ideology. It was
a struggle over who would be the symbol of American political power,
identity, and manhood. That a Mormon man had come to represent
the “great white hope” in the 2012 election, spoke volumes about how
much hegemonic masculinity had evolved, but also how it had resisted
change since the nineteenth century.22
Notes
1. Guy Logsdon, ed., “The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing” and Other Songs
Cowboys Sing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 40.
2. Ibid., 38–39.
3. Claudia L. Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah (Logan:
Utah State University Press, 1997); Sarah Barrington Gordon, The Mormon
Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Bruce
Bergett, “On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the 1850s
and the 1990s,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005): 75–102;
Kelly Elizabeth Phipps, “Marriage and Redemption: Mormon Polygamy
in the Congressional Imagination, 1862–1887,” Virginia Law Review 95,
no. 2 (April 2009): 435–487; Amy Hoyt and Sara M. Patterson, “Mormon
Masculinity: Changing Gender Expectations in the Era of Transition from
Polygamy to Monogamy, 1890–1920,” Gender & History 23, no. 1 (April

2011): 72–91.
4. R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity:
Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 832–833,
947–848; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History
of Race and Gender in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996); Christopher Booker, I Will Wear No Chain! A
Social History of African American Males (New York: Praeger, 2000);
Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion
Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007);
Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau, eds., Across the Great
Divide: Manhood in the American West (London: Routledge, 2001); Noel
Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995); David R.
Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became
White (New York: Basic Books, 2005); Nell Irvin Painter, The History of
White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); E. Anthony Rotundo,
American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution
to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Michael Kimmel,
Manhood in America: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011).
5. Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in
1998): 243–244, 246, and 249–250; Craig T. Friend and Lorri Glover,
Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2004); Basso et al., eds., Across the Great
Divide, 8.
6. Hans P. Freece, Letters of an Apostate Mormon to his Son (Self-published,
1908), 14, 27. See also John Codman, The Mormon Country: A Summer
with the “Latter-Day Saints” (New York: United States Publishing, 1874),
90; Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling, Mormon America: The Power
and the Promise (New York: Harper, 1999).
7. E. Carmon Hardy, Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy,
Its Origin, Practice, and Demise (Norman, OK: Arthur Clark, 2007),
33–76; Hoyt and Patterson, “Mormon Masculinity,” 74–75.
8. Carrel Hilton Sheldon, “Mormon Haters,” in Mormon Sisters: Women
in Early Utah, ed. Claudia L. Bushman (Logan: Utah State University
Press, 1997), 115; Ostling and Ostling, Mormon America, 53–54; Gary
L. Bunker and Davis Bitton, eds., The Mormon Graphic Image, 1834–
1914 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983), 20–23.
9. Fanny Stenhouse, Tell It All: The Tyranny of Mormonism or An
Englishwoman in Utah (New York: Praeger, 1971), 251–254. See also
Codman, The Mormon Country, 155–157; Freece, Letters of an Apostate
Mormon to His Son, 55–56; and Mark Twain, Roughing It (New York:
Signet Press, 1962), 111.
10. Twain, Roughing It, xxii, 91, 97, 99, 102.
11. Hardy, Doing the Works of Abraham, 30; Stenhouse, Tell It All, vi, 146. For
more on the shifting ideals of marriage and sexuality in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, see John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate
54 STEVE ESTES
Matters: A History of Sexuality (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); and
George Chauncey, Why Marriage?The History Shaping Today’s Debate over
Gay Equality (New York: basic Books, 2004), 59–86.
12. Jeffrey Ogden Johnson, “Determining and Defining ‘Wife’: The Brigham
Young Households,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 20, no. 3
(Fall 1987): 57–70; Codman, The Mormon Country, 5, 16, 142–146;
Stenhouse, Tell It All, 163–164, 166, 171–172, 177; Hardy, ed., Doing
the Works of Abraham, 196. For more on the “self-made Man” ideal, see
Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity
from the Revolution to the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books,
1993), 18–20, 195–196.
13. Stenhouse, Tell It All, ix; Freece, “Letters of an Apostate Mormon to
His Son,” 30–31; and Hardy, ed., Doing the Works of Abraham, 226;
Ostling and Ostling, Mormon America, 70, 95–101. For more on the
connections between anti-Mormon rhetoric, race, and imperialism, see:
Bruce Bergett, “On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in
the 1850s and the 1990s,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2005):
75–102. For more on the connections between gender and civilization,
see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of
Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996).
14. Hardy, ed., Doing the Works of Abraham, 205–206, 246; Sheldon,
“Mormon Haters,” 122–123.
15. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth
Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
16. Phipps, “Marriage and Redemption,” 447–451, 453; Hardy, ed., Doing
the Works of Abraham, 241–242.
17. Reynolds v. U.S., 98 U.S. 145 (1878); Hardy, ed., Doing the Works of
Abraham, 265–266.
18. Hardy, ed., Doing the Works of Abraham, 260; Bunker and Bitton, eds.,
The Mormon Graphic Image, 110.
19. Bunker and Bitton, eds., The Mormon Graphic Image, 112, 116–117, and
118; Hardy, ed., Doing the Works of Abraham, 278.
20. Ostling and Ostling, Mormon America, 70–73; Phipps, “Marriage and
Redemption,” 484–487.
21. Ostling and Ostling, Mormon America, 84–93; Hoyt and Patterson,
“Mormon Masculinity,” 73; Bunker and Bitton, eds., The Mormon
Graphic Image, 138.
22. Peyton M. Craighill et al., “Where Americans Stood This Election,”
Washington Post, November 7, 2012; and “Exit Polls” Cable News
Network, accessed November 16, 2012, http://www.cnn.com/elec-
tion/2012/results/race/president#exit-polls. Mitt Romney, the first
Mormon presidential nominee of a major political party in the United
States, lost the 2012 popular vote, but exit polls revealed that he won
support from 52 percent of male voters, 59 percent of white voters, and
62 percent of white male voters.
C H A P T E R 3
Eugenic Nationalism, Biopolitics, and

the Masculinization of Hysteria:
Historical and Theoretical
Ref lections
Anna Loutfi
Masculinity and the Modern Nation:

A “Trait Approach”
As R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt have pointed out in
their critical reevaluation of “hegemonic masculinity” as an analytical
category, the term has tended to rely heavily, especially within psy-
choanalytic scholarship, on “the notion of masculinity as an assem-
blage of traits” or “trait terminology.” According to Connell and
Messerschmidt, it is the “trait approach” that results in fixed concep-
tualizations of masculinity.1 Connell and Messerschmidt’s observation
draws attention to the problem of essentializing approaches to mas-
culinity. Yet at the same time, I would argue, trait terminology has a
very special relevance for historians of gender and nation. In her review
of theoretical approaches to the subject, Joane Nagel points out the
importance of attending to how “the value of and adherence to . . . nor-
mative manly traits vary by time and place.”2 Similarly, George L. Mosse
presents “normative masculinity” as an assemblage of manly traits that
can be harnessed in the service of nation-states.3 Thus, methodologi-
cally speaking, the historical study of masculinity and the nation must
necessarily involve examining which traits become manly at specific
historical junctures, and how discourses on such manly traits become
interwoven with discourses on nation building.
56 ANNA LOUTFI
In this chapter, I argue that at the turn of the twentieth century, the
trait of “manly will” was being transformed through the intersection
of medical psychiatry and military nationalism from a philosophical,
metaphysical, and psychoanalytic concept into a biological, medical
entity. Like the female womb, which links the individual bodies of
women to the future progress of the national collective (the biopoliti-
cal location of the nation’s “unborn”), I suggest that early twentieth-
century psychiatric notions of the will helped forge a link between the
bodies of individual men to the collective (national) body—with the
will providing the medical key to military success for the world’s most
powerful military nations (I refer mainly to England, Germany, and the
United States). This is the period when the concept of male hysteria—
or wartime neurosis—was born, and intensified in the years following
World War I. In discourses on male (wartime) hysteria, we find the
will operating as a mysterious aspect of male biology in need of dis-
ciplinary training and medical intervention, for it is the undisciplined
will—the key symptom of male hysteria—that is the cause of unpre-
dictable and antisocial behavior threatening the national collective in
wartime. The will as a “manly trait” signals the grave ambiguities at
work in constructions of masculinity in discourses of military nation-
alism in this period: it is both the trait that allows a man to serve his
nation with valor, and the trait which might, at the same time, result
in an individual man’s unwillingness to serve. Historical literature has
signaled the ways in which male hysteria has been seriously underre-
searched, while it is also clear from the same literature that the mental
and physical vulnerability of men in military combat require a rethink-
ing of male citizenship in wartime as a peculiar subjection of male
bodies to violence in the national interest.4 However, little attention
has been paid to the theorization of masculinity and the nation using
insights drawn from the study of male wartime hysteria. Connell’s
powerful concept of “hegemonic masculinity,” which refers us to the
values conferred on certain masculine types—or traits—does not, in
my view, do justice to the nuanced ways in which the same masculine
trait can signify both a value for, and a threat to, the national collec-
tive. Neither the terms “hegemonic” nor “marginalized” masculinity
adequately capture the phenomenon I seek to outline here, whereby a
manly trait such as the will comes to characterize both valorous man-
hood (in terms of a service rendered to the nation) and treacherous
manhood (leading a man to betray his nation). I am here advocating
a reappraisal of the “trait approach” in masculinity studies. Dismissed
by Connell and Messerschmidt as an essentializing approach to heg-
emonic masculinity that freezes gender roles into rigid stereotypes, I
argue that we not only need to pay greater attention to the ways in
EUGENIC NATIONALISM, BIOPOLITICS, AND HYSTERIA 57
which hegemonic traits “become manly,” but also to the central role
played by the “manly trait” in the medicalization of masculine citizen-
ship, whereby “traits”—here manly will—become biological condi-
tions of both citizenship and non-citizenship, marking the disturbing
ease with which a masculine ideal can collapse into a degenerate, crim-
inal, or antisocial “type,” endangering the national collective.
Nation-Building and Medical Manliness

By the phrase “medical manliness,” I imply, following Foucault, that
the manly subject is established as manly through technical proce-
dures, “at once ritual and ‘scientific,’” carried out by medical pro-
fessionals within the framework of the medical examination. 5 The
appropriate paradigm for a medical diagnostic system technically
addressed to manly subjects is the early twentieth-century mili-
tary medical inspection: a set of diverse techniques and procedures
deployed by medical professionals to establish civilian levels of fitness
for service during and after the World War I.
In the military inspection, manliness is produced through a med-
ical gaze—Foucault refers to a “compulsory visibility”—that estab-
lishes each man as an individual case: “The individual as he may
be described, judged, measured, compared with others” and “the
individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized,
excluded, etc.”6 The medical examination becomes the site where
social meanings are bestowed on individual bodies, their comport-
ment, deportment, performance, conduct, memory, capacity for pro-
ductive interaction, and emotional stability. But these social meanings
cannot be interpreted in relation to some overarching hegemonic
norm or ideal; what is significant about the medical examination from
Foucault’s perspective are the individuating techniques involved:
“Each individual receives as his status his own individuality [and] he
is linked by his status to the features, the measurements, the gaps,
the ‘marks’ that characterize him and make him a ‘case.’”7 The mil-
itary medical examination does not so much generate binary catego-
ries such as “manly”/“unmanly” (or “hegemonic”/“marginalized”);
rather, it encourages a more fluid economy of manliness as fun-
damentally unstable: an hysteric economy. Some historians have
written of the nineteenth-century “spermatic economy,” wherein
masculinity becomes intelligible in terms of an able-bodied and pro-
ductive subject (able to produce large quantities of sperm and able
to exercise enough restraint to conserve that commodity).8 But in
the hysteric economy engendered by the twentieth-century military
inspection, manliness becomes intelligible as a subject whose latent
58 ANNA LOUTFI
incapacities and inabilities are foregrounded: the subject’s inability

to fight, to remain upright, to focus, to take initiative, and to obey
orders. The military inspection replicates precisely Francis Galton’s
earlier “eugenic” technique of composite portraiture, which sought
to establish generic physiognomic and physical “types” on the basis
of assorted individual cases, while at the same time rendering visi-
ble the inner character of each type. “A composite portrait,” Galton
explained in 1878, “represents the picture that would rise before
the mind’s eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in
an exalted degree.” The composite, he went on, represents “not the
criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime.” 9
Within the framework of the military inspection, the medical pro-
fessional sees, in the language of Galton, “the man who is liable to
fall.” The man who may fail to perform under duress during combat
becomes the man whose body, gestures, and behavior might betray
“the child, the patient, the madman.”10 This military gaze is simulta-
neously a national gaze as well as a medical one, for it seeks to know
the inner worth of each individual male body for the nation-state
conceived of as pure military force. This synthesis of a medical and
national gaze is eugenic in its mode of vision (following in the tradi-
tion of “seeing” established by Galton’s composite portraiture): it sees
the inner qualities of an individual in his or her physiology and physi-
ognomy. Daniel Kevles has shown in his pioneering study of eugenics
how the idea of “intelligence” as a measurable and quantifiable mental
and physical trait was circulated via so-called intelligence tests (such
as the infamous Simon-Binet tests) thought to be of utmost impor-
tance to respective national interests within the international milieu
that immediately followed World War I. During what Kevles calls the
“postwar testing vogue” that swept the United States, revised and
updated versions of intelligence tests, initially used for the classifica-
tion of mentally handicapped children, revealed that almost a quar-
ter of draft army recruits were mentally lacking or “feebleminded.”11
By 1923, when the psychologist Carl Brigham completed his book
A Study of American Intelligence, it seemed to be the opinion of a
great deal of medical professionals, including Brigham, that the aver-
age man on the street was very probably the man “liable to fall,”
in Galton’s vivid phrase. Manliness, constructed along eugenic lines
as a medical and national object of scrutiny, had become inextrica-
ble from an economy of physical signs betraying potential weakness
of will. Writing in the Eugenics Review in 1910, one commentator
described military service as “eugenically useful,” encouraging “phys-
ical fitness,” “courage,” “patriotism,” and virility, while discouraging
“the perpetuation of feebleness.”12
Biopolitics, Eugenics, and the Manly

Trait of “Will Power”
Manly “will” features prominently in the canon of traits promoted as
part of what Joane Nagel calls a “renaissance of manliness” in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 Alongside the transnational
rise of national eugenics programs and movements for the promotion of
eugenic motherhood within the moral frameworks of the public health
and domestic hygiene,14 numerous newly founded fraternal organi-
zations, lodges, and secret societies promoted will power as a staple
manly trait.15 And as will power was masculinized, it was at the same
time medicalized: the will could be mapped onto the male body as part
of diagnostic analysis. Writing in 1905 on the treatment of patients
with neurotic disorders, the Swiss psychotherapist Paul Dubois spoke
of the need of patients suffering from nervousness for an “education of
the will.” Dubois took great pains to distinguish his understanding of
“the will” from earlier philosophical and contemporary psychoanalytic
works, according to which the (male) will was associated with liberty,
agency, and power.16 For Dubois, a metaphysical approach to the will
was unscientific; the will was not an ethical or sublime attribute of the
human species, but a physical attribute that could be studied under a
medical diagnostic gaze. Notions such as freedom, responsibility, or the
will, were all, in his view, problematic legacies of earlier Enlightenment
traditions of ethical thought as yet “unenlightened” by the advent of
modern scientific medicine. Dubois asserted that, in the wake of what
was known about the composition of the human nervous system, there
could be no further doubt that all nervous or psychological disorders
were rooted in the workings of the brain, and that the only available
philosophy of the material body and its comportment could be a deter-
ministic one: “It is of no use to speculate upon the nexus that unites
the soul and the body,” Dubois wrote in 1909. “Whatever may be the
nature of this bond, the moment that there is regular concomitance,
the succession of conscious states from the cradle to the tomb is neces-
sarily also regulated, and is as inevitable in each of its terms as the cor-
responding series of mechanical events.”17 For Dubois, the education
of the will thus referred not to the exercise of (highly delusional and
idealistic) moral agency or intellectual action, but to a self-conscious
struggle with one’s own motor responses through which reason could
be learned and reasonable behavior could become, with time, a habit-
ual physical reaction.18 “Do not hesitate,” Dubois cautioned his fellow
psychotherapists. “Show him that [the disease] is not uncontrollable;
that it pertains only to a physical disorder upon which he can exercise a
decided influence by the education of his reason.”19
60 ANNA LOUTFI
Dubois’s deployment of a medical discourse on the will did not

explicitly acknowledge the gendered logic of such a discourse: namely,
that if will power was a manly trait, then men were precisely the gen-
dered subjects most susceptible to the diagnosis of an uneducated will.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Dubois did recognize the gender dimen-
sions of his medical discourse in his choice of metaphors. And with
them, he also recognized the national dimensions of his discourse.
Describing neurotics as “unworthy soldiers” and “stragglers from
the army,” and likening them to antisocial delinquents and criminals,
Dubois’s analogies reflect a medical meditation not on neurosis per se,
but on the limits of male citizenship, drawing an explicit distinction
between men who were unable to serve their nation, using the lan-
guage of physical disability (neurotics “are lame”) and men who were
unwilling to serve their nation (“we do not know whether to believe in
their hurts . . . and send them back to the ranks”).20 The internal logic
governing the structure of this argument, determined by the overarch-
ing metaphor of the neurotic “straggler from the army,” is the eugenic
conflation of the neurotic object of the medical gaze with the male
object of the military gaze. Under this gaze, the male body is biolog-
ically linked to the national collective through the medical concept of
the will—a biopolitical point. Following Foucault, “government” in a
biopolitical context refers to the forging of a direct relation between
autonomous conduct (“governing the self,” “directing the soul”) and
the modern sovereign state.21 I argue that the medicalization of the
will in the first decades of the twentieth century was a key development
in the historical transformation of male citizenship into a biopolitical
model of citizenship where individual (male) biology becomes inextri-
cable from a collective “racial” or national biological organism—the
body politic. This paradigm is well established and understood in the
scholarly literatures on women, citizenship, and reproductive policies in
this period. Eugenic movements for “race betterment,” which sought
to harness science, industry, military power, and women’s reproductive
bodies (and domestic labor) in the political service of the nation-state,
encouraged a political view of motherhood that emphasized the impor-
tance of women’s individual mental and physical health for the promul-
gation of good national “stock,” a vision that Wendy Kline has called
“a new ideology of motherhood” or “scientific motherhood.”22 It is the
female womb in this context that provides the sovereign state with the
crucial “body part” that links the bodies (and conduct) of individual
women to the body politic. Indeed, Ruth Miller has argued—against
the liberal feminist claim that women have been historically excluded
from political citizenship—that women have been relentlessly included
as citizens of nation-states by virtue of their “womb-owning” status:
“Not just [as] good mothers,” but as “political actors [who] are biolog-
ically and medically linked to the nation.”23
What sense can be made of the relationship between individual
male bodies and the nation using this kind of biopolitical interpretative
framework? For Miller, male citizenship must be understood in relation
to female citizenship. In modern (biopolitical) nation-states, female cit-
izenship is normative in that female bodies are organically—without
the need for the conferral of political citizenship—linked to the collec-
tive through their possession of wombs. Men, “their copies,” must be
granted “artificial wombs.”24 Miller’s provocative analysis invites us to
rethink political constructions of masculine citizenship in the historical
context of the modern nation-building enterprise. What might Miller
mean by “artificial wombs” granted to men? (She does not elaborate on
this.) Does the male counterpart of the female womb refer to a biologi-
cal entity or body part? And how might this body part provide (medical)
explanations for individual male “conduct” on the battlefield?
I address these questions now by turning to the modern history of
hysteria: a disease initially presumed to be related to the possession
of a womb, as well as a medical condition that was discovered, in the
twentieth century, to affect men who lacked control over “their will.”
The modern trope of the hysteric as having both a masculine and
feminine gender offers a useful starting point for exploring biological
and medical constructions of masculine citizenship in the lead up to,
and aftermath of, World War I. As Paul Lerner points out in his his-
torical study of male hysteria in Germany in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, “the will as a psychiatric concept” was a
vague one, making it “a powerful and elastic metaphor that could be
easily appropriated for military, economic, and political purposes.”25
Male Hysteria: A Brief Medical History

The emergence of the will as a biological link between individual men’s
bodies and the national collective must be contextualized in eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century medical cultures that sought to explain human
emotional states in terms of physical, corpuscular processes. Physicians
like William Cullen (1710–1790) included hysteria (among other dis-
eases of the nervous system) in a new class of neurotic diseases, the
symptoms of which, they argued, had both physical cause and somatic
location. Any ambiguity over the precise somatic location of an ill-
ness was resolved with recourse to “the nerves [as] a central explan-
atory model for disease. Everything became a nervous complaint.”26
Well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “the nerves” oper-
ated as a code word for innumerable “unsolved medical mysteries”: a
62 ANNA LOUTFI
general referent standing in for a diseased body part.27 As hysteria was

“reconfigured as a nervous disease,” it became increasingly difficult to
demarcate diseases of the nervous system in terms of the physical sexual
differences between men and women.28 Eighteenth-century physicians
such as Cullen struggled to distinguish hysteria, a condition primar-
ily associated with women, from the same symptoms in men, which
were labeled melancholia or increasingly (in the nineteenth century)
hypochondriasis.29 In the late nineteenth century, hypochondriasis was
gradually replaced with the term “neurasthenia” by neurologists such
as George Miller Beard, who used it to imply the negative effects of
civilization on the (male) nervous system.30 Hysteria, the paradigmatic
disease of the female nervous system (linked to women’s reproductive
organs) was joined (but not replaced) by a new, late nineteenth-century
paradigm of nervous illness: a metaphorical understanding of the
nerves that sought to communicate the extreme vulnerability of male
“brain workers,”31 whose bodily states and activities were compared to
malfunctioning industrial operations: “breaking down,” “running out
of steam,” and “forced into overproduction.”32 A powerful association
between masculinity and industry facilitated the insertion of the male
body masculine body into a broader medical paradigm of nervous ill-
ness that was no longer dominated by the idea of hysteria as dysfunc-
tion in women.33 The male body was subject to a subtle remapping as
physicians attempted to identify a “metaphorical male womb”: that is,
a somatic location for nervous disorders in men.34 Janet Oppenheim
describes in detail the fashioning of male hypochondria or neurasthenia
from the mid-nineteenth century onward by medical practitioners who
clearly distinguished between female disorders of the reproductive sys-
tem and male disorders triggered by the pressures of work.
Medical-Military Analogies
Until the late nineteenth century, nervous illness was not considered par-
ticularly shameful among male members of the wealthier classes who
could afford medical treatment.35 The lack of stigma in this initial phase
reflects the absence of a concrete medical discourse linking male nervous
disorders to the health and military security of the national collective.
However, this situation was dramatically reversed in the early twentieth
century, with the development of military expansionist policies on the
part of the world’s most powerful nations.36 As France and Britain strug-
gled to retain their positions of global hegemony and aspiring imperial
nation-states like Germany, Russia, and the United States jostled for con-
trol of territories, raw materials, and populations worldwide, male citi-
zenship was carefully remodeled around the military concept of “fit for
service.” The corollary, “unfit for service,” helped to completely reframe

both men’s health and male citizenship under the rubric of national
security. In Britain, at the peak of its world dominance, it was the Anglo-
Boer war (1899–1902) that legitimized new national fitness standards
for men, against which male bodies were measured—and often found
lacking. The military-medical inspection was a paradigmatic technique
for “measuring manliness,” and helped bring about public consensus
that men’s bodies were “notoriously inadequate.”37 In 1903, following
the South African war, the British Parliament established a commission
on “national deterioration,” an event which reflected a background of
eugenic concerns over the decline of the nation’s “moral character, intel-
ligence, ambition, and capacity to rule the world.”38
It is important to emphasize, in the light of such developments,
not only the keen preoccupation of eugenics with national progress,
but its preoccupation with manliness —a concern often overlooked in
scholarly literatures in which eugenics is discussed primarily in terms
of the national politicization of the female reproductive body.39 A key
disciplinary tool for promoters of eugenic manliness in the interest
of national military prowess was the medical discipline of psychiatry,
which was swiftly gaining scientific credibility in German-speaking
Central Europe—the European “epicenter of scientific and medical
research”—in the first decades of the twentieth century.40 The med-
ical and military gaze of professional psychiatry upon the male body,
especially in the aftermath of the horrors and injuries sustained by men
in combat during World War I, transformed male nervous disorders
into something altogether inexcusable: “somehow blameworthy.”41 A
profound reconceptualization was underway, whereby male nervous-
ness increasingly “belonged to social failure,” to borrow a phrase from
Foucault;42 that is, it became a condition considered to impact the social.
This paved the way for a powerful moral psychiatric diagnostic model
emerging around 1900 within which “male hysteria” became gradually
socially intelligible, not simply as the problem of individual men, but
of men whose weakness of will threatened national health and military
victory on the battlefield. Ruthlessly undermining previous gender dis-
tinctions between hysteria as an exclusively female malady and other
kinds of nervous disorder in men,43 hysteria was effectively masculin-
ized—or, at the very least radically redefined as an affliction that could
be located in individual male bodies. The masculinization of hysteria
accompanied the militarization of hysteria as a generalized antisocial
condition. As hysteria was defined as “an abnormal way of reacting in
the individual,” in the words of psychiatrist Robert Gaupp,44 individual
hysterics could be diagnosed as stubborn or willfully disobedient: resis-
tant to the collective demands exacted by (military) discipline. After
64 ANNA LOUTFI
the Great War, as numerous military testing programs were devised

“not only for the exclusion of intellectual defectives, [ . . . ] but rather
for the classification of men in order that they be properly placed in
the military service,”45 a new “genre” of scientific writing emerged,
blending Freudian insights with scientific observations from the fields
of clinical psychiatry, neurology, and eugenics to address the problem
of wartime hysteria in military recruits. Defined in highly generalized
terms as a collection of numerous “manifestations of functional ner-
vous disorder” and characterized primarily by “the state of weakened
volition brought on by shock or exhaustion,” hysteria in this genre of
writing was heavily gendered as masculine, rendering the very term
hysteria “inconvenient for many purposes.”46
The questions that had plagued Enlightenment philosophers over
man’s possession of free will, or his propensity for rational deliberation
and self-restraint, were no longer philosophical but biological—indeed
medical—debates. Moreover, they were debates over masculinity and
national service—the fitness of individual men to serve in military com-
bat situations. A man’s lack of will power was at the same time a ques-
tion of his social value. Within the new military paradigm for discussing
nervous illness, the will became the physical or bodily cause of involun-
tary movements, speech impediments, and general disobedience or oth-
erwise unpredictable behaviors in men. Without proper “education of
the will,” to return to Paul Dubois’s phrase, the male body potentially
failed both eugenic standards of physical and moral fitness and their
nations (at war). We may speak here of the will as both a moral category,
a pseudo-medical (male) body part, and a manly trait that in its failed
state (seen in terms of incapacity or negative orientation) results in the
criminalization of the male hysteric.47 Before the outbreak of war, in
the very first years of the twentieth century, the medicalization of male
bodies via the psychiatric appropriation of the male will strengthened an
emerging organic, even mystical view of properly mastered will power,
in its masculine embodiment, as the safeguard of national health. From
this perspective, warfare became indistinguishable from medicine; war
was the natural antidote to decadence, curing civilization of its own
excesses, securing the future, mobilizing the best of men, “weeding out
militarily unfit elements,” and “curing the nervous crisis and restoring
men to their rightful role.”48 Medical and military analogies overlapped
as neurosis was reconstructed within the terms of twentieth-century
psychiatry both figuratively and literally as a form of desertion from the
army. No longer a question of individual well-being or ill health, male
hysteria had become associated with an explicitly dangerous form of
undisciplined manly will that might potentially undermine military dis-
cipline and thus threaten the security of the national body politic.
The Male Hysteric as Public Enemy?

Clearly, one cannot reduce early twentieth-century hysteria to a single
psychiatric discourse on masculinity. Nevertheless, in disentangling
hysteria from a somatic condition understood to derive from a wom-
an’s reproductive (later nervous) system, the twentieth century can be
seen to have brought about a radical shift in medical cultural attitudes
toward the male body, whereby hysteria was conjoined to a different,
rather more esoteric manly trait: will power. Though “tainted” by its
long associations with the female reproductive body, it nevertheless
seems plausible to argue that wartime hysteria, coupled with the psy-
chiatric concept of the male will, helped to reinvent the male body
as highly susceptible to nervous disease—and thus constitutive of a
major threat to national health and security.
Twentieth-century historians of masculinity, particularly in relation
to World War I, provide strong support for the idea that men had become
something of a national liability through the increased association of
the male body with hysterical symptoms. The tics, tremors, and other
signs of “shell shock” displayed by the male survivors of military com-
bat during the war were interpreted as evidence, according to historian
George Mosse, of a “social disease” afflicting the national collectivity,
indicating a certain criminal culpability on the part of the sufferers, who
were deemed to lack the necessary will to serve the “higher,” national
interest. In both Germany and Great Britain, the remapping of the fit
and worthy soldier-citizen’s body in terms of presence or strength of will
(transforming the male will into a biological national resource) domi-
nated debates over shell shock and other examples of war neurosis—in
Germany, practically to the exclusion of all other factors.49
What the debates over shell shock also point to is the extent to which
will power was not only a manly trait embodied within a hegemonic
masculine ideal, but an ambiguous and dangerous resource that might,
at any moment, be channeled in dangerous directions that did not serve
the “higher ideal” of wartime combat and individual sacrifice for the
nation. In both Britain and Germany, World War I marked a key turning
point in social and medical attitudes toward both male citizenship and
nervous illness. Centuries-old associations of female hysteria with fraud-
ulent behavior (“acting” or “shamming”) were recast in relation to male
hysteria, as public commentaries and medical discourses enacted a slip-
page between the medical afflictions associated with “war neurosis” and
the nationally treacherous activities of men “shirking” or “malingering”
at the front. These latter categories were historically born out of indus-
trial systems of factory labor in peacetime, referring to workers’ evasion
or slack performance of their duties (shirking), or to fraudulent attempts
66 ANNA LOUTFI
by workers to gain financial compensation for self-inflicted wounds or

feigned/self-induced illness (malingering). But during the Great War, as
the male body was increasingly seen as blameworthy in direct propor-
tional relation to its physical vulnerability, the malingerer or shirker was
more likely to be understood as a failed soldier, unworthy of political
citizenship, financial aid, or symbolic recognition.50 Refusal to enlist,
conscientious objection, inability to fight, fear, exhaustion, desertion or
disobedience at the front were difficult to disentangle from generalized
notions of “war shirking” or “war malingering,” and were all potentially
legally indictable.51 Male hysteria, as understood as a form of malinger-
ing, involved a highly ambiguous construction of male physicality and
embodiment that was ill, but willfully so. Those men lacking the will to
serve their nation but possessed of a strong enough will to avoid the call
of duty gave rise to a complex masculinity whose gender was not in doubt,
but rather his national loyalty.52 The individual soldier becomes, in the
malingering or shirking discourse of war, a bizarre amalgam of both cit-
izen (“public friend”) and noncitizen (“public enemy”):53 the biological
source of (dangerous and unpredictable) will power that might serve the
national interest or ebb away, to be replaced by a willful, deliberate avoid-
ance of national duty. The biologically determined male citizen of the
belligerent and territorially covetous nation-state, as he is rendered visible
before the medical gaze of the military inspection, thus emerges as a
thoroughly unstable, unreliable, and racially suspect social actor, rather
than the heroic embodiment of some hegemonic ideal of manly strength.
Even as he exhibits biological mastery of his own will, the soldier-cit-
izen at the same time exhibits a potentially dangerous individualism,
unmoved by the national collective’s requirement of self sacrifice. Hence
the need to educate the masculine will with the aid of psychiatry and
military discipline. Chronicling the treatment of nervously ill soldier-
patients with the often very painful “Kaufmann method” of suggestive
electrotherapy, Andreas Killen writes that “pain was held to be essential
to the success of the cure,” not only with a view to affecting a cure for
the illness itself, but in order “to override the patient’s ‘will to sickness’
with a more powerful ‘will to health.’”54 Thus, the will, whether strong
or weak in the male soldier-patient, remained a suspicious “manly trait,”
making impossible the psychic disentanglement of the figure of the brave
soldier-citizen from the broken, disfigured, and dangerously antisocial
body of the male hysteric.
Conclusion
According to Connell and Messerschmidt, hegemonic masculinities
do not necessarily “correspond to the lives of actual men.” Yet, they
write, hegemonic models “do, in various ways, express widespread ide-

als, fantasies, and desires.”55 In my analysis, I have tried to paint a
different portrait of hegemonic masculinity in the context of military
nationalisms of the early twentieth century, using what I have named
a “trait approach.” According to this approach, hegemonic models of
masculinity are built up discursively through the iteration of histori-
cally salient “manly traits,” such as strength, will power, self-discipline,
etc. However, rather than viewing such traits as components of an
ideal, fantasy, or desire, I regard it as more appropriate to focus on
the inherent ambiguity that traits present in terms of their capacity
to serve the nation, that is as symbolic of both ideal and dangerous
masculinity. This move, I argue, becomes inevitable if one employs a
biopolitical framework to analyze gender and citizenship, since in the
modern (biopolitical) nation, the citizen refers to a biological category,
the body of the citizen, and this body is biologically linked to the collec-
tive in the manner of a positive/negative relation: “public enemy” or
“public friend.”56 For Miller, the citizen as a biological category is at
the same time a gendered category (woman) and a reproductive bodily
space (the womb). The political decision that decides which individ-
ual women will play the role of public enemy will be made in relation
to the womb as the ultimate political space. Thus women (or their
bodies) become normative political categories: spaces where the future
health of the collective is to be both located and guaranteed. 57
The question I have tried to answer is where do we place male cit-
izenship within the biopolitical model presented by Miller? Can we
speak of biological traits in men that may be harnessed in the interest of
national health and security collective—as the reproductive womb links
the bodies of individual women to the collective “body” of the nation?
Such questions, in the light of the discussion advanced here, suggest
that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the philosoph-
ical concept of the will was being radically biologized, medicalized, mil-
itarized and, most significantly, masculinized as that “manly trait” that
could both serve and betray the national collective. This link between
the mysterious male body part—the will—and the national body politic
opens up a possibly new historical focus for the study of how biological
links have been forged between masculinity and the nation. The precise
ways in which male bodies are biologically linked to national collec-
tives remains largely under-theorized. The will, like the womb, both
consolidates, breaks down, and ultimately confuses the traditional sci-
entific distinction (inherited from Enlightenment materialism) between
the male soul and the male body, facilitating the emergence in modern
psychiatry and medicine of a new (wholly obscure) medical entity that
makes available the male citizen for appropriation by the national body
68 ANNA LOUTFI
politic. Neither a feature of some hegemonic ideal, nor a medical “fact”

of men’s marginalization and exploitation under wartime conditions,
the will is a biopolitical resource that helps shape the relation of men to
the national collective in terms of reliability—and liability.
Notes
Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 847.
2. Joane Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the
Making of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998): 245.
3. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
4. See, for example, Mark S. Micale, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male
Nervous Illness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Joanna
Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War
(London: Reaktion Books, 1999); Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock,
Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006); Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma
in Germany, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
5. Michel Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” in The Foucault
Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 204.
6. Ibid., 199, 203.
7. Ibid., 204.
8. See Ben Barker-Benfield, “The Spermatic Economy: A Nineteenth
Century View of Sexuality,” Feminist Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 1972):
45–74; Lisa Jean Moore, Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious
Fluid (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 21.
9. Francis Galton, “Composite Portraits,” Nature, May 23, 1878, 97–98.
Emphasis mine.
10. Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” 203.
11. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human
Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 79–82.
12. C. H. Melville, “Eugenics and Military Service,” Eugenics Review 2,
no. 1 (1910): 54.
13. Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 244.
14. Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Tensions of Empire
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann
Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 89.
15. Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism,” 245.
16. In the works, for example, of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and of course
Freud, for whom to speak of the will in relation to Woman was to lapse
into obscurantism (“What does a woman want?”).
17. Paul Dubois, The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders: The
Psychoneuroses and Their Moral Treatment (New York: Funk & Wagnalls,
1909), 48.
18. Ibid., 56.
19. Ibid., 43.
20. Ibid., 45–46.

21. Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Biopolitics’—Michel Foucault’s Lecture
at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality,” Economy
and Society 30, no. 2 (2001): 190–207.
22. Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics
from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), 30–31.
23. Ruth Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape
Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 151–
152. Emphasis mine.
24. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity, 149.
25. Lerner, Hysterical Men, 38.
26. Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern
Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 170.
27. Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 8. For some
of the difficulties encountered with the eighteenth-century somatic model
of mental illness, see also Kevles’s discussion of the medical causes of insan-
ity in twentieth-century legal circles, Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 49.
28. Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, 170.
29. Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 142; Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, 171.
30. George M. Beard, American Nervousness, Its Causes and Consequences
(New York, Putnam, 1881).
31. Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 51.
32. Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 156.
33. Brian Dillon, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (London:
Penguin, 2010), 87.
34. It was often the stomach that functioned as a metaphorical “male womb:
the organ to which the onset of countless physical symptoms may be
ascribed, and the cause of many emotional disturbances.” See Dillon,
Tormented Hope, 87–88. See also Paul Lerner on the use of the term
“railway spine” to medically diagnose male patients exhibiting hysteri-
cal symptoms without any anatomical basis following railway accidents.
Lerner, Hysterical Men, 24–25.
35. Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 152. See also Andrew Scull, Hysteria: The
Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 97.
36. The Crimean War (1853–1856) between the Russian empire and the
British (and her allies) had established a new public culture of war, with
news reports, including photographs, reaching national readerships on a
daily basis, thereby linking the national interest and security of the empire
to the interests and security of an “informed public” that was kept regularly
updated through the press. By the 1870s, the unifying national territories
of Germany and Italy had entered the global theater of war; industrial-
ized production of arms had begun to revolutionize military technologies,
and, by the late 1890s, the Western European powers were immersed in a
full-fledged “scramble for Africa,” accompanied by growing awareness in
Europe of the ascendancy of the United States as a nascent world empire.
37. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 13.
38. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 73.
70 ANNA LOUTFI
39. See, for example, Kline, Building a Better Race; Miller, The Limits of
Bodily Integrity.
40. Lerner, Hysterical Men, 15–16.
41. Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, 151.
42. Michel Foucault, “The Birth of the Asylum,” in The Foucault Reader, ed.
Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 150.
43. In 1881, men had been admitted to a new outpatient clinic at the
Salpêtrière asylum-turned hospital in Paris, followed by the famous proc-
lamation of the Salpêtrière neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot that “hys-
teria in the male is not as rare as is thought.” Georges Didi-Huberman,
The Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the
Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 80.
44. Cited in Lerner, Hysterical Men, 37.
45. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 80–81.
46. W. H. R. Rivers, “War-Neurosis and Military Training,” in Instinct
and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-
Neuroses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 205–228. See
also Dubois, Psychic Treatment, 19.
47. As Paul Lerner and others have noted, the incorporation of “male hys-
teria” into the psychiatric lexicon of German medicine served to justify
nonpayment of compensation or pensions to men who had been psy-
chologically affected by their experiences on the battlefields during
World War I. Lerner, Hysterical Men, 124–162. See also Killen, Berlin
Electropolis, 128–138.
48. Lerner, Hysterical Men, 46, 53.
49. George L. Mosse, “Shell-Shock as a Social Disease,” Journal of
Contemporary History 35, no. 1 (January 2000): 103–104.
50. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 78. Traumatic neurosis in Germany
between 1890 and World War I was increasingly dismissed as “pension
addiction” by doctors critical of the German social security system, because,
as they saw it, the system “encouraged sickness and . . . whining.” For a full
discussion, see Lerner, Hysterical Men, 23–39. Joanna Bourke notes similar
patterns in the British context. See Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 87.
51. Punishments included disenfranchisement, imprisonment, ineligibility
for welfare, and, of course, death.
52. George Mosse, in making this point, suggests, in dialogue with Sander
L. Gilman and Joanna Bourke, that the medical concept of the male
will facilitated diagnoses of men with “shattered nerves and lack of will-
power” as racially suspect “outsiders,” and “the enemies of settled soci-
ety.” Mosse, “Shell-shock as a Social Disease,” 102–103.
53. The terms “public friend” and “public enemy” are taken from the work
of German National Socialist jurist Carl Schmitt, whose well-known
legal treatise, The Concept of the Political, is summarized nicely in Ruth
Miller’s The Limits of Bodily Integrity, 159–162.
54. Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 139, 142–143.
55. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the
Concept,” 838.
56. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity, 4–6.
57. Ibid., 12.
C H A P T E R 4
Preserving the Family and the Nation:

Eugenic Masculinity Concepts, Expert
Intervention, and the American Family
in the United States, 1900–1960 *
Isabel Heinemann
Throughout the twentieth century, most western societies consid-

ered the family the foundation of the nation and sought to foster its
well-being and a stable birthrate through jurisdiction, welfare policies,
social work, and pro-family rhetoric. In the United States however, the
idea of the family as the basic social unit and cultural norm was molded
into a highly normative and surprisingly persistent national family ideal
that entailed specific race and class hierarchies as well as socioeconomic
assumptions. This ideal was the white, middle-class, nuclear family,
consisting of a male breadwinner, a homemaking or at least part-time–
working mother, and their children. Although it constituted a highly
contingent cultural construct, this normative family concept and the
gender roles attached to it structured the lives and aspirations of a large
part of US society prior to World War II and beyond.
Between 1942 and 1955, sociologist Talcott Parsons coined the
term “modern isolated nuclear family” for this normative model,
insisting that “the most important single feature of our family struc-
ture is the isolation of the individual conjugal family.”1 For Parsons,
“the ‘isolation’ of the nuclear family” was “manifested in the fact that
members of the nuclear family, consisting of parents and their still
dependent children, ordinarily occupy a separate dwelling not shared
with members of the family of orientation of either spouse.”2 In
72 ISABEL HEINEMANN
addition to the fact that it totally disregarded the existence of extended

kinship networks as well as patchwork families, Parsons’s model relied
primarily on the husband’s earning power as the sole breadwinner of
the family.3 Moreover, the husband had to provide a certain degree of
affluence and middle-class lifestyle as “the family status is overwhelm-
ingly bound to the occupational status of the husband and father.”4
Historians’ critique of such notions of socioeconomic exclusiveness
and racial bias notwithstanding, the nuclear family ideal and incor-
porated notions of masculinity and femininity proved hegemonic in
twentieth-century America.5 For example, the ideal of the nuclear fam-
ily as stronghold of the nation was at the core of President Theodore
Roosevelt’s warnings of “race suicide” in the early twentieth century and
the eugenic movement’s fitter family campaigns during the 1920s and
1930s. Proponents of Americanization and social work similarly sought
to convince immigrants and nonwhite citizens to adopt the nuclear fam-
ily ideal and the values it entailed, among them male ambition and eco-
nomic prowess, female respectability and homemaking qualities as well
as the constant will to improve their family’s social status, as Claudia
Roesch argues in this volume. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt
initiated the New Deal to counter the effects of the Great Depression,
public work programs and social security regulations focused on the
white male breadwinner at the expense of working women, nonwhite,
and working-class families. Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty,
Ronald Reagan’s “family values” campaign, and Bill Clinton’s Welfare
Reform of 1996 likewise favored the middle-class nuclear family. It was
preached in churches; communicated in public debates on women’s
work, divorce, and abortion; and reached virtually every citizen of the
nation through media and advertisement campaigns. The omnipresence
of this ideal had significant effects on those who could not or did not
want to conform to it. Especially when it came to the importance of
“proper family structure” and “family life,” nonwhite minorities such as
African Americans, members of the working class, and single or homo-
sexual parents found themselves excluded from the national ideal.6
As Parsons pointed out as early as 1942, the nuclear family ideal
implied strict gender hierarchies: women were to focus on their role as
mother, housewife, and manager of the family’s social life; men were
expected to be good providers—energetic, healthy, and well-adapted
to the exigencies of the professional world.7 Consequently, fathers and
husbands were under particular pressure because of the high speciali-
zation of America’s modern occupational system, which left men rela-
tively little time for social contact outside the workplace, and the fact
that retirement was often experienced as descent into total vacuity and
loss of purpose in life, given the great significance of occupational
PRESERVING THE FAMILY AND THE NATION 73
status.8 Thus, in his descriptions of the modern isolated nuclear fam-

ily as the dominant normative family model of the 1940s and 1950s,
Parsons also provided an account of the period’s ideal of hegemonic
masculinity: white, middle-class, heterosexual men who were econom-
ically productive and healthy. Men who—for whatever reasons—faced
difficulties in being good providers were not considered at all.
Reexamining Parsons’s ideas as well as those of his predecessors, this
chapter probes the ways in which social experts shaped nationalized
notions of manhood in the United States from the turn of the century
to the civil rights era. Throughout this period, American social experts
exerted a tremendous influence on nationalized ideals of masculinity by
establishing widely accepted standards of what constituted “proper and
healthy manhood.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, debates
on gender norms and the American nation were inspired by fears of
race suicide and inspired a quest for “social control.” As shown by the
example of pioneer sociologist Edward E. Ross, social experts began to
confront traditional Victorian morals with more “modern” notion of
individualism and obligations toward the state and the family, empha-
sizing a specific white, middle-class masculinity concept to counter the
perceived negative effects of Asian immigration. During the 1920s, the
eugenic movement aimed to improve American masculinity by dissemi-
nating knowledge about heredity, hygiene, and healthy living through
highly popular “fitter families” campaigns. These campaigns were based
on a strictly biologist understanding of gender norms: men as breadwin-
ners and breeders; women as homemakers and bearers of valuable off-
spring. These ideas did not disappear after World War II. The example
of marriage counselor Paul B. Popenoe and his American Institute of
Family Relations reveals how eugenic thinking on “proper and healthy
manhood” as the bedrock of the family and the American nation found
a new outlet in family planning and hereditary counseling in the 1940s
and 1950s. These traditions of “eugenic masculinity” were easily inte-
grated into Talcott Parsons’s male-centered nuclear family model and
testify to the powerful impact of eugenic thinking on the interrelation-
ship between masculinities and the nation in the United States.
Although many scholars have analyzed the effects of the nuclear
family concept on the lives of women in recent years, we know rela-
tively little about how men conformed or objected to this norm and
how it affected their lives.9 Despite groundbreaking studies by Michael
Kimmel, Ralph LaRossa, James Gilbert, and John Tosh, who concen-
trated on men’s sociocultural representations and self-conceptions, there
continues to be a dearth of historical scholarship on the effects (as well
as the variations) of what Raewyn Connell has termed “hegemonic mas-
culinity” on American men, specifically on those men who were unable
74 ISABEL HEINEMANN
or unwilling to comply with this ideal due to their race, class, status,
or sexual orientation.10 According to Connell and Messerschmidt, the
“subordination of nonhegemonic masculinities” and “marginalization
and delegitimation of alternatives . . . to socially dominant masculinities”
are central features of the creation of hegemonic masculinities.11
As indicated by the case studies on eugenic masculinity that are
presented in this chapter, however, Connell’s analytical concept
might require certain adjustments, since it does not adequately cap-
ture white, heterosexual, middle-class men’s marginalization vis-à-vis
the nation.12 The American eugenic movement sought to improve the
nation through a regime of bio-power or bio-politics, which was based
on biologist concepts of the nation dating back to the late nineteenth
century and on sociopolitical interventions such as race exams, ster-
ilizations, and even euthanasia.13 Although eugenic thinking in the
United States and its legacies has received considerable scholarly atten-
tion over the past two decades, there are no studies on eugenic mas-
culinity concepts of the 1920s and 1930s or their long-term impact.14
In a similar fashion, the historiography of expert culture and advice
in the first half of the twentieth century is largely silent on the role
of (male) experts in the adaptation and transformation of masculinity
concepts within the context of American nation-building.15
To bridge this gap, this chapter probes the ways in which social
experts shaped nationalized notions of masculinity from the turn of
the century to the civil rights era.16 During this period of tremendous
social change, “proper manhood” was conceived of as white, middle-
class manhood and linked to economic prowess. If members of ethnic
minorities and the working class were given attention in the expert pub-
lications and public debates on the family, they were mostly described
as deficient others that had to be transformed, educated, cured, and
morally uplifted to conform to this hegemonic ideal. Against this back-
drop of prescribed gender roles, this chapter investigates the discursive
construction of the American nation vis-à-vis the nuclear family ideal
and concepts of “proper manhood” in expert discourse.
The scholarship of Benedict Anderson and Gary Gerstle provides
important theoretical and methodological insights to better under-
stand these complexities. While Anderson’s influential book established
the idea that modern nations are “imagined communities” rather than
natural entities, Gerstle has shed light on two seemingly contradictory
strains of nationalist thought in twentieth-century America: civic and
ethnic nationalism. According to Gerstle, the American nation success-
fully wedded an “expansive civic nationalist creed” with a racially exclu-
sive nationalism between 1930s and the late 1960s. During the 1960s,
the civil rights and Black Power movements as well as the legacy of the
Vietnam War lay bare the fundamental contradictions inherent in this

vexed amalgam and ultimately tore it to pieces. For this chapter’s focus,
Gerstle’s insights into racial nationalism are valuable because they con-
tribute to a more thorough understanding of the connections between
eugenic masculinity and American nationalism.17
Preventing Race Suicide through “Social

Control”: Edward A. Ross and the
Glorification of Rural Manhood
When Edward E. Ross, who is considered the founding father of mod-
ern American sociology, published his major work Social Control in
1901, it was the first attempt to transform the diagnosis of pervasive
social change at the turn of the century into precise suggestions for
a better adaptation of mankind to these changes.18 More specifically,
Ross had in mind the welfare and future of the American nation, which
for him rested on the shoulders of white, middle-class men who were
the decision makers and social actors addressed in his book.19 By sug-
gesting that modern society’s individualistic tendencies should be sub-
ordinated to the common good, Ross provided a blueprint for social
engineering in the twentieth century. His idea of “social control” aimed
at improving society in the sense of a “better adaptation of men to one
another” through rigid rules and regulations.20 “If in their collective
capacity men did not find a means of guiding the will or conscience
of the individual member of society,” Ross wrote, “they would here
betray a lack of enterprise they show nowhere else. The elementary per-
sonal struggle threatens the general prosperity just as the swollen river
or the wildfire.”21 The process of social transformation described by
Ross as “social control” had to be expert-guided and rooted in modern
social thought. Thus, the social expert assumed a leading role, as he
could appeal to “those who administer the moral capital of society—to
teachers, clergymen, editors, law-makers, and judges, who wield the
instruments of control; to poets, artists, thinkers, and educators, who
guide the human caravan across the waste.” In this constant effort to
improve society, the social expert should “make himself an accomplice
of all good men for the undoing of all bad men.”22
Although this appeal to the social scientist that had both the knowl-
edge and the scientific methods to reform society appeared distinctly
“modern” and innovative, Social Control revealed a rather traditional
image of “natural” manhood that seemed to refer to the Jeffersonian
Yeoman ideal.23 Ross insisted that masculinity was best embodied
in the American blend of farmers and merchants at the frontier—
at a time when the Frontier just had been closed. His description of
76 ISABEL HEINEMANN
ideal manhood can also be read as an example of “frontier anxiety”

that reflected fears of decadence and moral decay of the American
nation.24
The same year that he published Social Control, which quickly
became one of the watchwords of the decade, Ross coined another term
that became equally influential in the contemporary public debate: race
suicide.25 As a strong opponent of unregulated immigration, especially
from Asia, Ross warned in an address to the American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences that “the [American] working classes grad-
ually delay marriage and restrict the size of the family as the opportu-
nities hitherto reserved for their children are eagerly snapped up by the
numerous progeny of the foreigner,” and that the “American farm hand,
mechanic and operative might wither away before the heavy influx of
a prolific race from the Orient.”26 Contrasting the New Immigrants
from eastern and southern Europe and those from Asia with white
Americans at the frontier prior to its closing in 1890, he described the
latter as ideal types—energetic, industrious, self-reliant, self-controlled,
and driven by ideas and economic spirit—in short, real men. From
Ross’s perspective, the American farmer was the ideal citizen: strength-
ened by the frontier experience in “body, brain, and character” and
not yet exposed to “the deteriorating influences of city and factory.”27
Although fully aware of the ongoing transformation of American soci-
ety through industrialization and urbanization (the effects of which
he had sought to counter in Social Control ) and the end of the frontier
in 1890, Ross concluded with an apotheosis of the native American
farmer: “He is now probably at the climax of his energy and everything
promises that in the centuries to come he is destined to play a brilliant
and leading role on the stage of history.”28 In light of the fact that many
farmers had to cope with poverty in the late nineteenth century and
left their farms to work in the emerging industrial centers in the urban
Northeast and Midwest, Ross’s reverence for the Jeffersonian concept
of yeoman masculinity may seem utterly anachronistic at first sight.
Only at a second glance, and read together with Ross’s warnings of
“race suicide,” one can discern a political program, a quest for a rebirth
of rural manhood in the wake of modernity.
Ross’s most influential supporter and the nation’s paragon of “real
manhood” around 1900 was Theodore Roosevelt, who became presi-
dent of the United States during the same year that Social Control was
published.29 As Gail Bederman has convincingly argued, his racial nation-
alism and his powerful advocacy of imperialism built on an ideal of self-
made manhood, which he had developed when living a solitary and
strenuous life in the West during the 1880s.30 Roosevelt thoughtfully
linked his claim to political power with the allure of strong but civilized
white masculinity. In his autobiography and the three books that he

wrote on his experiences in the rural West, Roosevelt molded his story
into a national model of masculine education, intended as a direct coun-
terpart to conventional sentimental academic education of young upper-
class men.31 For Roosevelt, as Arnaldo Testi has observed, the private and
the political were closely linked, since he presented “sex and marriage as
means of procreation and defense of the race, of great power-politics.”32
Although Roosevelt’s ideas reflected his personal experiences, he
also was an avid reader of Ross’s work and frequently incorporated the
social scientist’s conclusions into his own thinking on manhood and
the American nation. After helping to publicize the term race suicide in
the foreword he wrote to the popular bestseller The Woman Who Toils,
which was published in 1903, the president returned to the issue in his
1906 annual address to the US Congress.33 In this oration, Theodore
Roosevelt warned of “race decadence” and looming “race death” if
immigration remained unrestricted while the white American popula-
tion’s birthrate continued to decline. Unlike Ross, however, Roosevelt
took a decidedly antifeminist stance. From his perspective, female
individualism and women’s increasing participation in the workforce
were the fundamental causes of race suicide because they threatened
women’s traditional dedication to home and family.34
The president’s concerns and Ross’s warnings were widely echoed
by a new kind of science-based social reform movement, the eugenic
movement. Eugenicists believed in the biological inequality of people
and advocated measures to improve the biological substance of entire
peoples and nations, among them scientific selection, forced steriliza-
tions and, ultimately, euthanasia.35 Most early proponents of eugen-
ics in the United States were social scientists and animal breeders who
applied their experiences with raising plants and breeding animals as well
as their enthusiasm for Charles Darwin’s theory to the analysis of human
heredity. The best-known eugenicist organizations were the Michigan-
based Race Betterment Foundation, which was founded in 1906; the
Eugenic Records Office, which was established four years later in Cold
Spring Harbor, New York; and the American Eugenics Society (founded
in 1922). Equating “racial value” with social and personal worth, these
organizations advocated biologically determined gender roles and close
observance of racial theories in the selection of spouses for the benefit of
the nation. In eugenicists’ thinking, men were considered the sole pro-
viders who had to combine professional achievement with a healthy body
and pure mind, while women were reduced to their reproductive role.36
In a private letter to Charles B. Davenport, one of the leading
eugenicists of the time, Roosevelt contemplated the fate of the
American nation with respect to the declining birthrate of white
78 ISABEL HEINEMANN
Americans. He complained that “the men and women who ought

to marry, and if married have large families, remain celibates or have
no children or only one or two.”37 With this diagnosis in mind, he
insisted that it was the national duty of “superior” citizens to repro-
duce while he cautioned the nation not to enhance the reproduction
of “inferior” people: “Someday we will realize that the prime duty,
the inescapable duty of good citizens of the right type is to leave his
or her blood behind him in the world and that we have no business to
perpetuate citizens of the wrong type.”38
The ideas that Edward Ross and Theodore Roosevelt popularized
in the early twentieth century linked “modern” biologist concerns
about the American nation’s well-being to a general openness to inter-
vention in US society. While these ideas, which were conceived of as
benefiting primarily white, native-born Americans, framed the nation
in racial terms, they also emphasized the crucial relevance of strong
and virtuous manhood for the survival of the nation. Contributing to
a turn-of-the-century model of hegemonic masculinity, notions of race
suicide and “social control” marginalized nonwhite and working-class
men’s manhood and reduced them to biological and social outcasts
that were regarded unfit for full membership in the American nation.
Promoting a Eugenic Ideal of Masculinity: The

Fitter Families Contests of the s
After World War I, the growing eugenic movement adapted the
theories of Ross and Roosevelt and translated those theories into a
nationalized ideal of eugenic masculinity. The deaths of thousands
of able-bodied young American men during the Great War helped
eugenic activists to popularize their cause. Although the war’s death
toll had been far higher in Europe than in the United States, evidence
indicates that American eugenicists deplored the high losses and the
resulting “degeneration” of the American race. In the foreword to the
first American eugenic manual Applied Eugenics, which was written
by Paul B. Popenoe and Roswell H. Johnson and appeared in 1918,
Edward Ross recommended eugenics as the social technique to avoid
“a stagnation or even decline of our civilization in consequence of the
losses the War has inflicted upon the more valuable stock.” Ironically,
according to Ross, the war itself had paved the way for the ascent of
eugenics because “the plowshare of war has turned up the tough sod
of custom, and now every sound new idea has a chance.”39
One such new idea was the “fitter family contests,” which emerged
across the nation during the 1920s. Social experts (doctors, pediatri-
cians, social workers, and mostly female nurses) sought to use these
contests in their quest for better offspring as well as larger and health-
ier families. Specifically, they regarded them as an opportunity to
train families in the basics of heredity laws and healthy childrearing
practices, which implied an observance of biologically based gender
norms and a specific interpretation of hegemonic masculinity. After
the first “better babies contests” had been held at rural state fairs in
1911, their follow-up, the “fitter family contests” of the 1920s, soon
became a national phenomenon. Apparently, they attracted a wide
range of Americans who flocked to exhibition halls, happily endured
medical exams and oral interviews, and were eager to have their fam-
ily pedigrees established.40 Prizes were awarded in several catego-
ries, including large and small families as well as married couples.
Sponsored by the American Eugenics Society, medals accorded to
the winners were engraved with the slogan “Yeah, I have a godly
heritage!” Photos of and articles about the awardees in the local press
made them minor celebrities in their respective communities.41
The first fitter family contest was organized in Kansas in 1920 by
two women social reformers: pediatrician Florence Sherbon from the
University of Kansas and Mary Tyrell Watts, president of the Iowa
Parent Teacher Association. Watts and Sherbon were motivated by
their own experiences with the examination of babies in the “bet-
ter babies contests” and encouraged by the president of American
Eugenics Societies, Charles B. Davenport. They planned to collect
data on entire families and to provide guidance in eugenic matters to
a larger range of people instead of merely screening infants. After five
years of experience with the contests in Kansas and the export of the
format to numerous other states, the Kansas Bureau of Child Research
underscored the competitions’ affinity to agricultural breeding tech-
niques in an official report: “The Fitter Families Project is a legiti-
mate outgrowth of scientific agriculture. It is the application of the
principles of scientific plant and animal husbandry to the next higher
order of creation, the human family, and contemplates the develop-
ment of a science of practical husbandry.”42
The design of the contests not only revealed striking continuities
with regard to biologist thinking (from plants and animals to human
beings), it also established a close link between the individual and its
obligations toward society, echoing Ross’s emphasis on social control.
The opening exhibit that was part of the contest setting—an installa-
tion with flashing lights—not only offered information on heredity, but
also invited spectators to rethink their most private decisions regard-
ing reproduction and family for the sake of the nation. It read: “Some
people are born to be a burden on the rest. Learn about Heredity. You
can correct these conditions.” Below a constantly flashing light stood
80 ISABEL HEINEMANN
the caption: “This light flashes every 48 seconds: every 48 seconds a

person is born in the United States who will never grow up mentally
beyond the stage of a normal 8 year old boy or girl.”43
After being provided with such information, the family proceeded
to the eugenic and medical exam, carried out in the case of Kansas
by a eugenicist who tended to be a university professor, male and
female physicians, an otolaryngologist, a dentist, a psychiatrist, a psy-
chologist, and a laboratory technician. In a three-hour process, these
specialists assembled a complete record of the family, giving each
entrant a health certificate class A, B, or C.44 While the entire family
was examined, the organizers of the contests accorded specific gen-
der roles to men and women. Women were instructed in proper baby
care and nutrition, while fathers were given additional information on
heredity and shown the exhibition. Fathers and men were confirmed
as the prime decision makers in eugenic matters because they were
provided with all the important information while their wives learned
how to balance the effects of that information.
Since the fitter family contests tended to be part of state fairs,
most of which took place in rural regions, the family ideal (and the
related masculinity concepts) that they upheld echoed earlier notions
of agrarian manhood. The contests favored the male farmer as the
strong, independent pater familias. This ideal man not only contrib-
uted to the national cause by producing numerous progeny, he also
preserved America’s natural resources by tending his fields and breed-
ing cattle. An article in the Journal of Heredity on the Kansas contest
hailed “the farmer, who drove his wife and five children fifty miles in
a Ford, and then waited four hours for the examination, just for the
sheer satisfaction that they were all right.”45
The visitors of the exhibit and especially the participants of the
contest were told that it required competence and foresight on the
part of the husband to select a wife because “the young man who
knows the eugenic history of his family” would “look for more than
just a pretty face when he decides to marry and add his own branch to
the family tree.”46 Girls were to become devoted mothers and com-
passionate wives to build and sustain the American nation. They had
to raise healthy offspring and should “resist the whirlwind courtship
of a handsome stranger,” unless his eugenic background had been
cleared.47 Through such instructions, men were familiarized with the
hegemonic ideal of white, middle-class masculinity, albeit adapted to
their rural environment, while both men and women were told to
subscribe to biologically grounded gender norms.
Obviously, the contests and the gendered family ideal that they
propagated were heavily racialized: all award-winning individuals and
families were white. Nonwhite men and women did not figure in the
investigation, except for negative examples of “undesirable heritage”
or ruthless intruders into the white race.48 By linking social achieve-
ment and seemingly proper genes, social experts constructed a cate-
gory of white men and women who, together with men and women
of color, were deemed a racially inferior “danger to the white race.”
According to eugenicists, the male members of these two groups had
“deficient” hereditary traits and ought to refrain from procreating
for the sake of the nation. These experts thus not only accepted but
actively perpetuated their marginalization.49 In sum, the fitter fam-
ily contests show how social experts actively defined guidelines for
American couples and their offspring, inspired by eugenic thinking
and agricultural breeding techniques. In a broader sense, they served
to propagate a eugenic masculinity ideal that made white middle-class
men of “valuable racial stock” the principal bearers of the nation.
Women played an important role in the contests. In fact, almost
all initiators and most judges were women, while the heads of the
eugenic movement who sponsored the events were overwhelmingly
male. Examining women field workers of the Eugenic Record Office
(ERO), which collected eugenic data on American families across the
nation from the turn of the century well into the 1920s, Margaret
Rossiter and Amy Bix have shown that these women frequently
encountered discrimination as researchers. Male eugenicists insisted
that women’s childbearing capacity determined their gender role,
which confined most female eugenicists to menial jobs and severely
limited their academic career options.50 This observation also applies
to the women examiners in the fitter family contests who endorsed a
eugenic family ideal that favored patriarchy and male dominance in
the nation but that they believed would help improve the American
nation.51 Such ambivalences regarding gender norms, female agency,
and male dominance survived well into the post–World War II period
and characterized public debates on the family.
Serving the Nation: Paul B. Popenoe’s

Transition from Eugenics to Family
Planning and Marriage Counseling
After World War II, the national American family ideal and the gen-
der norms attached to it underwent significant changes, especially with
regard to masculinity. In the context of the Cold War, stable families
and good male providers assumed great importance in debates about
the American nation.52 Not only did men return to their function as
82 ISABEL HEINEMANN
prime breadwinners (although many women continued to work part-

time), they also had to deal with social experts’ new idea of involved
and responsible fatherhood.53 Although recent historical scholarship
has shed light on issues as “Cold War privacy” and the “moderniza-
tion of fatherhood,” we know little about the ways in which notions
of “modern fatherhood,” “traditional breadwinning,” and the eugenic
masculinity concepts of the 1920s and 1930s were linked to each other
and how the latter found their way into the American mainstream. In
this process of readjusting the national family ideal, American social
experts assumed a critical role. They helped transform eugenic thinking
into family planning and hereditary counseling, once more establishing
and propagating specific notions of “proper and healthy manhood”
on a national scale. For example, former eugenicist Paul B. Popenoe
became the nation’s foremost marriage counselor and advice colum-
nist.54 As such, he was determined to “improve” the substance of the
American nation, exerting a tremendous influence on popular under-
standings of gender roles in Cold War America. Through his American
Institute of Family Relations (AFIR), which was founded in 1930 in
Los Angeles, California, and existed until the late 1970s, Popenoe not
only advised thousands of couples how to adjust their marriage but
also trained hundreds of family experts, most of whom were men.55
The Institute’s family counselors helped disseminate Popenoe’s aggres-
sive pro-natalism as well as his idea of decisively separate, biologically
determined gender roles. Men were to assume their economic func-
tion, but were also expected to be involved dads and attentive partners.
Most importantly, however, men had to make wise, that is eugenically
informed, choices regarding the potential mothers of their future chil-
dren. From the very beginning, the AFIR expected its counselors to
conform to high professional standards; to hold degrees in psychology,
sociology, or religious education; and to be married fathers.56
The gendered ideology that Popenoe sought to disseminate
through AFIR was heavily influenced by the ideas he had presented
in Applied Eugenics, the 1918 volume that Popenoe had coauthored
with Roswell H. Johnson. Closely following Edward A. Ross, who
wrote the foreword to the manual, Popenoe and Johnson trans-
ferred eugenic techniques to the social sphere, which they then inter-
preted from a eugenic perspective. In his foreword, Ross himself had
endorsed the idea that eugenicists had a duty to prevent US society’s
racial decline: “The fear of racial decline provides the eugenicist with
a far stronger leverage than did the hope of accelerating racial pro-
gress.”57 Popenoe’s first marriage advice manual, Modern Marriage:
A Handbook for Men, which was published in 1925, echoed these
eugenic tenets, propagating traditional gender roles as a means to
uplift the nation through reproduction from a biologist point of view.

Husbands, for instance, ought “to take the initiative in most matters
pertaining to marriage” and were “held responsible in a large part for
the education of his wife.”58 The manual reached a large readership in
the following decades and appeared in its fifteenth edition in 1960.
In Popenoe’s strictly biologist marriage concept, men who bore dis-
eases deemed hereditary, among them epilepsy, “feeblemindedness,”
and insanity, should neither marry nor produce any offspring to pro-
tect the American nation. Sterile men and those suffering from syphilis
were also expected to refrain from marriage. Men who were afflicted
by diseases like gonorrhea, tuberculosis, obesity, and heart disease were
expected to have themselves cured before entering into matrimony.59
Although their skin color and class position tended to make these men
part of what R. W. Connell has termed hegemonic masculinity, they
were thought of as a danger to the nation on biological and eugenic
grounds. While their masculinity was not as “marginalized” as that of
nonwhite men, they were certainly considered marginal when it came
to men’s membership in and responsibility toward the nation.
While Popenoe sought to prevent all “deficient individuals” from
procreation, he lamented the fact that an increasing number of
healthy and well-educated men remained unmarried. Popenoe had
always been concerned about “the bachelor problem,” and he contin-
ued to reflect on it throughout the 1950s and 1960s, as an analysis of
the AIFR’s journal Family Life during the institute’s heyday between
1952 and 1969 reveals.60 For him, healthy men (as well as women)
who renounced marriage and reproduction deliberately neglected
their duties as members of the American nation. Consequently, his
Institute’s counselors encouraged men and women to embrace “social
effectiveness” (which was the title of the AFIR’s most successful work-
shop) and marry, have children, and maintain stable relationships.61
Popenoe gradually came to favor cooperative marriage for the sake
of preventing divorces, but he remained an advocate of biologically
determined gender roles and would never grant women the same lib-
erties enjoyed by men. For example, in a 1945 article for the fraternity
journal Phi Delta Kappan, he asked young male students: “Should
boys grow up to be men?” Arguing that boys in urban centers were
not only domineered by mothers and women but also deprived of
worthy male role models due to the absence of modern commuter
dads, he demanded more paternal involvement: “In the cities, boys do
not have a great deal of contact with their fathers or other men. On a
farm, the father works near the family all day. . . . In the city, the father
usually leaves soon after breakfast . . . and returns in time for dinner
(or maybe only in time to go to bed). Thus the boy does not have
84 ISABEL HEINEMANN
contact with his best source of masculine behavior patterns.”62 For

Popenoe, such deficient education and socialization of the nation’s
male members resulted in high divorce rates in urban centers and ulti-
mately endangered the family as the substance of the nation.
Thus, at the outset of the 1960s, Popenoe developed new per-
spectives on “The Role of the Man in the Modern Family” that also
affected his interpretations of the family’s importance for the American
nation. Insisting that men and women differed biologically, socially,
and psychologically, he asked for “men who can be leaders of their
own families and at the same time partners with their wives.” Such
fathers and husbands should provide role models for their sons and
daughters. While girls’ upbringing should lead them to want a “good
man” like daddy for a husband, sons should learn to emulate their
fathers’ behavior to become “good citizens in every way.”63 By the late
1960s, Popenoe was convinced that parent-induced good citizenship
was of crucial importance to the future of the nation, as he stressed
in AFIR’s journal Family Life. From his perspective, the “survival of
the nation” depended on men and women who accepted their respec-
tive gender roles and worked together to “produce a good next gen-
eration.”64 The influence of Popenoe and AFIR on popular debates
about marriage counseling gradually declined in the 1970s, but the
impact of the institute’s work on nationalized notions of hegemonic
masculinity was considerable between the 1930s and 1960s.65
Interestingly, the family ideal that Popenoe tried to uphold through
AFIR and his tireless efforts as a marriage counselor corresponded
closely to the Talcott Parsons’s model of the modern nuclear family in
modern industrial societies. In Popenoe’s naturalist interpretation of
the gender order, the husband bore a triple responsibility as the father
of healthy offspring, as the central provider and the moral authority
of the family, and, finally, as the bedrock of the nation. Although
Popenoe argued that the family was “the oldest institution in exis-
tence” that had preceded the modern nation-state, he nonetheless
maintained that men, as heads of the family and as its representatives
in the public sphere, were the genuine bearers of the nation.66
Conclusion
Social experts like Edward Ross and Paul Popenoe played a crucial role
in defining and propagating notions of hegemonic masculinity, which
they considered essential for the well-being of the nation. Only those
men who were healthy enough to produce strong offspring as well as
able and willing to be responsible fathers and good role models were
considered good citizens. Both men advocated a concept of eugenic
masculinity that rested on naturalist gender differences and the notion

of “racial” (or genetic) value. Popenoe revised his concept only slightly
in his post-1945 writings, acknowledging the need for a companionate
marriage while continuing to emphasize the relevance of wise marriage
choices based on genetics. These social experts played a central role in
the construction of marginalized masculinities on social, racial, and
eugenic grounds. While Ross feared that Asian immigrants would lead
to the decline of white, native-born farmers, Popenoe sought to coun-
ter what he perceived as the general decline of the family as well as the
rise of divorce rates and broken families through family counseling and
marriage education. The example of these men shows how individual
liberties and collective obligations were renegotiated in a time of dras-
tic social change. Their concept of strictly defined gender roles that put
family and nation above the individual would soon be challenged by
the diverse social movements of the 1960s, but some elements, among
them the marginalization of African American, homosexual, and work-
ing-class masculinities, remained in place well into the 1970s.
The writings of Ross, the fitter family contests, and Popenoe’s
American Institute of Family Relations show some commonalities in
their attempts to strengthen family, society, and nation: They resorted
to techniques of “social control,” they applied biologist masculinity
concepts and distinctively separate gender roles, and they favored an
idealized version of rural family life as a counterimage to the suppos-
edly degenerate and unhealthy life in America’s modern cities. Yet,
their conceptions of hegemonic and marginalized masculinities dif-
fered markedly. While Ross’s “rural family and frontier manhood”
was directed against Asian immigrants whom he perceived as an eco-
nomic and racial threat to American society, the eugenicists of the
fitter family contests focused primarily on the prevention of “degen-
erate offspring” and the dissemination of eugenic knowledge among
white, native-born Americans. Popenoe and his American Institute of
Family Relations, by contrast, emphasized the importance of stable
families and lasting marriages as part of white men’s contribution to
the well-being of the American nation.
Regardless of the differences in their ideas on what constituted
“true” manhood, these experts all agreed that men were families’ prin-
cipal providers. Within this context, especially Popenoe’s eugenic family
counseling attempted to address the effects of modern commuter dads’
absence in 1950s. The fitter family contests have to be regarded as a
crucial transition phase: although the contests emphasized men’s racial
traits and genetic qualities as the central precondition for healthy off-
spring, eugenicists nonetheless regarded a man’s ability to hold a good
job and provide for his family as a strong criterion for his eligibility as
86 ISABEL HEINEMANN
a legitimate member of the nation. In the 1950s, this explicit linkage

of masculinity and occupational status was equally commonplace, as
observed by sociologist Talcott Parsons: “Virtually the only way to be a
real man in our society is to have an adequate job and earn a living.”67
Placed in historical perspective, Parsons’s observation does not only
account for the striking ubiquity of the ideal of the male-breadwinner
well into the 1970s and beyond, but also suggests that we might have
to rethink R. W. Connell’s understanding of hegemonic masculini-
ties: white heterosexual men that did not have the earning power or
socioeconomic status to be good providers were not considered “real
men” in expert discourse. Others were denied their masculinity due
to “less valuable genes” or health problems. Although these men were
not “marginalized” in the sense of Connell’s definition, they were not
considered representatives of America’s nationalized ideal of masculin-
ity. While they might have been “marginalized,” they were certainly
“marginal” with regard to what social experts thought of their con-
tributions as men to the nation. Focusing on experts’ interpretations
of manhood can thus reveal much about the complex interrelationship
between masculinities and the nation in the twentieth century.
Notes
* The research for this chapter has been undertaken as part of the work of
the Emmy Noether Research Group “Family Values and Social Change: The
American Family in the Twentieth Century,” which is funded by the German
Research Foundation and is based at the University of Mü nster in Mü nster,
Germany. The author wishes to thank Simon Wendt and Pablo Dominguez
for their concise comments on earlier drafts of this article.
1. Talcott Parsons, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United
States,” American Sociological Review 7, no. 5 (October 1942): 604–
616, 615.
2. Talcott Parsons, “The American Family: Its Relations to Personality and
the Social Structure,” in Family, Socialization and Interaction Process,
ed. Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales (New York/London: Free
Press, 1955), 3–33; See also Talcott Parsons, “The Kinship System of
the Contemporary United States,” American Anthropologist 45, no. 1
(1943): 22–38; Talcott Parsons, “The Normal American Family,” in
Family in Transition: Rethinking Marriage, Sexuality, Child Rearing
and Family Organization, ed. Arlene S. Skolnick and Jerome H. Skolnick
(Boston, MA: Pearson Education, 1971), 397–403. Uta Gerhard’s biog-
raphy of Parsons does not focus on how Parsons helped propagate the
nuclear family ideal through his writings. This aspect requires further
research. See Uta Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
3. Parsons, “The American Family,” 3–33
4. Talcott Parsons, “The Social Structure of the Family,” in The Family: Its
Function and Destiny, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1949), 173–201, 192.
5. Jürgen Martschukat, Die Ordnung des Sozialen: Väter und Familien in der
amerikanischen Geschichte seit 1770 (Frankfurt: Campus, 2013); Robert
O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Demontage since
the 1960s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012); Natasha Zaretzky, No
Destination Home: The American Family an the Fear of National Decline
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). See also my
forthcoming book: Isabel Heinemann, Familienwerte im gesellschaftlichen
Wandel: Debatten über Ehescheidung, Frauenarbeit und Reproduktion in
den USA des 20. Jahrhunderts (München: Oldenbourg, 2016).
6. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics
of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967); James T. Patterson,
Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over
Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama (New York: Basic Books, 2010);
Elena R. Gutiérrez, Fertile Matters: The Politics of Mexican-Origin Women’s
Reproduction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Claudia Roesch,
“Americanization through Homemaking: Mexican American Mothers as
Major Factors in Americanization Programs,” in Inventing the Modern
American Family, ed. Isabel Heinemann (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag,
2012), 59–81; Marisa Chapell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and
Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2010); Premilla Nadasen et al., Welfare in the United States: A History with
Documents (New York: Routledge, 2009).
7. Parsons, “Age and Sex.” On the mid-century professional men, see
Charles W. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1952). On concepts of male health and per-
formance, see Tracy Penny Light, “’Healthy’ Men Make Good Fathers:
Masculine Health and the American Family in 20th Century America,”
in Inventing the Modern American Family, 105–123.
8. Parsons, “Age and Sex,” 613.
9. Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern
America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Natasha Zaretsky, No
Direction Home: American Families and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–
1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Jessica Weiss,
To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom and Social Change (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound:
American Families in the Cold War Era (Boston, MA: Basic Books, 1988).
10. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Michael
Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996); Jü rgen Martschukat, Die Ordnung des Sozialen:
Väter und Familien in der amerikanischen Geschichte seit 1770 (Frankfurt:
Campus, 2013); John Tosh, “Hegemonic Masculinity and the History
of Gender,” in Masculinities and Politics in War: Gendering Modern
History, ed. Stefan Dudink et al. (New York: Manchester University
Press, 2004), 41–58; Bryce Traister, “Academic Viagra: The Rise of
American Masculinity Studies,” American Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June
2000): 274–304; Daniel Wickberg, “Heterosexual White Male: Some
88 ISABEL HEINEMANN
Recent Inversions in American Cultural History,” Journal of American

History 92, no. 1 (2005): 136–159; Ralph LaRossa, Modernization of
Fatherhood: A Social and Political History (Columbus: University of
Chicago Press, 1997); James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for
Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
11. See Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic
Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6
(2005): 829–859, 846.
12. Whereas concepts of marginalization and othering have been fruitfully
framed within the context of postcolonial theory and African American
Studies, I use the term “marginal masculinities” in Connell’s and
Messerschmidt’s sense. On postcolonial concepts of othering, see Homi
K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2006); Edward
W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Michal Omi
and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the
1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
13. Christian Geulen, Wahlverwandte: Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im
späten 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004); Philipp
Sarasin, “Zweierlei Rassismus? Die Selektion des Fremden als Problem in
Michel Foucaults Verbindung von Biopolitik und Rassismus,” in Biopolitik
und Rassismus, ed. Martin Stingelin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003); Philipp
Sarasin, Darwin und Foucault: Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der
Biologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009); Michel Foucault, Il faut defender la
société: Cours au Collège de France 1976 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
14. Instead, most recent publications focus on eugenic concepts of proper femin-
ity, motherhood, and reproductive morality. See Edwin Black, War against
the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New
York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Wendy Kline, Building a Better
Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the
Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Nancy Ordover,
American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Philip R. Reilly, The
Surgical Solution. A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Alexandra Minna
Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Bederman’s lucid
study of masculinity concepts and the nation does not include the 1920s and
1930s, the period when eugenic thinking were most popular. Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
15. Rima Apple and Janet Golden, Mothers & Motherhood: Readings in
American History (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997);
Rima Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America
(Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Barbara Ehrenreich
and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Expert’s Advice
to Women (London: Pluto Press, 1979); Jonathan M. Metzl, “‘Mother’s
Little Helper’: The Crisis of Psychoanalysis and the Miltown Resolution,”
Gender and History 15, no. 2 (2003): 228–255. Laura Lovett’s excellent
work is similarly concerned primarily with sociologists and other experts’

approaches toward women. See Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future:
Pronatalism, Reproduction and the Family in the United States 1890–1938
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
16. This is even more surprising because there are good studies on experts’
impact on conceptions of motherhood, female workforce participation,
and reproduction. See Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good;
Metzl, “Mother’s Little Helper..”
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verson, 1983); Gary Gerstle, American
Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 8–9, 268–345.
18. Sean H. McMahon, Social Control and Public Intellect: The Legacy of
Edward H. Ross (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999).
19. In this context it is interesting to note that Ross nonetheless proved an
ardent defender of the right to divorce during the Progressive Era. See
Edward A. Ross, “Is the Freer Granting of Divorce an Evil?” American
Journal of Sociology 14 (1908/09): 793–794.
20. Edward A. Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order
(1901, reprint; Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University,
1969), 436–437.
21. Ibid., 59.
22. Ibid., 441.
23. Michael Kimmel has convincingly argued that the beginning of the twen-
tieth century saw a return to a masculine ideal that emphasized physical
strength and a well-shaped body as signs of virility, which seemed in
part a reinvention of the pre-civil war concept of “self-made” manhood.
Kimmel, Manhood in America, 83, 120–124.
24. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from
the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996).
25. Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 18, no. 1 (July 1901): 67–89.
26. Ibid., 88.
27. Ibid., 89.
28. Ibid., 89.
29. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 120–124.
30. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 170–215.
31. Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1885); Theodore Roosevelt, Ranch Life and the Hunting-
Trail (New York: Century Company, 1888); Theodore Roosevelt, The
Wilderness Hunter (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893); Theodore
Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (New York: MacMillan,
1913).
32. Arnaldo Testi, “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt
and the Culture of Masculinity,” Journal of American History 81, no. 4
(March 1995): 1518.
33. This was originally a letter that the president wrote to the authors after
reading a preprinted chapter in Everybody’s Magazine in 1902. See Bessie
90 ISABEL HEINEMANN
and Mary van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experiences of two
Gentlewomen as Factory Girls (New York: Doubleday, 1903); Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization, 202.
34. Theodore Roosevelt, “Sixth Annual Message, December 3, 1906,” in
State Papers as Governor and President, 1899–1909, The National Edition of
Roosevelt’s Works, ed. Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 15 (New York: Better World
Books, 1926), 377–378. For the first mentioning of the phrase “race sui-
cide” by Roosevelt in 1905, see US Department of Commerce and Labor,
Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Marriage and Divorce 1867–1906,
part I: Summary, Laws, Foreign Statistics, Washington, D.C., 1909, 4.
35. Euthanasia as final means of biological annihilation of unwanted genes
through murder was contested even within the eugenic movement. See
Ian Robert Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in
Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Stefan
K ü hl, Die Internationale der Rassisten: Aufstieg und Niedergang
der internationalen Bewegung für Eugenik und Rassenhygiene im 20.
Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus, 1997).
36. On the eugenic movement in America, see Stern, Eugenic Nation; Kline,
Building a Better Race ; Stefan K ü hl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics,
American Racism, and National Socialism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1994); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics.
37. Charles B. Davenport was one of the protagonists of the American
Eugenic Movement. He founded the Eugenic Record Office in 1910 and
the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations in 1925.
38. Theodore Roosevelt to Charles B. Davenport, January 3, 1913, American
Philosophical Society, APSSimg4945.
39. Edward A. Ross, “Foreword,” in Applied Eugenics, ed. Roswell Johnson
and Paul Popenoe (New York: Macmillan, 1918), xif.
40. Erica Bicchieri Boudreau, “‘Yeah, I have a Goodly Heritage’: Health ver-
sus Heredity in the Fitter Family Contests, 1920–1928,” Journal of Family
History 30, no. 4 (2005): 366–387; Laura L. Lovett, “‘Fitter Families for
Future Firesides?’ Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics,” Public Historian
29, no. 3 (2007): 69–85; Lovett, Conceiving the Future; Steven Selden,
“Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families: Archival Resources and
the History of American Eugenics Movement, 1908–1930,” Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society 149, no. 2 (2005): 199–225.
41. Fitter Family Medal, undated, American Eugenics Society Records, American
Philosophical Society, Digital Collection, APSimg1539; Chicago Daily
Tribune, January 10, 1925; Doris Blake, “‘Fitter Families’ Campaign Advises
Looking to Heredity,” Washington Post, March 16, 1926; “Certificates given
to ‘Fitter Families,’” New York Times, October 22, 1927; “Southern Fairs,”
Atlanta Constitution, October 28, 1923; “Fitter Family Slogan of Drive On
In Savannah” Atlanta Constitution, September 28, 1926.
42. Quoted in Boudreau, “Health Versus Heredity,” 368.
43. Other captions read: “Every 50 seconds a person is committed to jail in the
United States.” “Very few normal persons go to jail.” “Every 16 seconds a
person is born in the United States. Every 7 minutes a person is born in the
United States who qualifies for creative work and is fit for provide leader-
ship. 4 percent of Americans fall into this class.” Flashing light signs were
first used at Fitter Families Contest in 1926. American Philosophical Society,

American Eugenics Society Records, Mss. 575.06.Am3. APSimg1491.
44. Hildegard Walls Johnson, “Fitter Families for Future Firesides: The
Kansas Eugenics Contest,” Journal of Heredity 16, no. 12 (1925): 457–
460, 459.
45. Ibid., 459.
46. Ibid., 460.
47. Ibid., 460.
48. For example, photographs from the Kansas Fitter Family contest in 1925
shows how literacy rates of white native Americans and African Americans
were compared to suggest higher achievement and better eugenic stock
in whites. Eugenic and Health Exhibit, Fitter Families Contest, Kansas
Free Fair, 1925. American Philosophical Society, American Eugenics
Society Records, Mss. 575.06.Am3. APSimg1500.
49. For one example of a fierce eugenicist, see Ezra S. Gosney and Paul B.
Popenoe, Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results
of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909–1929 (New York: Macmillan,
1931); Paul B. Popenoe, “Mate Selection,” American Sociological Review
2, no. 5 (October 1937): 735–743.
50. Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies
to 1940 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Amy
Sue Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenic Field-Workers: ‘Women’s
Work’ in Biology,” Social Studies of Science 27, no. 4 (1997): 625–668.
51. Joanne Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in
1998): 242–269.
52. Tyler May, Homeward Bound.
53. LaRossa, Modernization of Fatherhood; Ralph LaRossa, Of War and
Men: World War II in the Lives of Fathers and Their Families (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011); Ralph LaRossa, “The Culture of
Fatherhood in the Fifties: A Closer Look,” Journal of Family History 29,
no. 1 (January 2004): 47–70.
54. Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilization and the Modern Marriage in
the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe,” Gender and History 13,
no. 2 (August 2001): 298–327.
55. We lack a thorough study of the institute’s counseling practice. The best
information is provided by Stern, Eugenic Nation, chapter 5. The files
of the AIFR are located in the personal collection of Paul B. Popenoe at
the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Collection
Number 04681. In a rather personal “defense” of his father, the son of
Paul B. Popenoe, the conservative sociologist David Popenoe, speaks of the
institute of having as much as 70 counselors during the 1970s and having
counseled as much as three hundred thousand individuals in 1977. David
Popenoe, Remembering my Father, Paul B. Popenoe: An Intellectual Portrait
of the Man Who Saved Marriages, http://www.popenoe.com/Paul/
Popenoe.htm, accessed March 18, 2011. An older printed version of the
paper is published in David Popenoe, War Over the Family (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 2005). Interestingly, David Popenoe was elected
corporate member of the AFIR in 1966. See Family Life 16, no. 4 (1966).
92 ISABEL HEINEMANN
56. “Counseling Program of the AFIR,” Family Life 13, no. 10 (1953): 5;
Paul B. Popenoe, “What is Marriage Couseling?” Family Life 15, no. 7
(1955): 5–6. “New Horizons For the AFIR,” Family Life 16, no. 11
(1956): 1–2.
57. Edward A. Ross, “Foreword,” in Applied Eugenics, ed. Roswell Johnson
and Paul Popenoe (New York: Macmillan, 1918), xif.
58. Paul B. Popenoe, Modern Marriage: A Handbook for Men (1925, reprint;
New York: Macmillan, 1929), x.
59. Popenoe, Modern Marriage, 207–231.
60. Paul B. Popenoe, “The Old Bachelor,” Family Life 12, no. 5 (1953):
1–2; Paul B. Popenoe, “Where are the Marriageable Men?” Family Life
13, no. 6 (1953): 1–2; Paul B. Popenoe, “Review of Richard H. Klemer:
A Man for Every Woman,” Family Life 19, no. 8 (1959): 1–3; Paul B.
Popenoe, “Mate Selection and the Church,” Family Life 27, no. 8 (1967):
1–3. See also Paul B. Popenoe, “Where are the Marriageable Men?”
Social Forces 14 (1935): 257–262.
61. Paul B. Popenoe, “What is Counseling?” Family Life 18, no. 4 (1958): 3–5.
62. Paul B. Popenoe, “Should Boys Grow Up to Be Men?” Phi Delta Kappan
27 (1945): 120.
63. Paul B. Popenoe, “The Role of the Man in the Modern Family,” Family
Life 12, no. 7 (1961): 1–3.
64. Paul B. Popenoe, “Towards Better Husbands,” Family Life 19, no. 6
(1969): 1–4.
65. In 1962, the AFIR even started a daily radio program on the Los Angeles
Radio Station KABC, which discussed listeners’ questions regarding family
counseling. The program “Your Family Counselor” was produced live by
the executive director of the AFIR, Dr. Floyd M. Anderson. “Notes from
the AFIR,” Family Life 22, No. 10 (1962): 4. Popenoe tirelessly travelled
to Colleges throughout the United States to advertise his understanding of
family counseling. Popenoe himself had tied his personal fate closely to that
of the institute, which he supported through frequent media appearances
and publications, earning him the name of America’s “Mr. Marriage.” He
remained president of AFIR until his retirement in 1976. Shortly after his
death in 1979, the institute passed into oblivion. Furthermore, he had a
newspaper column, “Your Family and You,” that appeared in various news-
papers and provided the material for the iconic series “Can this Marriage
be Saved?” written by Dorothy Camorn Disney in Ladies Home Journal.
The series was so successful that selected cases appeared in print. Dorothy
C. Disney and Paul B. Popenoe, Can this Marriage be Saved? (New York:
Macmillan, 1960). Finally, a motion picture on the AFIR “A Modern
Marriage” was shown in cinemas and on television in 1960. “Thirty Years of
AFIR,” Family Life 20, no. 3 (1960): 1–3. For a critical evaluation from the
twenty-first century, see Jill Lepore, “Fixed: The Rise of Marriage Therapy,
and other Dreams of Human Betterment,” New Yorker, March 29, 2010.
66. Paul B. Popenoe, “The Changing Family in a Changing World,” Family
Life 19, no. 4 (1959): 1–3.
67. Parsons, “Social Structure,” 199.
C H A P T E R 5
“Less than a Boot-Rag”: Procreation,

Paternity, and the Masculine Ideal in
Fascist Italy *
Martina Salvante
The intriguing and beautifully written book Il Bell’Antonio (Beautiful

Antonio) by Vitaliano Brancati, published in 1949, tells the story
of Antonio Magnano, a man from Catania in Sicily who is famed
for his beauty. The story opens with Antonio living in Rome in the
early 1930s, where he seeks his fortune with other young Sicilians.
While he is incapable of finding a job, women practically fall at his
feet, attracted by his unrivalled beauty. Eventually, his parents call
him back to Catania, because it is time for Antonio to get married.
Antonio is to marry Barbara Puglisi, the daughter of a notable figure
in town and a woman who is almost as beautiful as he is.
Three years after their wedding, however, Antonio’s rich in-
laws discover that their daughter is still a virgin. When the secret is
revealed, everyone in town is shocked by the unconsummated mar-
riage. Antonio’s assumed impotence causes a great scandal and is
turned into a piece of gossip for the entire population of Catania.
While local women’s passion for the beautiful Antonio intensifies,
men have their say on the nature of his “misfortune”:
“Nothing but a flop for three years?”

“Nothing but a flop.” [ . . . ]
“I could understand it once or twice, or three times . . . I’ll be
generous—five times. Which of us hasn’t done a flop?”
“I tell you no lie, friend. I never have.”
“Never?”
94 MARTINA SALVANTE
“Never!”
“In a certain sense, in the sense of a complete and hopeless flop, nei-
ther have I.”
“May the Lord send me death rather than such a misfortune! What’s
a man got in life if they take even that away from him? I tell you
I’d go jump in the lake.”1
Antonio’s father Alfio is quick to distance himself from his son’s

impotence, which he defines as “the worst, blackest, most venomous
tragedy it’s possible to saddle a man with.” He further complains:
“My own son, my only son, my pride and joy, my life! To see him
reduced to less than a boot-rag, less than a boot-rag because at least
with a boot-rag you can clean your boots. But a man in his condition,
what use is he? What kind of good is he? What’s he alive for?”2
I have quoted these excerpts from Vitaliano Brancati’s novel at
length to give a first impression of Italian masculine culture in the
1930s and 1940s. Brancati’s novel, an ironic comment on Sicilian sex-
ual customs, wittily sheds light on existing social pressures to conform
to specific ideals of masculinity. Literary scholars have commonly cata-
logued the novel as the second part of Brancati’s trilogy on gallismo,3
the ostentatious machismo often associated with Mediterranean mas-
culinity.4 Unlike Don Giovanni in Sicilia (1941) and Paolo il Caldo
(1955),5 however, in Il Bell’Antonio the author “deliberately connects
the Sicilian man’s obsession with his virility to fascist rhetoric.”6 What
does Il Bell’Antonio tell us about masculinity in fascist Italy, then?
Alfio’s comparison of an impotent man with a useless boot-rag,
along with the general perception of the inability to have sexual
intercourse or procreate as the worst fate imaginable, reveals Italian
fascism’s obsessive preoccupation with virility and procreation. In a
culture imbued with the idea of sexual potency as proof of a vigorous
male heterosexuality, the prospect that a man might not achieve an
erection was seen as an indicator of inferior masculinity. Most of the
men around Antonio—his father Alfio included—are complicit in a
culture of machismo, built on a voracious sexuality characterized by
male competition and boasting, as well as on an apparently axiomatic
hegemony over women. As a result, “other” masculinities, like the one
embodied by Antonio, which do not share all the standard features of
dominant masculinity, are singled out for scorn and marginalization.7
What is more, Alfio’s desperate exclamations highlight the centrality
of procreation in defining a man’s status in the wider community.
Given that marriage and reproduction were understood as inextrica-
bly linked social practices designed to preserve a kinfolk (and related
land and properties) from one generation to the next, being unable to
beget and provide for his own progeny rendered a man useless.
“LESS THAN A BOOTRAG” 95
In this chapter I explore the central but ambiguous role that father-
hood and sexual potency played within hegemonic ideals of masculinity
in fascist Italy. As Brancati’s novel evidences, fascism provided a socio-
political setting that amplified existing practices of social control and
conformity with the purpose of molding Italians’ character and atti-
tudes. The regime effectively put in place measures and norms aimed
at promoting certain ways of being a man as opposed to others deemed
inferior. Given this political intention of the regime, my chapter’s sec-
ond central aim is to identify what was specifically fascist about the
promotion of sexually potent masculinity in interwar Italy. To explore
these themes, I analyze the significance of reproduction and paternity
from 1922 to 1943, the two dates coinciding with Benito Mussolini’s
rise and fall from power.8 I approach my subject by making use of a
variety of sources: legislation, Mussolini’s speeches, welfare provisions,
police measures, and fictional texts like Brancati’s novel. My chapter
will ponder the interrelationship between masculinities and the nation
by addressing the following questions: What were the historical condi-
tions under which childless masculinity came to be marginalized vis-à-
vis the nation, whereas fruitful men were praised and rewarded? Were
the ideals of masculinity proposed by fascism alternative to those previ-
ously propagated and experienced? And if so, in what terms?
Historiography
While the overwhelming majority of gender histories of Italian fascism
focuses on women, a number of scholars have studied the relation-
ship of masculinity and the nation in fascist Italy. George L. Mosse’s
groundbreaking study on the image of man in modern Europe has
first explored the normative masculine stereotype in several Western
nation-states and devoted specific attention to fascist masculinity in
Germany and Italy. According to Mosse, “the importance of manli-
ness as a national symbol and as a living example played a vital role
in all fascist regimes.” 9 In particular, Mosse emphasizes, “Fascism
heightened the warrior qualities of masculinity”10 and put emphasis
on the “new man” living in a state of permanent war against internal
and external enemies. Mosse investigated issues such as respectability
and conformism, norms and their transgression, exclusion and inclu-
sion by focusing on body, sexuality, and gender. Homosexuality and
race, Mosse stresses, had often operated as the masculine stereotype’s
counterparts, thus reinforcing it.
More recently, Lorenzo Benadusi has devoted a monograph to the
depiction of the homosexual as the enemy of the “fascist new man” in
Italy.11 Though drawing heavily on Mosse’s books, Benadusi criticizes
96 MARTINA SALVANTE
certain aspects of Mosse’s analysis of masculinity as one-sided.12 Other

scholars have criticized Mosse in a similar manner: in particular, recent
scholarship has challenged Mosse’s too rigid demarcation between heg-
emonic and subaltern male types and his excessive emphasis on the repres-
sion carried out against nondominant masculinities, putting a stronger
focus on ambiguities and struggles between different male identities.
Dagmar Herzog, for instance, has brilliantly revealed the multifaceted
aspects of Nazi sexual politics, thus explaining that “an advocacy of sex-
ual expression coexisted with virulent racism and mass murder.”13
The role of fatherhood and masculine reproductive capabilities for
Italian fascism, however, has received scant scholarly attention. By
focusing on images, policies, measures, and experiences about fathers
and prospective fathers in interwar Italy, this chapter seeks to bridge
this gap. While existing studies on fascist masculinity mention the
aspect of sexual potency and fatherhood only in passing, my intent is
to highlight the cultural significance attributed to paternity as well as
the political actions put in place to build a fatherly “new man” in the
fascist era. We still know little about the experiences of those men who
were bound up with norms and prescriptions about masculinity. How
did Italian men come to terms with an imposed and internalized set of
values and how did they perpetuate, conform to, or resist hegemonic
standards of manliness? Relevant matters such as subjectivity, identity,
and agency have only begun to be explored by historical scholarship.14
Approaching such questions is an especially important task because the
dynamics of hegemonic masculinity can tell us a lot about the internal
contradictions of fascism itself. Consequently, while explaining the set
of values that typified the normative masculinity endorsed by fascism, I
find it equally important to focus on the sort of practical policies they
inspired and on the impact these measures had on individual men and
their self-perception as fathers. While focusing on discursive norms and
cultural stereotypes, I emphasize the many contradictions that fascism
brought about in its attempt to remake the Italian people.
Theory: Masculinities and the Nation

R. W. Connell’s work on gender and masculinities has greatly influ-
enced social sciences and humanities in recent decades.15 In particu-
lar, Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity” has been widely
employed across different academic fields and has been ubiquitously
cited in historical studies of men and masculinities. This innovative
notion (evoking Antonio Gramsci’s theories on class relations and
structural change over time) aimed to replace sex role theory deemed
too static as an explanatory tool and insufficiently flexible to grasp

“change as a dialectic arising within gender relations themselves.”16
Instead, Connell aspired to underscore the historical and, therefore,
evolving nature of gender relations by unfolding the continuing
struggle between powerful and subordinate groups in society. Her
formulation of the successful concept of hegemonic masculinity thus
allows understanding “not only the complex nature of femininities
and masculinities, not merely the power relationships between gen-
ders and within genders, but also the possibility of internally gener-
ated change.”17 In these terms, gender is a set of norms constantly
reproduced in social practice and not just passively internalized.
According to Jeff Hearn, the concept of hegemonic masculinity has
been particularly successful in recognizing the forms of domination
exercised by men both on women and on other men.18 Demetrakis
Demetriou has underscored this aspect by making a distinction
between “external” and “internal” hegemony: the former is connected
to “the institutionalization of men’s dominance over women,” while
the latter “refers to a social ascendancy of one group of men over oth-
ers.”19 Following the widespread employment of Connell’s formu-
lation across different disciplines, some critics, especially historians,
have accused scholars working in men’s studies of overshadowing the
significance of patriarchal exploitation of women by men in the past by
focusing on multiple masculinities and thus taking women out of the
historical picture once again.20 In truth, the question of patriarchy has
been crucial in the development of Connell’s notion of hegemony and
she has expressed regret that male-female relations have dropped out
of focus in many studies on men and masculinities.21 Indeed, Connell
had originally defined hegemonic masculinity as “a pattern of practice
(i.e., things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity)
that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue.”22 A certain
behavior, Connell has stressed, is considered hegemonic not because it
is necessarily performed by the majority of men, but rather because it
sets a norm. To sum up, hegemonic masculinity, according to Connell,
is “the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all
other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically
legitimated the global subordination of women to men.”23
Established theories of nationalism analyze nations as essentially
modern constructions and stress the importance of symbols, myths,
and discourses in “imagining” and “defining” the nation.24 According
to Tamar Mayer, “Nationalism is the exercise of internal hegemony,
the exclusive empowerment of those who share a sense of belonging to
the same ‘imagined community.’”25 Nonetheless, as Mayer and other
98 MARTINA SALVANTE
feminist critics of nationalism have emphasized, the nation is not a

gender-neutral construction, for “sexuality plays a key role in nation-
building and in sustaining national identity.”26 Indeed, throughout
the modern era, nationalists in different cultures have consistently used
familial metaphors and kin idioms to refer to the larger community. The
mobilization of familial rhetoric for political purposes was not invented
by nationalists, but had been a common topos in political imagery, for
example, in representations of the patriarchal bond between a king and
his subjects in the early modern period.27 The French Revolution and
the democratization of politics did not bring about an end to family
imagery, but rather stressed fraternal over paternal ties.28
In the age of nationalism in the nineteenth century, family meta-
phors and kin idioms again referred frequently to the national com-
munity. By promoting a sort of “fictive household” to which everyone
could belong, such metaphors replicated the feeling of belonging within
the family on a national scale.29 The same time frame saw the prolifer-
ation of political narratives in which men and women were attributed
specific roles within the national community according to family rela-
tions. Hence, women were increasingly addressed as “mothers of the
nation” and invested with the duty of reproducing the national popu-
lation, both culturally and biologically.30 On the other hand, men were
regarded as those in charge of defending the integrity and stability of
the nation-state by force of arms. Compulsory military service for men
gave the state a powerful means of building the nation around new
gendered definitions of citizenship, patriotic values, and social order.31
While femininity and maternity have been examined in their mul-
tifaceted links with nation-building projects,32 paternity still requires
further analysis in this connection, especially in the context of Italian
history. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity allows us to
study the relationship between masculinity and the nation in more
detail. This is an especially worthwhile endeavor in the case of fascist
Italy: despite the existing scholarship on fascist masculinity, we still
know surprisingly little about how Italian fascism mobilized men and
their bodies for the national cause. By employing Connell’s concepts
to the Italian case, then, we can begin to analyze the central role
that male sexuality and fatherhood played within Italian nationalism
under fascist rule in more detail.
Masculinity and the Nation from National

Unification to Italian Fascism
The Kingdom of Italy was officially proclaimed in 1861 under the
House of Savoy. In the aftermath of Italy’s unification and the
introduction of conscription in the new kingdom, there emerged a

strong political desire that the citizens of the new country would
conform to a specific model of heroic masculinity. The army and the
school system were thought to be ideal instruments for the nationali-
zation of Italians. The political elites hoped that the bodies and minds
of male citizens would be “shaped” by the military draft and that they
would in turn embrace national principles and ventures.33 According
to Alberto Maria Banti, nationalist discourse in Italy made use of
three main rhetorical figures in the period between the Risorgimento
and fascism: (1) The nation as family/kin; (2) The nation as a com-
munity of sacrifice; (3) The nation as a community composed of sex-
ualized and gendered bodies, hierarchically organized.34 War and
militarization played a great part in putting love for the motherland
to the test of physical and emotional sacrifice, as was evidently the
case during World War I. In the years after the war, fascist ideology,
which emerged directly from the experience of soldiering and com-
bat between 1915 and 1918, made the connection between nation,
honor, and sacrifice even more stringent and additionally amplified
the biopolitical aspects of nationalism by calling attention to issues
such as race, sexuality, fitness, and reproduction.
The emphasis on the national relevance of reproduction was not
unique to fascist Italy. On the contrary, it affected many govern-
ments, both democratic and authoritarian, in the interwar period.
The loss of millions of young men on the battlefields of World War
I resulted in a widespread postwar anxiety with regard to population
quantity and quality.35 The years after the Armistice thus saw a resur-
gence of attention to procreation, which was of particular interest to
Italian fascism. Italian eugenics had started developing before World
War I, but found new, enthusiastic supporters and underwent new
developments after the war by encouraging eugenic procreation as a
measure of racial improvement.36 Hence, reproduction and parent-
ing were invested with renewed meanings and values, which were
emblematically linked to national issues and fascist aims.
John Tosh has foregrounded the drastic impact that moments of
national crisis have on notions of masculinity and the ways of being a
man.37 Tosh’s observations especially apply to the case of Italy after the
end of the Great War: as soon as fighting with the Austro-Hungarian
forces came to an end in early November 1918, Italy entered a period
of social unrest that later culminated in violent and persistent clashes
between political opponents (1919–1921).38 “The squadristi [members
of Fascist paramilitary squads, also known as Blackshirts] used violence
to establish their own masculinity at the expense of their enemy’s.
Shedding an enemy’s blood was a form of initiation into virility.”39 The
100 MARTINA SALVANTE
social conflict of those years gave rise to and consolidated the fascist
movement, which was officially launched in March 1919 and seized
power in Italy in October 1922, when Benito Mussolini was nomi-
nated president of the Council of Ministers by King Victor Emmanuel
III after the threat of the March on Rome.40
The rise of fascism thus brought about a renegotiation of masculini-
ties. The redefinition of Italian masculinity, which first and foremost was
to be fascist, went hand in hand with a new phase in Italy’s history. The
“anthropological revolution”—as defined by Emilio Gentile41—that
Benito Mussolini sought to pursue in Italy during his 20 years of govern-
ment materialized in a series of policies and organizations aimed at regi-
menting and educating people according to their gender and age. Such
a course of action also clearly affected manhood, as the fascist model of
masculinity amplified heteronormative features of man as father, bread-
winner, and warrior. As Lorenzo Benadusi has aptly summed up, “The
new Fascist male was in many ways the continuation of a stereotype that
had its roots in nineteenth-century nationalism,” but fascists personal-
ized this preexisting model “adding new features more closely connected
to the war experience.”42 Derived from the “rejuvenating” experience
of World War I,43 fascism rehabilitated the hegemony of martial values
and rituals in peacetime by presenting them as a basis for the transfor-
mation of the nation. Indeed, fascism seized on the legacy of the Great
War and merged it with instances of political and social renewal com-
ing from a variety of schools of thought and cultural movements. For
instance, the avant-garde movement labeled Futurism and its founder
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti praised war, modernity, audacity, and speed
as both necessary components of and means for an effective transforma-
tion of Italian society. In his writings, Marinetti plainly linked warfare
and sexuality, drawing a parallel between military and sexual prowess.
In his novel L’alcova d’acciaio, for instance, Marinetti elaborated on his
experience as a soldier in World War I and imagined himself making love
to a female Italy in an armored car, the “steel alcove” of the title, across
the Austrian territories conquered by Italy.44
The exaltation of combat as a virilizing act was a recurrent motif in
fascist rhetoric. “Propaganda helped spread the image of masculinity
as being aggressive, authoritarian and soldierly through iconographic
representation, the exaltation of physical education and youthfulness,
and the public exposure of the Duce’s body as a model of virility and
political culture.”45 Mussolini’s body was indeed repeatedly duplicated
in a variety of statues, photographs, and drawings that adorned remote
corners and crowded squares throughout the country, thus presenting
him as the model of manliness to which Italian men were expected to
mold their appearance and behavior. The body of the leader was meant
to incarnate the gendered and sexualized body of the (fascist) nation.
Images of Mussolini’s naked torso while he was mowing, skiing, or
swimming were largely diffused by propaganda, to draw analogies
between his virility and that of the country. Even his own personal
story seemed to reproduce stereotyped masculine features: married
man with five children, renowned lover with numerous mistresses,
and vaunted sexual prowess. Unlike Hitler, who was neither a father
nor was ever portrayed undressed, Mussolini staged the virile man in
his multiform qualities as a husband, father, lover, and worker.
Fascism’s boast of excessive virility, epitomized by Benito Mussolini’s
being “the first contemporary head of state to vaunt his sexuality,”46
operated as an intentional and metaphorical representation of the nation,
closely identified with its leader. In Mussolini’s speeches, Italy was invari-
ably described as a virile nation, that is, dynamic, youthful, warmonger-
ing, and hungry for conquest, because it was governed by an aggressive,
intrepid, and courageous ideology such as fascism. In his 1945 satirical
pamphlet Eros e Priapo, the Italian writer Carlo Emilio Gadda ridiculed
the fascist obsession with virility by hyperbolizing it: “For everything
then was male and Martial: even broads and wet nurses, and the tits of
your wet nurse and the ovary and the fallopian tubes and the vagina and
the vulva. The virile vulva of the Italian woman.”47 According to Barbara
Spackman, the model for nationalism was a form of heterosexuality of
which force was a normal component.48 Klaus Theweleit had already
drawn attention in his 1977 two-volume work to the relations between
militarism/fascist violence and hatred for women and explained both as
driven by a fear of dissolving boundaries.49 In his psychoanalytically led
study, sexual fantasies of female subjugation merged and entwined with
desires of brutal repression against internal enemies.
The link between sexual and military prowess, between demographic
and political power appeared in its entirety in Mussolini’s so-called
Ascension Day speech, which he delivered to the Italian parliament on
May 26, 1927.50 The speech, recognized by historians as the official
launch of the “demographic campaign,” called for Italy to increase its
population from 40 to 60 million in just 25 years to achieve a position of
authority in Europe.51 A populous nation had a better chance of success-
fully pursuing an aggressive policy of colonial expansion. The regime’s
ideological policing of gender and sexuality was based on this eugenic
premise. Accordingly, the interwar period was characterized “by unprec-
edented efforts on the part of national and local governments to intervene
in their citizens’ private lives. This would be true both for those nations
that turned to fascism and for those that remained democratic.”52
In fact, Mussolini was not alone in pursuing population policies,

given that “nearly all European state governments had been prompted
by the experience of World War I to expand welfare and health care
and administrative systems which intervened—in both restrictive and
supportive ways—in the private lives and even directly in the bodies of
citizens.”53 By employing Michel Foucault’s theories on the power of
knowledge,54 David G. Horn has interpreted social sciences in the inter-
war period in Italy as a means of managing the “reproductive capac-
ities and procreative practices of Italian women and men” in order to
increase the nation’s vitality.55 In particular, he has examined the “con-
struction of society as an organic body to be defended against threats
to its health, virility, and reproductive potential, and the construction
of the bodies of women and men as loci of social potentials, risks, and
dangers requiring rational management.”56 Dagmar Herzog has fur-
ther specified that “the demographic campaign pioneered in Italy from
the late 1920s onward insisted on a neopatriarchal restoration.”57 The
question of a reassessment of patriarchy by fascism had been previously
underlined by Victoria De Grazia. According to De Grazia, “Mussolini’s
dictatorship constituted a special and distinctive episode of patriarchal
rule. Fascist patriarchy took as axiomatic that men and women were
different by nature. It then politicized this difference to the advantage
of male Italians and built it into an especially repressive, comprehensive,
and unprecedented system for defining female citizenship and govern-
ing women’s sexuality, wage labor, and social participation.”58
But how and to what extent did the fascist regime reiterate men’s
dominance over women? How did it change or reinforce traditionally
prescribed social roles of men? What set of role expectations and pat-
tern of practices did fascism approve and induce so as to ensure the
subordination of women to men? Though all men had the benefit
of a hegemonic position over women, in reality they did not uni-
formly take advantage of it. Differences among men in the enjoyment
of power occurred in proportion to their degree of standardization to
normative masculinity.
Procreation and Paternity

During fascist rule in interwar Italy, the needs and interests of men
and women were progressively subordinated to those of the entire
social organism, of which individuals and family units were viewed
as the primary components. The family thus became a key focus of
intervention by authorities intent on stabilizing and conforming single
cells of the social body according to fascist principles. In an ideolog-
ical framework that placed families in a special relationship with the
state, fathers had a major role, being the heads of their families and,
therefore, the principal conduit between these units and the institu-
tions. In fact, the central role of family in the “new fascist order” made
sure that the dictatorship focused significant attention on fatherhood,
given that fathers, in turn, were supposed to educate their offspring
according to fascist principles. Indeed, it was mainly because of their
function as educators and authority holders that fathers and prospec-
tive fathers attracted the attention of the fascist authorities. Mussolini
took advantage of measures to pursue a political plan aimed at infil-
trating the fabric of Italian society and at gradually promoting a model
of masculinity with specific characteristics (martial, prolific, politically
faithful, and racially pure). By defining precise cases for intervention,
the dictatorship thus traced imaginary paternal categories, both pos-
itive and negative, the enactment of which certainly affected the lives
of thousands of men and their families.
Procreation was increasingly regarded as a duty toward the nation
and, accordingly, forms of nonreproductive behavior were perceived
as anti-patriotic and condemned both morally and materially. Along
these lines, a bachelors’ tax—applicable to unmarried men between
the ages of 25 and 65—was introduced in 1926,59 which amounted to
a monetary penalty for those who did not conform to the ideal of the
married and reproductive man. The tax was calculated on the basis of
age and income and only disabled veterans, priests, servicemen, and
the mentally ill were exempted from its payment. In his Ascension Day
speech, Mussolini made explicit reference to this levy, by labeling it “a
demographic whip to the nation,” and explained that it would finance
institutions (in particular, the Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia)
dedicated to the assistance of mothers and children nationwide. Men
choosing “desertion of paternity” would thus be forced to contribute
economically to public efforts at increasing the national population
and improving the Italian stock. In addition, conformism and prolif-
icacy were openly stimulated with a whole array of prizes and incen-
tives for newly married couples and parents of newborn babies.
In a 1928 article titled “Il numero come forza” (The Strength in
Numbers), Mussolini quoted Hegel and emphasized that “he who
is not a father is not a man,” thus leaving little doubt about his per-
ception that full masculinity could only be attained through father-
hood.60 In that same piece, Mussolini made the connection between
nationalism and masculinity even more explicit:
If a man does not feel the joy and pride of being “perpetuated” as
an individual, as a family, and as a people; or on the other hand, if a
man does not feel sadness and shame at the prospect of dying as an
individual, a family, and a people, laws in themselves can do nothing,

even, I would say especially, if they are draconian. Laws must be a spur
to morals. . . . A nation does not only exist as a history and a territory,
but also as a mass of human beings who reproduce from generation
to generation. . . . In a Fascist Italy where marshes have been drained,
the land has been irrigated and cultivated; where life has become dis-
ciplined, there is space and food for another 10 million men. Sixty
million Italians will have the numbers and strength to make an impact
on the history of the world.61
Following the mind-set expressed in Mussolini’s speech, bachelors

were also discriminated against in the workplace, since hiring and
promotional preferences were given to married men, especially those
with children. Documents regarding public servants sometimes sug-
gest that men decided to get married simply to get a promotion at
work, as was apparently the case with Armando Pacifico, a member
of Italy’s Council of State.62 Nonreproductive masculinities were,
therefore, considered alien to the national body, just like the beau-
tiful Antonio of the eponymous novel. Antonio felt extraneous to
the (hetero)sexual voracity of fascist culture and, once his impotence
was made public, the local deputy secretary of the fascist party has-
tened to say of him: “Antonio Magnano never had the stuff of a true
Fascist.”63 Hence, those who did not fully enact the hyper-virile fas-
cist model were at risk of marginalization.
On the other hand, there was at least a small possibility of “redemp-
tion” for those who opted to conform to canons of heterosexual and
reproductive masculinity. Carlo G., for instance, was sent by the fas-
cist regime in 1937 to serve three years of political confinement on
the Tremiti islands because of some comments he had made on the
war in Spain and, above all, because of his “pederasty.”64 Two years
later he wrote a letter to Mussolini asking for a pardon in recognition
of his “mended” behavior, as evidenced by his desire to marry a local
woman. However, not even his marriage could prevent him from serv-
ing his entire sentence.65 The case of Carlo G. reveals the degree to
which the regime’s policing of gender and sexuality was part of a far-
reaching totalitarian project designed to mould social practices so as to
build the new (and more virile) “fascist man” and “fascist Italy.”
All the demographic provisions and decrees essentially aimed at
inducing changes in Italian males’ life planning by forcing them to
marry earlier in life so as to increase their chances to father as many chil-
dren as possible. Nevertheless, the success of these measures was quite
ambiguous, as statistical data on the celibacy rate in the 1930s testifies.
Figures provided by the Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) showed that the
number of bachelors in Italy had actually increased, not declined,66 in

all probability as a consequence of the economic crisis that had post-
poned the wedding plans of Italians at the time. In fact, the demo-
graphic campaign was restructured in the late 1930s in order to make
it more comprehensive and effective. A new central agency was set up to
manage the implementation of population policy, while new measures
were introduced. All of this happened under the general motto put for-
ward by Mussolini himself, according to which “the unmarried male
citizen should be differentiated from the father, because, according to
Fascist dogma, the family father accomplishes his duty in the best inter-
ests of the state and, therefore, should receive more rights.”67
The former minister Alberto De’ Stefani, a liberal economist and
member of the fascist Grand Council, even proposed harsher conse-
quences for bachelors and childless parents, as he felt they should not
enjoy “the same legal rights of those who guaranteed the reproduc-
tion of the population.”68 In his view, the solution to the demographic
problem could not be fiscal, but rather pertaining to law through the
resolute enactment of a legislation criminalizing celibacy and forcing
people to marry before their thirtieth birthday. Otherwise, “another
possibility was to give the courts the authority to annul marriages
which remained childless after five years.”69 De’ Stefani firmly stated:
The citizen is today authorized to remain celibate or with few chil-

dren, by paying the price of his sin in installments to the State. If celi-
bacy and voluntary sterility are, as people say, a crime against the State,
this crime, under the current legislation, can be continued by paying
a fixed-price ransom. Thus, we cannot speak seriously of penalties. It
would be necessary to judicially discipline the political obligation of
marriage and procreation.70
Although this legislation proposed by De’ Stefani was never introduced,

a small number of husbands were tried for not having consummated
their marriage due to the ambiguous interpretation of a newly intro-
duced penal crime. In fact, in the 1930s, “the family was constituted
judicially as a locus of new responsibilities and duties.”71 Marriage and
family were therefore regulated not only by civil law but also by the new
penal code issued in 1930. While the use or application of any method
designed to hinder procreation, such as contraceptives or abortion, was
harshly punished under Title X “Crimes against the integrity and health
of the stock,” Title XI of the 1930 penal code classified bigamy, adul-
tery, deception, and violations of the obligations of familial assistance
under “Crimes against the family” (articles 556–574). According to
the minister of justice Alfredo Rocco, this title was necessary “in order
to ‘strengthen the physical existence and moral unity of the familial

organism.’ Punitive sanctions defended against ‘attacks on the institu-
tion of marriage, the fulcrum of every well-constituted society, or on
the organism of the family.’”72 But to what extent could the defini-
tion of “violation of family obligations” be interpreted? Jurisprudence
reveals a couple of court cases, in which the husbands were incriminated
and sentenced for having violated their marital obligations because of
a non-consummated marriage.73 The dubious equivocality of such ver-
dicts was discussed at the time, as evinced by the heated legal debate
that followed the pronouncement of these sentences with regard to the
propriety of the state intruding so far into the nuptial bed.74
However, it was not by accident that those court cases happened in
the mid- to late 1930s, exactly when fascist population policy became
more insistent and pervasive. It is more than reasonable to conclude that
the verdicts had been influenced by a propaganda insistently equating
sexual with military prowess and prolificacy with national expansion.
Apart from anything else, this was precisely the same period the mar-
riage between Antonio and Barbara in Vitaliano Brancati’s novel took
place, only to be then annulled through a sentence of the Tribunal of
the Roman Rota, the ecclesiastical court judicially authorized to declare
a marital union null and void.75 In fact, according to article 1061 of the
Canon Law, “A valid marriage between the baptized is called ratum tan-
tum if it has not been consummated; it is called ratum et consummatum
if the spouses have performed between themselves in a human fashion a
conjugal act which is suitable in itself for the procreation of offspring, to
which marriage is ordered by its nature and by which the spouses become
one flesh.”76 As a result, an inability or an intentional refusal to consum-
mate the marriage might be grounds for an annulment, as happened to
Antonio and Barbara. Such procedure brings to the fore the peculiar
position of the Catholic Church where marriage without sex is as rep-
rehensible as sex without marriage, since the Church mainly encourages
sex for procreation purposes according to the biblical instruction “Be
fruitful and multiply.”77 Following the signature of the Lateran Pacts
between the Catholic Church and the Kingdom of Italy in February
1929,78 parish church marriages were accorded full civil status, which
had not been the case since the Italian unification in 1861. Accordingly,
any decree of nullity issued by the Roman Rota automatically resulted in
a civil annulment, as in the case of the “beautiful Antonio.”
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have focused on the procreation and sexual prowess
as defining features of hegemonic masculinity. In a political context
and national setting where images of virility were used to epitomize

the entire nation, reproduction became a fundamental factor. Hence,
those who could not or did not want to contribute actively to pop-
ulation growth ran the risk of being discriminated against and/or
isolated from the wider community, both physically and symbolically.
In particular, I have identified the historical conditions under which
childless masculinity came to be marginalized vis-à-vis the nation.
The promotion of male fecundity created internal hegemony
among men by giving preference to those who married earlier and
produced a large number of offspring. At the same time, this approach
to reproduction reinforced gender differences and strengthened ste-
reotyped gender roles and values. While women were praised and cel-
ebrated as mothers of large families in publicly staged ceremonies, it
was mostly men who in their function of “head of family” were enti-
tled to get specific aids and advantages such as marriage loans, fam-
ily allowances, and career advancement.79 Fatherhood thus became
a distinctive factor in the attainment of full “citizenship” and the
enjoyment of social welfare. Benefits and rewards were in fact elabo-
rated and used to shape individual choices and bring them into line
with fascist social ideals, rather than to create an egalitarian system of
public assistance.80 Conformist heteronormative individual behavior
therefore provided the key to state benefits. Conversely, fascist penal
and civil law amplified the former patriarchal legal system, confirm-
ing the subaltern position of the wife within the household.81 Such
actions aimed primarily at consolidating marital and paternal power,
while making the family man the conduit of fascist values within
the domestic realm. Yet by so doing, the fascist state equipped itself
with a series of legal and political means to control masculinities and
penalize the “nonconformist” ones.
Experiences of motherhood and fatherhood during the period
often went far beyond the very personal dimension of having come
from individual choices of life, for maternity and paternity had been
increasingly charged with a nationalist connotation.82 Although Italy
was not the only country promoting population policies in Europe
and the wider world, the language and practices accompanying such
measures revealed the totalitarian nature of the fascist project of shap-
ing ordinary Italians’ lifestyles.
Notes
* I profoundly thank Edward Madigan for the detailed revision of this chap-
ter and his helpful comments on its content. I am also grateful to Lorenzo
Benadusi for his observations, to Ciaran Wallace for his subtle language
corrections and remarks, and to the editors of this book for their attentive
annotations and recommendations.
1. Vitaliano Brancati, Beautiful Antonio (London: Penguin, 2007), 186–
187. The Italian publisher of the novel was the Milan-based Bompiani.
2. Ibid., 226.
3. See Paolo Mario Sipala, Vitaliano Brancati: Introduzione e guida allo
studio dell’opera brancatiana, storia e antologia della critica (Firenze: Le
Monnier, 1978), 67.
4. According to Brancati, gallismo consists purporting to have an extraordi-
nary virile potency. See Vitaliano Brancati, “Diario Romano,” in Opere:
1947–1954 , ed. Leonardo Sciascia (Milano: Bompiani, 1992), 380.
5. Paolo Il Caldo was published, though lacking the two planned final chap-
ters, one year after Brancati’s death in 1954.
6. Jacqueline Reich, Beyond the Latin Lover: Marcello Mastroianni,
Masculinity, and Italian Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004), 58.
7. Sexual impotence used as a metaphor for postwar anxiety appears also
in the novel of a great twentieth-century author, Ernest Hemingway. In
his The Sun Also Rises, published in 1926, the protagonist Jake Barnes is
in fact an American veteran of the Great War who is left impotent by a
combat wound.
8. Actually, Mussolini also governed the Italian Social Republic (RSI), bet-
ter known as the Republic of Salò, in Northern Italy from September
1943 to April 1945. The RSI was a puppet-state of Nazi Germany.
9. George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 155.
10. Ibid., 180.
11. Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist
Italy, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2012).
12. Lorenzo Benadusi, “Una casa ben arredata: storia della mascolinità,”
in Sulle orme di George L. Mosse: Interpretazioni e fortuna dell’opera di
un grande storico, ed. Lorenzo Benadusi and Giorgio Caravale (Roma:
Carocci, 2012), 59–79.
13. Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-
Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.
14. On the importance of subjectivity in the analysis of masculinity, see
Michael Roper, “Between the Psyche and the Social: Masculinity,
Subjectivity and the First World War Veteran,” Journal of Men’s Studies
15, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 251–270.
15. Previously Robert W., Raewyn Connell is today a transsexual woman and
she prefers to be referred to as a woman also in the past tense, as attested
by her personal website, http://www.raewynconnell.net/, accessed
January 16, 2015, and underlined in the article by Nikki Wedgwood,
“Connell’s Theory of Masculinity: Its Origins and Influences on the
Study of Gender,” Journal of Gender Studies 18, no. 4 (December 2009):
329–339.
16. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 53.
17. Demetrakis Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity:
A Critique,” Theory and Society 30, no. 3 (June 2001): 337–361, 339.
18. Jeff Hearn, “From Hegemonic Masculinity to the Hegemony of Men,”
Feminist Theory 5, no. 1 (April 2004): 49–72.
19. Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity,” 341.
20. Toby L. Ditz, “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of
Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History,”
Gender & History 16, no. 1 (April 2004): 1–35; Judith M. Bennett,
History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2006).
Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (December
2005): 848.
22. Ibid., 832.
23. Ibid.
24. See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006);
Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
25. Tamar Mayer, “Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage,” in
Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer
(London: Routledge, 2000), 1. The obvious reference is to Anderson,
Imagined Communities.
26. Mayer, “Gender Ironies of Nationalism,” 2. See also George L. Mosse,
Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in
Modern Europe (New York: H. Fertig, 1985).
27. Let’s think of Robert Filmer’s theory as explained in his Patriarcha, or
the Natural Power of Kings (1680). His political philosophy was founded
upon the statement that the government of a family by a father is the true
origin and model of all government.
28. See Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (London:
Routledge, 1992).
29. I take the expression “fictive household” from Beth Baron, Egypt as
a Woman: Nationalism, Gender, and Politics (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2005), 5.
30. Patrizia Albanese, Mothers of the Nation: Women, Families, and
Nationalism in Twentieth-Century Europe (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2006).
31. See Ute Frevert, A Nation in Barracks: Modern Germany, Military
Conscription and Civil Society (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2004).
32. The first issue of the journal edited by the Italian Society of Women
Historians was dedicated to the analysis of the sense of belonging to a
nation or any other community; see Genesis: Rivista della Società itali-
ana delle storiche: Patrie e appartenenze, 2002. See also Alberto Mario
Banti, Sublime madre nostra: La nazione italiana dal Risorgimento al
fascismo (Roma: Laterza, 2011); Marina D’Amelia, La mamma (Bologna:

Il mulino, 2005).
33. Nicola Labanca, “Una pedadogia militare per l’Italia liberale: I primi
giornali per il soldato,” Rivista di storia contemporanea no. 4 (1988):
546–577; Marco Mondini, “La nazione di Marte: Esercito e nation
building nell’Italia unita,” Storica 7, no. 20–21 (2001): 209–238; Marco
Mondini, “Coscrizione e modernizzazione: l’Italia liberale,” in Fare il
soldato: Storie del reclutamento militare in Italia, ed. Nicola Labanca
(Milano: Unicopli, 2007), 83–90.
34. Banti, Sublime madre nostra.
35. Mass death of young and adult males due to World War I had a major
social, cultural, and political impact on European societies. See Jay Winter,
“Victimes de la guerre: Morts, blessés et invalides,” in Encyclopédie de
la Grande Guerre, 1914–1918: Histoire et culture, ed. Stéphane Audoin-
Rouzeau and Jean Jacques Becker (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 1083–1085.
36. Francesco Cassata, Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and
Genetics in Twentieth-Century Italy, trans. Erin O’Loughlin (Budapest
and New York: Central European University Press, 2011); Maria Sophia
Quine, “Racial ‘Sterility’ and ‘Hyperfecundity’ in Fascist Italy: Biological
Politics of Sexual Reproduction,” Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist
Studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 92–144.
37. John Tosh, “Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of Gender,” in
Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan
Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004), 41–60.
38. Fabio Fabbri, Le origini della guerra civile: L’Italia dalla Grande Guerra
al fascismo, 1918–1921 (Torino: UTET, 2009).
39. Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man, 27. See also Giovanni De Luna,
Il corpo del nemico ucciso: violenza e morte nella guerra contemporanea
(Torino: Einaudi, 2006).
40. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920 (Torino: G.
Einaudi, 1965); De Felice, Mussolini il fascista I: La conquista del pot-
ere, 1921–1925 (Torino: Einaudi, 1966); Roberto Vivarelli, Storia delle
origini del fascismo: l’Italia dalla grande guerra alla marcia su Roma,
3 vols. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1965–2012); Giulia Albanese, La marcia su
Roma (Roma: Laterza, 2006).
41. Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth
Century, trans. Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).
42. Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man, 28.
43. Mussolini endorsed the myth of youth to contrast the impetuousness
of the generation returning from the battlefields with the “defeatist”
bureaucrats of the old liberal elite who still controlled the government
until 1922.
44. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, L’alcòva d’acciaio: romanzo vissuto (Firenze:
Vallecchi, 2004). The novel was first published in 1921.
45. Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man, 28–29.
46. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 205.
47. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eros e Priapo (Milano: Garzanti, 1967), 73, as
translated in Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology and
Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996), 1.
48. Ibid., 142.
49. See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Polity Press
in association with Blackwell, 1987–89). The work had been originally
published in German in 1977. In particular, Theweleit examined novels
and memories written by members of the Freikorps, a counterrevolution-
ary paramilitary movement operating in Weimar Germany in the period
1918–23.
50. Benito Mussolini, “Il discorso dell’Ascensione,” in Scritti e discorsi di
Benito Mussolini: Scritti e discorsi dal 1927 al 1928, VI (Milano: Hoepli,
1934), 37–77.
51. See David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Reproduction, and Italian
Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Carl
Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Anna Treves, Le nascite
e la politica nell’Italia del Novecento (Milano: LED, 2001).
52. Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 45.
53. Ibid., 55.
54. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); Foucault, The History of Sexuality
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
55. Horn, Social Bodies, 3.
56. Ibid., 13.
57. Herzog, Sexuality in Europe, 62.
58. Victoria De Grazia, “How Mussolini Ruled Italian Women,” in A
History of Women in the West: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth
Century, vol. 5, ed. Françoise Thébaud (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1996), 120.
59. Royal decree by law no. 2132 of December 19, 1926.
60. See Ipsen, Dictating Demography, 65–68. The text “Strength in
Numbers” appeared as the preface to the Italian edition of Richard
Korherr, Regresso delle nascite: morte dei popoli (Roma: Libreria del
Littorio, 1928).
61. Benito Mussolini, “Prefazione,” in Regresso delle nascite: Morte dei popoli,
by Richard Korherr (Roma: Libreria del Littorio, 1928), 22–23.
62. Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS) in Rome, Consiglio di Stato, file
“Pacifico Armando.” I thank Giovanni Focardi for having shared this
information with me.
63. Brancati, Beautiful Antonio, 205.
64. “Pederasty” was the exact word used at the time on the criminal files of
those arrested for alleged homosexual practices. The term identified, and
condemned, the “culprit” for having had anal intercourse with boys/men
as a passive partner.
65. Acs, Ministero dell’Interno, Ufficio confino politico, folder no. 477, file
“G. Carlo.”
66. Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Annali di statistica: L’azione promossa dal

governo nazionale a favore dell’incremento demografico, vols. 7, 2 (Roma:
Tipografia Failli, 1943).
67. Benito Mussolini, “Le direttive del Gran Consiglio,” in La politica
demografica, ed. Paolo Orano (Roma: Pinciana, 1937), 182.
69. Maria Sophia Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from
Liberalism to Fascism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 300.
70. Alberto De’ Stefani, “L’obbligo del matrimonio e della filiazione,” in
Commenti e discorsi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1938), 208. The text was com-
posed on January 4, 1937.
72. Ibid.
73. “Pretura di Casteggio, 24 Giugno 1933—Estensore Della Valle—
Imputato Ruggeri,” Annali di diritto e procedura penale (1934): 483–
490; “Corte di Appello di Napoli, 25 Giugno 1936. Sez. XI—Pres.
Limonati—Est. Ferraro—P.M. Bellini; Imp. Marsico,” Rivista italiana
di diritto penale (1937): 703–711.
74. Mario Sinopoli, “Se il rifiuto opposto da un coniuge alla ‘communi tori’
possa essere incriminabile ai sensi dell’art. 570 Cod. Penale,” Il diritto
ecclesiastico (1935): 133–138; Alfredo Sandulli, “Amplesso coniugale
ed obbligo di assistenza famigliare,” La giustizia penale (1937): 89–95;
Arturo Carlo Jemolo, “Su una contestata interpretazione dell’art. 570
codice penale,” Giurisprudenza italiana (1937): 209–218.
75. Brancati, Beautiful Antonio, 217.
76. “Code of Canon Law”, accessed December 13, 2013, http://www.vati-
can.va/archive/ENG1104/_INDEX.HTM.
77. Genesis 1:28. See Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 124, for some details
on European nineteenth-century legislations on nullity of marriage for
impotence.
78. The signing of the pacts in 1929 put an end to the controversial “Roman
Question” that had resulted from the conquest of Rome, site of the Holy
See, by the recently proclaimed Italian Kingdom in 1870.
79. With regard to the former, see Martina Salvante, “I prestiti matrimoniali:
Una misura pronatalista nella Germania nazista e nell’Italia fascista,”
Passato e presente 21, no. 60 (2003): 39–58.
80. Similar considerations can also be made for the German case, as described
in Michelle Mouton, From Nurturing the Nation to Purifying the Volk:
Weimar and Nazi Family Policy, 1918–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
81. Article 144 of the 1942 Civil code stated marital authority over the
wife.
82. Chiara Saraceno, “Costruzione della maternità e della paternità,” in Il
regime fascista: Storia e storiografia, ed. Angelo Del Boca, Massimo
Legnani, and Mario G. Rossi (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1995), 475–497.
C H A P T E R 6
Martial Men in Virgin Lands?

Nineteenth-Century Filibustering,
Nation-Building, and Competing
Notions of Masculinity in the
United States and Nicaragua
Andreas Beer
In the Humanities, transnational approaches have gained widespread

currency, especially in such fields as American Studies.1 This chapter aims
to apply these approaches to the study of masculinities and their interre-
lationship with nationalism by focusing on one particular historical case
study. It provides a transnational perspective on the gender dimensions
of American nation-building in the nineteenth century, attempting to
challenge nation-state–centered scholarship on the history of mascu-
linities in the modern world. It argues that the transnational forays of
the so-called filibusters enhance our understanding of how different
masculinities interacted with each other in what Mary Louise Pratt has
famously called the “contact zone” between different cultures.2
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States experienced a
surge of so-called filibuster expeditions. Filibusters were men who pri-
vately organized invasions of territories with which the United States
was at peace. Their ultimate aim was to annex such territories in order
to expand the US nation-state. This chapter explores the tensions
between competing forms of masculinity and nation-building processes
during the filibuster invasion of Nicaragua, which took place between
1855 and 1857, arguing that the filibusters’ partial success stemmed
from their ability to embody competing concepts of masculinity that
114 ANDREAS BEER
appealed to different groups of men within the United States and the
Nicaraguan population. Until today, the historiography of the filibus-
ters has revolved around notions of exceptionalism and US nationalism,
with few scholars employing comparative or transnational approaches
to better understand the filibusters’ actions. Amy Greenberg’s 2005
study Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire remains
one of the rare studies on nineteenth-century masculinity in the United
States that includes a broad discussion of the phenomenon of filibuster-
ing.3 Yet, even Greenberg confines her analysis to the US domestic
sphere and argues that “the reactions of the people Americans encoun-
tered . . . are unfortunately beyond the scope of this study.”4 This chap-
ter, although taking up many of Greenberg’s findings, focuses on the
reactions of the people the filibusters “encountered.” It takes a truly
transnational perspective by investigating Nicaraguan conceptions of
the interrelations between masculinities and the nation-state, thereby
contributing to a better understanding of the repercussions of filibuster-
ing that went beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.
US Expansionism in the s and Competing

Concepts of Masculinity
The practice of filibustering was intimately linked to the surge of US
expansionism in the 1850s. Having started sporadically in the 1820s,
filibustering activities reached their apex in the decade between the
Mexican War and the US Civil War, when it was “common for two
or more U.S. filibustering expeditions to be in some stage of prepa-
ration or in actual progress.”5 While they continued to colonize the
Northern American continent via westward movement, US citizens
increasingly looked south for new territory. Especially the slave-
holding South welcomed the prospect of annexing new territories,
hoping to establish slavery in the Caribbean basin.6 The filibusters’
targets were primarily Mexico and Cuba,7 but their expeditions also
led them to Central America, Hawaii, and Venezuela. The filibusters
were regarded as an embodiment of the prevailing spirit of territorial
expansionism, connected to the ideology of Manifest Destiny and
the Young America political movement.8 Consequently, they served
as focal points for heated discussions about the necessity for and vir-
tue of US national expansion, which included the delicate prospect of
annexing territories that were populated by people of mixed ethnicity
who in their majority adhered to the Catholic faith.
As Gail Bederman and Amy Greenberg have argued, these discus-
sions of national expansionism intersected with discourses of gender
and race.9 The emergence of the nation-state, its expansion, and its
MARTIAL MEN IN VIRGIN LANDS? 115
relation to other nation-states were conceived in gendered terms, with

the corporal metaphor of the body politic ruling supreme.10 This meant
that the US nation was equated with the human body: Metaphorically
born out of the successful revolution of 1776, it had entered adoles-
cence during the first half of the nineteenth century. This confluence
of both people and territory in the body politic in nineteenth-century
nationalist thought11 meant that expansionism was naturalized: the
nation, like the human body, had to grow. New limbs (in the form of
new territories) could be attached, but vigilance was important. The
limbs had to be compatible with the essence of the national body. This
compatibility depended on race. From white Americans’ perspective in
the nineteenth century, nation-states had to be composed of one single,
homogeneous race. Territorial expansion and the prospect of allowing
different races to become part of the nation carried the danger of dilut-
ing its racial purity and its ability to spread white civilization.12
Apart from racial purity, the nation’s male citizens were expected to
maintain their manliness during the process of expansion. “Manliness
was the achievement of a perfect man, just as civilization was the
achievement of a perfect race,” Gail Bederman argues.13 Yet, what actu-
ally constituted the perfect form of masculinity was a point of debate in
the United States during the 1850s. At the time there existed no single,
hegemonic ideal of masculinity; two adversarial concepts competed for
men’s allegiance. On the one hand, there existed what Amy Greenberg
has dubbed martial manhood: the hypermasculine ideal of the dare-
devil adventurer and explorer, pioneer, and frontiersman. Adherents
of martial manhood expected virile young men, who were seen as the
embodiment of the young republic, to go into the world to conquer and
subdue it. On the other hand, the ideal of restrained manhood hailed
the business man and the family man. This form of masculinity hinged
on men’s abilities as wage earners, their mechanical skills as well as their
domesticity.14 It embraced the increased urbanization and industriali-
zation of US society, while “martial” men regarded these processes as
threats to their manhood. Restrained men condemned their martial
counterparts as epitomes of a bygone era and were in turn belittled as
effeminate and pretentious weaklings. In effect, both sides regarded the
other as an obstacle to the goals of nation-building and spreading civ-
ilization: while martial men were believed to idealize a past that knew
no civilization, restrained men were accused of being over-civilized,
with an aristocratic tendency of feminine degeneration.15
On the surface, both types of masculinity regarded femininity as
their ultimate antagonist.16 Feminization was tantamount to defeat,
both on an individual and on a national level; and since many Latin
American men were regarded as effeminate, expansionists were
116 ANDREAS BEER
interested in an annexation of their countries, but not an incorpo-

ration of its inhabitants into the national community. Latin American
women, by contrast, were as desired a possession as the territories on
which they lived. Desires for stereotypically lascivious Latinas figured
prominently in expansionist dreams; indeed, sexual conquest symbol-
ized the ongoing territorial conquest.17 On the other hand, and in
spite of the violence perpetrated during subsequent waves of expan-
sionism (for instance, during the US-Mexican War 1846–1848), many
US expansionists imagined territorial aggrandizement as a peace-
ful process, expressed through feminized metaphors of fertility. In
nineteenth-century America, however, despite their prominent met-
aphorical role in expansionist thought, female citizens were assigned
a subaltern position. Men turned to them for moral guidance and the
domestic stability they deemed indispensable for expansionist conquest
abroad or success in the newly developing capitalist society at home,
but women were denied political and social rights. This ambiguity
toward women and their femininity lies at the heart of modern nation-
building, as Anne McClintock has shown. Women occupied diverse
positions in the framework of nation-building. They were to play an
active part as “biological reproducers of the members of national col-
lectives” and as “transmitters and producers of the national culture,”
but they also played a passive role as “symbolic signifiers of national
difference.”18 Although women were seen as a stabilizing factor in US
society as the embodiments of historical continuity, they were always
subordinated to men, who stood for the future of the nation in the
eyes of the advocates of both martial and restrained manhood.19
William Walker’s Filibusters between

Martial and Restrained Masculinities
Filibustering offered opportunities particularly for martial men.
American men left for Latin America in order to redeem the mar-
tial practices of manhood that had increasingly come under attack at
home.20 The Jeffersonian ideal of the manly yeoman citizen, whose
abilities to farm his own land and to provide for his family had made
him the backbone of the Republic, was no longer achievable for a
majority of men in a rapidly changing society.21 In addition, martial
men in particular were concerned about America’s growing urbaniza-
tion and the influx of millions of European immigrants, developments
that restrained men actually hailed as important steps toward a more
advanced civilization. For those feeling threatened by these rapid
changes, the filibusters offered the opportunity to conquer territory
and to become part of a group of men whose spirit revolved around

male camaraderie, machismo, and a paramilitary lifestyle that many of
them had become accustomed to during their military service in the
US-Mexican War. The American public reveled in portrayals of the fil-
ibusters’ virility, and the emerging mass media catered to this interest
by portraying the filibusters as daredevil, hyper-male adventurers.22
The filibuster expedition to Nicaragua between 1855 and 1857 is a case
in point. On this occasion, a group of predominantly Anglo-Americans
and Cuban and European exiles under the leadership of the Tennessean
lawyer, journalist, and adventurer William Walker was contracted as an
auxiliary force by one of the warring factions of the Nicaraguan Civil War,
which had begun in 1854. They helped their side—the Democrats—to
gain the upper hand, and William Walker took the post of Chief of the
Armed Forces in the coalition government that followed the hostilities.
Thanks to political maneuvering, infighting on the Nicaraguan side,
and rigged elections, Walker became president of Nicaragua in 1856.
He immediately began a program of Americanization aimed at facilitat-
ing US control of the country.23 This program, together with Walker’s
announcement that he sought control over all the countries on the isth-
mus, alarmed other Central American countries and prompted them to
form an anti-filibuster army under Costa Rican leadership, which even-
tually managed to topple Walker in March 1857. The filibusters’ “suc-
cess” in Nicaragua made Walker and his men “key cultural icons” of the
1850s,24 and the masculinities they represented played a pivotal part in
these public discussions. When R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt
argue that masculinity “represents not a certain type of man but, rather,
a way that men position themselves through discursive practices,”25 the
representations of and discussions about the filibusters in 1850s certainly
illustrate their point.
The filibusters’ propaganda was successful in the United States in
part due to their ability to represent both forms of masculinity that vied
for men’s allegiance in the 1850s. While the filibuster rank and file por-
trayed themselves as representatives of martial manhood, their leader
William Walker epitomized restrained masculinity. El Nicaraguense, the
newspaper founded by Walker’s filibusters, and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper, which regularly featured reports written by filibusters
about their exploits, constituted their main propagandistic tools for the
US market. In countless articles, the filibusters portrayed themselves
as hard-drinking, womanizing adventurers. Especially notorious was
the series “From my Knapsack and Hammock” by a fictitious corporal
named Pipeclay, who described his off-duty time as a constant feast of
alcoholic brawls, erotic adventures, and gold-digging expeditions into
118 ANDREAS BEER
the Nicaraguan countryside.26 As a weekly story paper, Frank Leslie’s,

published longer, narrative articles than could be found in daily news-
papers. It also featured sketches and drawings, which affirmed stereo-
types of the martial filibusters on a visual level. The article “Captain J
Egbert Farnham’s Quarters,” which was published on May 3, 1856, is a
good example. It is a filibuster home story, which, according to Leslie’s,
was “literal in every particular; in fact, it enables our readers to look in
upon the snug quarters of a professed filibuster.” The accompanying
illustration showed a wooden table that was covered with several bot-
tles, boots that were spread on the wooden floor of the room, and an
obviously drunk man who reclined in a bedstead with one arm on the
floor. For men looking for the martial type of masculine lifestyle, such
portraits held huge appeal. Additionally, the article and accompanying
sketch “Interior of the Convent, Repose after Battle” in the same issue
depicted a scene of a dozen wild-looking males, some in hammocks,
some shaving, some playing cards, all obviously enjoying themselves in
an intimate depiction of male cameraderie.27
In contrast to common filibusters who were portrayed as prototyp-
ical martial men, their leader, William Walker, epitomized the ideal of
restrained masculinity. In almost all the articles about Walker, his physical
appearance was an important part of the portrayal because his body was
seen as an embodiment of social ideals.28 The article “General Walker of
New Granada,” which appeared in Leslie’s on January 5, 1856, exempli-
fies this pattern. An accompanying daguerreotype of Walker showed a
slender, immaculately dressed young man, who appeared to be the very
opposite of the rugged manhood that was reflected in the depictions
of the filibuster rank and file. The article’s author described Walker’s
life as a newspaper editor in New Orleans and recalled the moment
when he first met him. He was immediately “attracted by his delicate
person, pale freckled face, light blue eye, and thoughtful expression.”29
This description stood in stark contrast to the usual depictions of manly
expansionists, whose muscular bodies were frequently hailed as the epit-
ome of strong masculinity.30 Walker’s body attracted attention precisely
because of its almost feminine qualities, with his gray eyes singled out
repeatedly.31 Another article in Frank Leslie’s dwelt on Walker’s appear-
ance in even greater detail. It described Walker as “rather below the
medium height, very spare in figure, but with a well-developed chest and
shoulders; his hair is yellow, very thin, and worn extremely short. His
complexion is light, or what would be termed sandy. . . . ” But Walker’s
restrained masculinity was not confined to his appearance; his lifestyle
and daily routine were similarly noted as following restrained ideals.
“He sleeps but little,” the author wrote, “labors incessantly, and at the
table, appears to be too abstemious.”32 This ascetic lifestyle constituted a
marked difference from his fellow filibusters, who, according to one arti-
cle in Frank Leslie’s, “indulg[ed] themselves to their hearts’ content.”33
Even in that scene, though, Walker ultimately appeared and imposed
a more restrained behavior: “The day of revelry, however, came to an
end, and General Walker, himself never self-indulgent, called into being
the stern discipline of military life, and restored to his army, order. . . . ”
These recurrent tropes of a frugal life as well as a disciplined character
and a weak, almost feminine body clearly echo depictions of European
aristocracy at the time. Such “noble” and “gallant” young aristocrats
were presumed to suffer from an excess of feminizing “culture” and
“civilization,” which left their bodies weak.34 The filibusters could thus
appeal to both types of masculinity that vied for dominance in the mid-
nineteenth century and suggested that a peaceful coexistence was pos-
sible. The mix between a group of martial men, led by a prototype of
restrained masculinity, seemed to guarantee the success of the filibus-
ter’s invasion of Nicaragua.
Nicaraguan M ESTIZO ’S Masculinities and

the Absent Nation
Despite these gendered dynamics within US society, the filibusters
also attempted to cooperate with Nicaraguans, and the masculinities
they projected constituted a major source for their initial success. The
filibusters interacted primarily with urban Nicaraguan Mestizo elites
from the main towns of Granada, León, and Masaya. These elites’
allegiances were divided according to their social, political, and eco-
nomic position in Nicaraguan society.35 However, they were unified
in their efforts to convert the country into a nation-state that followed
European models. After gaining independence from Spain in 1821,
most Nicaraguans did not accept the central government as the nation’s
highest authority but felt closer allegiance to the region they lived in,
their patrias chicas.36 Nicaraguan nationalists attempted to create a
sense of national unity, to establish national institutions, to defend the
contested border with Costa Rica, and to build up a national army to
guarantee Nicaragua’s sovereignty in the face of British and US intru-
sions. The two major political factions in the country, the Democrats
and the Conservatives, had differing ideas about the nation’s future,
but were united in their belief in European Enlightenment and the
patriarchal gender hierarchies that it entailed. Bradford Burns stresses
that even “in the bitterness of debate and conflict, few Nicaraguans
questioned the supreme role of the father in the family, social patriar-
chy.”37 Political nation-building was deemed a man’s task, while women
were confined to the duty of reproduction. For both Democrats and
120 ANDREAS BEER
Conservatives, the ideal of masculinity revolved around the outdoor

life of the hacienda. Yet, this does not mean that martial masculinity
was hegemonic in Nicaragua. Rather, Nicaraguan Mestizos connected
their male virility to their economic prowess. For them, civilization
was closely linked to trade and economic liberalism. Male members of
the Mestizo elite regarded themselves as businessmen and propagated
a restrained masculinity, which they hoped would set them apart
from what they regarded as socially and racially inferior members of
Nicaragua’s lower strata of society.38
For these elite Nicaraguans, martial types of masculinity were con-
nected to the trope of nature, and, following their worldview influenced
by European Enlightenment, they regarded nature as an obstacle to
nation-building and the creation of civilization. From their perspective,
civilization was directly connected to the construction of an inter-oce-
anic canal, a project that had been envisioned since colonial times and
was hailed as the great national unifier and the gateway through which
Nicaragua would become a “civilized” nation-state.39 The canal prom-
ised further industrialization and a commerce-driven path to moder-
nity that was linked to the restrained masculinity of its elite advocates.
The Nicaraguan Democrats had invited the filibusters not merely to
win the war, but also to ultimately settle in the country. Following the
racist theories of Arthur de Gobineau and other thinkers, they believed
that white Anglo-Saxons were the bearers of civilization and that their
mere presence might help elevate the country from a status of seeming
inferiority to that of a “civilized” and respected nation.40
Thanks to a small group of Cuban Mestizos, who translated Walker’s
writings into Spanish and promoted his actions among Nicaraguan
nationalists, Walker initially managed to bring large parts of the
Nicaraguan elite onto his side by “selling them progress” as well as
the related notion of restrained masculinity.41 Very few Nicaraguans
noticed the negative gendered dynamics that went hand in hand with
Walker’s expansionist vision, including the desire of US males to
enter into romantic relationships with Nicaraguan women—a desire
often resulting in the rape of Nicaraguan females. Only the opposi-
tional newspaper El Defensor del Orden touched upon this issue in an
article that was published in June 1855. Even before the filibusters’
arrival, the editor predicted: “[The filibusters] will wrestle from us
our religion and our race, will take away our women, will rape our
daughters, and will expel us from the fields we have cultivated with
our own sweat.”42 The dangers that the filibusters represented for the
masculinity of the Nicaraguans were explicitly named in the article,
even though they were seen as only one of several problems that the
filibusters’ presence posed. Once Walker and his men had entered the
country, the Defensor del Orden used the gendered metaphor of the
endangered motherland to gain support against the intruders. On
August 9, 1855, its editor warned: “Some of [Nicaragua’s] ignoble
and condemnable sons threw a horde of filibusters on her, so that they
could take possession of the country, absorb their nationality, cut her
institutions into pieces, usurp her properties and convert their citizens
into slaves.”43 However, this obvious allusion to the rape of the moth-
erland failed to rally Nicaraguans against the filibusters because of the
divided allegiances of the country’s population. Ideas of a national
motherland as well as notions of nationalized masculinity were far
from dominant among the country’s population and therefore elicited
little enthusiasm.
Eventually, however, Nicaraguan nationalists turned against
Walker. His Americanization program threatened the power of the
landed elite and quickly provoked widespread opposition. This oppo-
sition was reflected in changing depictions of Walker’s masculinity in
Nicaraguan media. Since the term “filibuster” etymologically links back
to Caribbean freebooters of the seventeenth century in the Spanish lan-
guage, Nicaraguans began to depict Walker as a bloodthirsty pirate,
whose martial masculinity was a remainder of an uncivilized past. By
using this dichotomy, the Nicaraguan Mestizos turned to the same tech-
niques of “othering” that their US counterparts had used in making
the case for territorial expansion. The link between a commercial view
on nation-building and restrained masculinity as well as the connec-
tion between martial masculinity and land-based expansionism thus
appears to have become a transnational phenomenon. Grounded in the
European Enlightenment binary between nature and civilization as well
as notions of steady human progress, which assigned one masculinity
to the past and another to the future, these two forms of masculinity
were understood by North Americans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans alike.
Discussions about nation-building were closely linked to these two
models. The gendered fault lines along which Nicaraguans conceptual-
ized their nation during the forays of the filibusters remained important
even after Walker and his men had been deprived of their power.44
National Narratives of Nation-Building

and Transnational Masculinities
The filibusters and their leader William Walker not only lost their
fight for Nicaragua, they also lost their fight for hegemony on the con-
tested field of nineteenth-century masculinities in the United States,
at least for a while. As Walker was increasingly labeled a martial man,
122 ANDREAS BEER
thus losing his ability to reconcile martial and restrained masculinity,

both Nicaraguan and American society perceived the filibusters as
anachronistic males who fought battles of the past instead of focusing
on future progress.45
In Nicaragua, Walker was increasingly regarded as the embodiment
of an uncivilized past that had delayed the country’s path toward mod-
ern “civilization.” Starting in the liberal period of the 1870s, Walker’s
role changed: his virile masculinity was no longer praised but vilified,
and he became the “ominous man who left a backwash of blood,”46
against whom the nation’s sons had united. As a result, the national
narrative went, they overcame the separation into various patrias chi-
cas and began the process of modern nation-building. The distinction
between ordinary filibusters and Walker had vanished, the latter had
become as martial a specimen as his ordinary followers and his out-
standing feature—his eyes—could thus be taken as testimony for his
baseness, not his refinement. This interpretation of the famous filibus-
ter endured well into the twentieth century and became part and par-
cel of Nicaragua’s founding myths. A popular Nicaraguan history book
from 1966 stated, for example: “Walker’s physiognomy reflects his soul.
Below a wide forehead, which should contain distinguished thoughts,
glare two brilliantly blue eyes, half opened, like a viper on the look-out,
ready for the attack. In these eyes lies the origin of his flashes of audacity
and of the coldness of his crimes.”47 The filibuster episode was person-
alized in Nicaraguan nationalist historiography to focus on the evilness
of the martial pirate Walker alone, which helped to create the legend of
Andrés Castro, the national hero, himself an idol of martial masculinity
whose legend narrates that he killed several filibusters in a decisive battle
by smashing their heads with stones after running out of ammunition.
All depictions of Castro, including his monument at the Hacienda San
Jacinto and his famous portrait in the National Library in Managua,
show him as a muscular, shirtless superman who intrepidly beats the
filibusters in their own field of hypermasculinity.
On the other hand, after the trauma of the American Civil War,
white middle-class men temporarily discarded martial masculinity, and
restrained masculinity became the hegemonic norm in their circles
until the 1890s, when discussion about these two types of manhood
began anew in the face of US imperialism.48 Until then, the collec-
tive memory of Walker and the filibusters remained in the semantic
field of piracy, to such an extent that the 1870s saw a surge of media
reports about “William Walker’s Buried Treasure”49 or “Walker’s Last
Expedition: The Adventures of the Great Filibuster and his Followers
in Central America,”50 which advocated quests to retrieve gold trea-
sures supposedly hidden by the filibuster-pirates. The filibusters,
including Walker, were remembered as quintessential martial men,

which did not sit well with the restrained ideal of the post-Civil War
era, a fate that once more befell the filibusters in the aftermath of
the Spanish-American War of 1898 and US imperialist ventures in
the Philippines around 1900. Only in the 1930s did US historian
Laurence Greene explicitly discuss Walker’s masculinity, interpreting
his restrained characteristics as homosexuality and speculating that his
“sexual disorder” had been the reason for Walker’s seemingly innate
evilness, thus underlining the heteronormative construction of many
national historiographies that categorize otherness in terms of deviant
masculinities.51 Since the 1970s, US historians have shown a renewed
critical interest in the filibusters, but they have focused primarily on
the American national perspective, failing to incorporate Central
American scholars and their scholarship. This, as demonstrated by the
study of Amy Greenberg, also holds true for scholarly accounts of the
filibusters’ masculinities and their vision of the United States.
A transnational analysis of the filibusters, and of William Walker
in particular, allows us to critically reconsider national narratives of
nation-building and the ways in which they are interrelated with various
notions of masculinity. This chapter has sought to provide some initial
insights into these complex issues. It argues that the nexus between
masculinities and nation-building can be better understood from a
transnational perspective: Both US Americans and Nicaraguans linked
their efforts of nation-building to the same two sets of masculinities
that were loosely connected to the Enlightenment dichotomy between
civilization and nature. Yet, while in the filibuster group these two mas-
culinities were competing for hegemony, Nicaraguan Mestizo men had
already embraced restrained masculinity. Thus, the latter employed a
gendered strategy of othering with regard to the filibusters, labeling
them exclusively as martial men and using this strategy to obliterate
divisions within their own ranks. This, in turn, influenced ongoing
American debates on masculinities and national expansion, serving to
link filibustering to martial masculinity. This did not only define the
stance of the Nicaraguan nation-building efforts, which used this pro-
jection of martial masculinity to situate the filibusters in an uncivilized
past against which the Nicaraguan nationalists forged their own mascu-
linity à la Andrés Castro, but also defined the posture of white, Anglo-
Saxon males who came to associate Walker and his men with a bygone
age and cause. The Nicaraguan Mestizos’ strategy of gendered othering
thus had a profound impact on discussions in the United States during
the filibuster heydays and on its historiographical aftermath, something
that has often been neglected because of scholars’ exclusive focus on the
national framework with regard to masculinities. To trace transnational
124 ANDREAS BEER
processes of the translation, adoption, and adaptation of different forms

of masculinity helps us better understand the question of how mascu-
linities and nationalism interact within different contexts. R. W. Connell
and James Messerschmidt have rightly called upon scholars of gender
to rethink the “geographies of masculinities,”52 either on a regional or
a global level, but their examples of globalized gender formations focus
on the present and do not delve into the gendered complexities of the
past. The filibusters’ forays in nineteenth-century Nicaragua suggest
that a transnational perspective can teach us much about the history of
the interrelationship between masculinities and the nation.
Notes
1. The following studies provide a good introduction to the transnational
approach: Jeffrey Grant Belnap and Raul A. Fernandez, eds., Jose Marti’s
“Our America”: From National to Hemispheric Cultural Studies (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998); Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary
Relations and Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004); Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The
Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005); Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe,
eds., Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies (Hanover,
NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2011); Mathew C. Gutmann et al., eds.,
Perspectives on Las Americas: A Reader in Culture, History, & Representation
(Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2008); Klaus Hock and Gesa Mackenthun,
eds., Entangled Knowledge: Scientific Discourses and Cultural Difference
(Berlin: Waxmann, 2012); Sünne Juterczenka and Gesa Mackenthun, eds.,
The Fuzzy Logic of Encounter: New Perspectives on Cultural Contact (Münster:
Waxmann, 2009); Caroline Field Levander and Robert Steven Levine, eds.,
Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2008); Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman, eds., The Futures of American
Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
2. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London: Routledge, 1992), 4.
3. The following English-language studies provide important insights into
filibustering: Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum
American Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Charles
Henry Brown, Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the
Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Rodrigo
Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United
States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Robert
E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861, 2nd ed.
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002); Robert E. May, Manifest
Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002); William O. Scroggs, Filibusters
and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates (New York:
Russell and Russell, 1969). Some of the best studies in Spanish include
Víctor Hugo Acuña Ortega, ed., Filibusterismo y Destino Manifiesto en Las

Américas (San José: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2010);
Rafael Obregón Loría, Costa Rica y la Guerra Contra los Filibusteros
(Alajuela, San José: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría y Ministerio
de Cultura, Juventud y Deportes, 1991); Iván Molina Jiménez, La Campaña
Nacional (1856–1857): Una Visión desde el Siglo XXI (Alajuela: Museo
Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2000).
4. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 15.
5. May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 20. During the heydays of Manifest
Destiny in the 1840s and 1850s, scholars diagnosed a “fever of expan-
sionism.” Víctor Hugo Acuña Ortega, La Campaña Nacional: Memorias
Comparadas, ed. Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría (Alajuela:
Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2009), 56. On Central
America, see Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 55.
6. See May, Southern Dream.
7. On filibustering activities in Mexico, which was the most prominent target
due to its geographical proximity, see Joseph Allen Stout Jr., Schemers and
Dreamers: Filibustering in Mexico 1848–1921 (Fort Worth: Texas Christian
University Press, 2002); Delia González Reufels, Siedler und Filibuster in
Sonora: Eine mexikanische Region im Interesse ausländischer Abenteurer
und Mächte (Köln: Böhlau, 2003).
8. Manifest Destiny was the belief that Providence had allocated the whole
continent exclusively for the expansion of the Anglo Saxons, while Young
America was the name of a group of politicians (mainly affiliated to the
Democratic Party) and editors who strongly advocated expansion driven
by Manifest Destiny. See Sam W. Haynes and Christopher Morris, eds.,
Manifest Destiny and Empire: American Antebellum Expansionism
(Arlington: University of Texas Press, 1997); Tomas R. Hietala, Manifest
Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest
Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
9. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender
and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), 4, 27; Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 14; R. W. Connell,
Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 23.
10. Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,”
Feminist Review 44 (1993): 1–4, 61–80.
11. Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 174.
12. See Robert W. Johannsen, “The Meaning of Manifest Destiny,” in
Manifest Destiny and Empire, ed. Sam W. Haynes and Christopher
Morris (Arlington: University of Texas Press, 1997), 7–20; Michael Paul
Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of
the American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000);
Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny.
13. Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 27.
14. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 10–18.
126 ANDREAS BEER
15. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 156–157; Amy S. Greenberg, “Soldado

o Don Nadie,” Filibusterismo y Destino Manifiesto, ed. Acuña Ortega
(Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamaría, 2010), 258–259.
16. All masculinities are “socially defined in contradistinction from some
model (whether real or imagined) of femininity.” R. W. Connell and
James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the
Concept,” Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (June 2005): 848.
17. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 125; Brady Harrison, Agent of Empire:
William Walker and the Imperial Self in American Literature (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2004), 190. These conquests, “international
race romances,” as Shelley Streeby has called them, were imagined to
obliterate the racial anxieties that were awakened by territorial expan-
sionism. Shelly Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the
Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002), 86.
18. McClintock, “Family Feuds,” 3–4.
19. Ibid., 65–67.
21. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of
the American West, Reissued (New York: Norton, 2006), 58; Richard
Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1998), 110.
22. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 56, 89.
23. This included a land redistribution scheme that was aimed at Anglo
American settlers, the introduction of English as the second official lan-
guage, and the reintroduction of slavery. See David E. Whisnant, Rascally
Signs in Sacred Places: The Politics of Culture in Nicaragua (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 75–76.
24. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 135; May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld,
69.
26. The author’s real name, J. W. De Frewer, was revealed only when the filibusters
had to inform their readers about his rather untimely death in August 1856.
“Corporal Pipeclay Dead,” El Nicaraguense, August 16, 1856.
27. “Captain J Egbert Farnham’s Quarters,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper, May 3, 1856, cited in Alejandro Bola ños Geyer, The War
in Nicaragua: La Guerra En Nicaragua as Reported by Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated Newspaper, 1855–1857, trans. Orlando Cuadra Downing, vol.
1 (Managua: Fondo de Promoción Cultural BANIC, 1976), 59; “Interior
of the Convent, Repose after Battle,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
May 3, 1856, cited in Geyer, The War in Nicaragua, 61.
28. Connell, Masculinities, 45, 58.
29. “General Walker of New Granada,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
January 5, 1856, cited in Geyer, The War in Nicaragua, 15.
30. Anne Baker, Heartless Immensity: Literature, Culture and Geography in
Antebellum America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006),
106.
31. Evoking the old myth about Herná n Cortés’ embodiment of Quetzalcoatl,
Walker stylized himself as the “Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny,” a supposedly
legendary figure long awaited by the Central American indigenous peo-
ple. See Amy S. Greenberg, “A Gray-Eyed Man: Character, Appearance
and Filibustering,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (Winter 2000): 673–
699; Alejandro Bola ños Geyer, William Walker: El Predestinado de los
Ojos Grises. Tomo III: Nicaragua, vol. 3 (Saint Charles, MO: Impresión
Privada, 1993); May, Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, 77.
32. “Reception Room of Gen. Walker in the President’s House, City of
Granada,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 15, 1856, cited in
Geyer, The War in Nicaragua, 34.
33. “Interior of the Convent: Repose After Battle,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Newspaper, May 3, 1856, cited in Geyer, The War in Nicaragua, 61.
34. See Bruce A. Harvey, American Geographics: U.S.-National Narratives
and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830–1865 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 153–154; Mar ía DeGuzmá n, Spain’s
Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American
Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 47–67.
35. See Jorge Eduardo Arellano, ed., Nicaragua en el Siglo XIX: Testimonios
de Funcionarios, Diplomáticos y Viajeros, vol. 6 (Managua: Fundación
UNO, 2005); Bradford E. Burns, Patriarch and Folk: The Emergence
of Nicaragua 1798–1858 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);
Antonio Esgueva Gómez, ed., Taller de Historia. Nicaragua en los
Documentos 1523–1857, vol. 10 (Managua: Instituto de Historia de
Nicaragua y Centroamérica, 2006); Miguel Angel Herrera Cuarezma,
Bongos, Bogas, Vapores y Marinos. Historia de los “Marineros” en el Río
San Juan; 1849–1855 (Managua: Centro Nicarag üense de Escritores,
1999); Frances Kinloch Tijerino, Nicaragua, Identidad y Cultura
Política, 1821–1858 (Managua: Banco Central de Nicaragua, 1999).
36. Frances Kinloch Tijerino, “El Primer Encuentro con los Filibusteros:
Antecedentes y Contexto,” in Revista de Historia, ed. IHNCA, vol.
20/21 (Managua: Editorial de la UCA, 2006), 24.
37. Burns, Patriarch and Folk , 72.
38. Tijerino, Nicaragua, 31, 211; Isabel Rodas, “Ladino: Una Identificación
Pol ítica del Siglo XIX,” in Política, Cultura y Sociedad en Centroamérica,
Siglos XVIII–XX , ed. Margarita Vannini and Frances Kinloch Tijerino
(Managua: IHNCA, 1998), 53–63, 56.
39. On the importance of the interoceanic canal, see Tijerino, Nicaragua,
211; Tijerino, Nicaragua, 7, 209–210; Tijerino, “El Primer Encuentro,”
30. On the interest of the United States in this project, see May, Southern
Dream, 85.
40. Tijerino, Nicaragua, 10, 54; Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 175.
41. El Nicaraguense of August 16, 1856, mentions a total of 32 Cubans in
Walker’s forces; the most important ones were José Ag üero Estrada, who
became the editor of the Spanish part of El Nicaraguense, and Domingo
de Goicour ía Cabrera, famous for having participated in several filibuster
attempts on Cuba in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Carlos Granados,
“Geopol ítica, Destino Manifiesto y Filibusterismo en Centroamérica,”
in Filibusterismo y Destino Manifiesto en las Américas, ed. Víctor Hugo
128 ANDREAS BEER
Acu ña Ortega (San José: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamar ía,
2010), 11–21, 12.
42. Mateo Mayorga, “Sin Título,” El Defensor Del Orden, no. 54 (November
6, 1855): 1 (my translation).
43. Mateo Mayorga, “Sin Título,” El Defensor Del Orden, no. 58 (May 22,
1855): 1 (my translation).
44. See Burns, Patriarch and Folk; Granados, “Geopolítica”; Michel Gobat,
Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
45. This is meant quite literally. Both opponents and supporters of the fili-
busters portrayed Walker as a new Herná n Cortés, either glorifying him
or emphasizing his cruelty. See, for example, the “The End–Not Yet,”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, June 6, 1857.
46. Alejandro Bola ños Geyer, La Guerra Nacional de Centroamérica con-
tra Los Filibusteros en 1856–1857: Conversaciones con el Doctor Alejandro
Bolaños Geyer (Alajuela: Museo Histórico Cultural Juan Santamar ía,
2000), 96 (my translation).
47. Miguel Angel Alvarez, “Los Filibusteros en Nicaragua 1855–1856–
1857,” Revista Conservadora del Pensamiento Centroamericano 73
(1966): 1–44, 16 (my translation).
48. Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and
Consumer Culture 1900–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
2000), 1; Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 171; Kristin L. Hoganson,
Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale
49. “Wm. Walker’s Buried Treasure. Fact and Fiction Concerning the
Dictator of Nicaragua. the Errors and Mistakes of a Northern Newspaper
Corrected,” New Orleans Democrat, August 12, 1878.
50. “Walker’s Last Expedition: The Adventures of the Great Filibuster and
His Followers in Central America,” New Orleans Democrat, December
29, 1878.
51. Laurence Greene, The Filibuster: The Career of William Walker
(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merril, 1937), 21.
C H A P T E R 7
Controlling Los Hombres : American

State Power and the Emasculation of
the Mexican Community,
1845–1900
Brian D. Behnken
In January 1847, a massive insurrection rocked northern New

Mexico. A group of local Mexican leaders rebelled against Governor
Thomas Bent and the newly installed American government. The
United States Army under the command of General Charles Kearny
had only recently pacified the region—what would become the New
Mexico Territory—and much of the military had moved on to capture
California. While Governor Bent had lived in New Mexico for nearly
two decades and was generally a well-liked individual, many New
Mexicans were displeased with the contingent of American troops
who remained in New Mexico. Under the command of the racist
General Sterling Price, these soldiers formed the bulk of local law
enforcement, were a visible sign of American dominance and control
in the region, and, according to Governor Bent himself, abused the
Mexican population in New Mexico. Bent complained about General
Price shortly before the revolt, noting that “there is a great want of
discipline and subordination of the troops here.” He argued that
Price should impress upon the troops the need for “rigid care with
regard to the treatment of the inhabitants,” adding that the American
soldiers “must conciliate, not exasperate.”1
Governor Bent’s warnings went unheeded. Some Mexicans
responded viscerally to their treatment. Pablo Montoya, a longtime
130 BRIAN D. BEHNKEN
Mexican politician, and other Mexicans began planning to overthrow

the Americans. On January 19, 1847, they travelled to Governor Bent’s
home and killed him, a newly appointed white sheriff named Stephen
Lee, and half a dozen others. The group then besieged a local dis-
tillery—which for the Mexicans represented the corruptive nature of
American settlement—and killed several others before finally march-
ing on Santa Fe. The attacks shocked the Americans in New Mexico.
As one reported, “we cannot believe that the Mexicans have been
able to make [so] much head[way] against our troops in Santa Fe.”2
General Price counterattacked and drove the insurrectionaries back
to Taos. He then besieged Taos, eventually capturing many of the
leaders of the revolt, and killed approximately 150 Mexicans. Tomás
Romero, one of the Mexicans who revolted, was captured, impris-
oned, and then murdered in his jail cell by an angry American soldier.
In a military drumhead, Pablo Montoya was quickly found guilty of
treason (an odd charge considering the conspirators were not citizens
of the United States) and hung. In subsequent trials, drumhead court-
martials found nearly 30 others guilty of treason. All were hanged.
As one bystander observed, the Americans acted with “a strange mix-
ture of violence and justice.”3 The first American legal proceedings
in the newly acquired territory of New Mexico were kangaroo court-
martials that found the accused guilty of a charge they could not have
accomplished, without the possibility of reprieve or appeal, and that
quickly resulted in the deaths of all involved.4
What does the revolt and its aftermath tell us about the relationship
between nation-building, masculinity, and “law enforcement” on the
American frontier? For one thing, the new American arrivals considered
themselves agents of the US nation-building project in the Southwest
and felt justified using extreme violence in their efforts to incorporate
the region into the American body politic. In order to justify the vio-
lence employed against the Mexican population, American commenta-
tors relied on a racist rhetoric. As a writer for the national Democratic
Review made clear, “the Mexican race now see . . . their own inevitable
destiny. They must amalgamate and be lost, in the superior vigor of the
Anglo-Saxon race, or they must utterly perish. They may postpone the
hour for a time, but it will come, when their nationality shall cease.”5
Beyond New Mexico, groups and agencies as diverse as informal “com-
mittees of public safety” or “vigilance committees” (semi-legal lynch
mobs), the military, state police forces such as the Texas Rangers, county
sheriffs, and city police departments were agents of legal and extralegal
forms of law enforcement carried out to control the region.6
However, the events of the 1847 revolt also point to another, slightly
less obvious dimension of nation-building in the Southwest, namely
CONTROLLING LOS HOMBRES 131
white Americans’ efforts to emasculate Mexican men in the process of

creating an Anglo-Saxon nation. American authorities generally deemed
Mexican men effeminate and unmanly, a perspective that impacted both
Mexican men’s sense of manhood while further subordinating Mexican
women, whom Americans generally viewed as nonentities. Whenever
Mexican men countered their symbolic emasculation with open revolt
or other forms of resistance, they faced drastically violent measures at
the hands of American law enforcement. Gender, which was inextricably
intertwined with race in the American Southwest, played a central role
in the nation-building processes that took place on the Western frontier
in the second half of the nineteenth century.
This chapter examines American nation-building and nationalism
in the Southwest by analyzing how law enforcement commenced a
process of emasculation to secure what Americans saw as a lawless and
barbarous region. As Amy Greenberg has observed, Manifest Destiny
was not only gendered in a symbolic sense, but in many instances was
“achieved through the direct and rightful force of arms” of American
men.7 While masculinity and nationalism reinforced one another
in the US Southwest, law enforcement served as the tool by which
Americans achieved white male supremacy in the region. I examine
three aspects of the criminal justice “system” to elucidate this “force
of arms” and demonstrate how law enforcement served as the pri-
mary means of American state control and how police worked to mar-
ginalize los hombres mexicanos : by exploring the violence of the late
Mexican American War period and immediate postwar period; by
examining American discomfort over perceived Mexican threats to
the slave system in the Southwest; and by investigating police treat-
ment of Mexican-origin people in the mid- to late nineteenth cen-
tury.8 By marginalizing Mexican men’s masculinity, the United States
could more easily dominate the region, incorporate the Southwest
into the US national vision, and reform, if not erase, a population
they saw as corrupt, racially degenerate, and unmanly.
In order to analyze the central role that masculinity played for
American nation-building in the Southwest, I rely on R. W. Connell’s
concept of hegemonic masculinity, which is particularly relevant for
exploring US westward expansion. Connell defines hegemonic mascu-
linity as a patriarchal form of power used to exercise control over non-
hegemonic masculinities such as gay men, men of color, and women.
In her analysis, hegemonic masculinity is an amalgam of group traits
that, depending on the time period, can include seemingly manly
behavior such as boxing or dueling, a common symbolism such as
adoration of certain types of labor or religious practices, and institu-
tional power such as service in the government.9 Connell goes on to
complicate hegemonic masculinity by examining non-hegemonic mas-

culinities. These marginalized masculinities are most often apparent
in communities of color. Marginalization validates hegemonic mascu-
linity; in the United States it gives white men power over ethnic men.
Historically speaking, African Americans, Mexicans, and Mexican
Americans did not have the same agency and power as did white men.
While a number of scholars have criticized Connell for her lack of
specificity in defining terms such as hegemonic or marginalized mas-
culinities, the terms themselves remain useful analytical categories.10
For white American men in the nineteenth-century Southwest, mas-
culinity was primarily based on work, aggressiveness, and a commit-
ment to forming public institutions in a region they saw as lacking such
institutions. Their feeling of masculine superiority was bolstered by their
status as Americans, which elevated their own masculinity over that of
men of color who were not viewed or treated as US citizens. American
hegemonic masculinity colluded with nationalism via the display of
American institutions of government, which broadcast the American
national project in the Southwest as one of a superior civilization taking
root where an inferior society had once stood. None of the American
institutions of government were more important than law enforcement,
both legal and extralegal, which served to affirm white men’s concep-
tion of self while simultaneously marginalizing Mexican men, who
almost always were on the receiving end of this law enforcement.
While scholarship on masculinity has proliferated in recent years,
studies on Manifest Destiny and masculinity as it pertains to Anglo
and Mexican men in the Southwest are scarce.11 In one of the few
monographs on manhood and Manifest Destiny, historian Amy
Greenberg explores how American men and women conceived of
Manifest Destiny as a gendered national project from the time of
the Mexican American War to the turn of the twentieth century. As
she accurately notes, “the consolidation of national identity and the
internal American categories of race, class, and gender occurred in a
framework of expansionism and imperial domination.”12 Greenberg
pays close attention to the gender dimensions of Manifest Destiny.
However, she does not focus closely on law enforcement and the
ethno-racial communities that bore the brunt of American expan-
sionism. Jacqueline Moore has examined cowboy culture in Texas
and found not only that the West and Southwest offered American
men a space within which to exercise their rough manhood, but also
that the region could serve as a cure-all for cultural shifts away from
the dominant vision of American masculinity. As such, the region
itself became part of the male sense of what constitutes manhood.13
Sociologist Michael Kimmel has observed that as Americans marched

westward they encountered Mexican men who seemed to lack the
“manlier virtues” that Anglo men purportedly possessed. Kimmel’s
analysis of hegemonic American masculinity shows that white men
positioned their own sense of masculinity against a subordinate
Mexican other.14 However, Kimmel, Moore, and Greenberg pay little
attention to the agency and resistance of Mexican men.
Most of the existing scholarship about masculinity and nation-
building on the southwestern frontier, then, is characterized by a
one-sided focus on hegemonic masculinity. Against this tendency, I
focus on the historical tensions between hegemonic and marginalized
masculinities in the American Southwest in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. The frontier situation boosted and complicated these tensions:
from the perspective of white Anglo American men, who embodied
the hegemonic ideal of masculinity, Mexican men lacked power and
were effeminate. When Mexican men did not comport themselves as
the marginalized masculinity that Americans expected—if they dem-
onstrated a masculinity that appropriated what Americans considered
hegemonic by fighting back or resisting American encroachment,
which they frequently did—those Mexicans had to be dominated,
punished, and emasculated so that they conformed to the American
view of their marginalization.
While Mexicans may have felt the sting of this emasculation, they
most certainly did not imbibe it. Within their own communities
Mexican men enjoyed their own, differing sense of masculine identity.
Mexican men and women continued to cling to a Mexican sense of
masculinity, and indeed a Mexican sense of nationalism, throughout
the period. As Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba has shown, Mexican
masculinity was in many ways an allegory for the nation, much like
for white men in the US. “Maleness,” Domínguez-Ruvalcaba writes,
“participates in a rhetorical operation in which it allegorizes historical
entities such as nation, modernity, and colonialism or functions as a
metonym . . . of social phenomena such as work, violence, oppression,
and resistance.”15 In this sense, Mexican hegemonic masculinity dif-
fered little from American hegemonic masculinity. Mexican mascu-
linity meant hard work, aggressiveness, protection and domination of
women, a patriarchal sense of self in relation to society, social control,
and national pride. As I show in the following, in the generally unsta-
ble situation on the southwestern frontier, the boundaries between
hegemonic and marginalized masculinities were blurred considerably
and complicate our understanding of American nation-building in
the nineteenth-century Southwest.
American Law Enforcement and

Mexican Emasculation
The years between 1846 and 1848 and the immediate post-Mexican
War period witnessed considerable violence by Anglos toward those of
Mexican-origin in the American Southwest. Even in so-called pacified
territories such as New Mexico, beatings, murders, and rapes contin-
ued to be American weapons of war. And they provoked, as the Taos
Revolts demonstrate, a Mexican counterresponse. Many Americans
viewed the war itself in gendered terms. Mexico was female, ripe for
penetration by superior Americans with, “a heel . . . placed upon her
neck.”16 This gendered scenario, of course, made the Mexican nation
as a whole into a passive, feminine bystander who could do little to halt
the violative power of the Americans. In this scenario, the American
military acted as the interlocutor, as the dominant mechanism of law
and order, and as the bearer of civilization itself.17
In the postwar period, that violence continued unabated, despite
the fact that the American military was replaced with newly formed
agencies of law enforcement. Many of the former American soldiers
who were mustered out of the Army found a convenient career in local
law enforcement. They also participated in the lynch mobs and vigi-
lance committees that came after the war, groups that were frequently
viewed as a form of law enforcement even though they had no legal right
to that title. Los Angeles serves as an excellent example of this phenom-
enon. The city was at first controlled by a vigilance committee that kept
“law and order” by abusing the Mexican population. For example, in
1851 this mob lynched a Mexican man known only as Zavalete for an
undisclosed “crime.” Such punishments were common.18
Historian William Deverell has quite accurately referred to the his-
tory of this time period as the “unending Mexican war” era and as a
“social hangover” wrought by the “recklessness of American occupa-
tion, warfare, and statehood.” That social hangover also had a decidedly
gendered element since “law enforcement” meted out lynch justice, and
justice more generally, universally against Mexican men. “To shoot these
greasers ain’t the best way,” one American declared, instead “give ’em
a fair trial, and rope them up with all the majesty of the law. That’s the
cure.” William Wallace, a more sympathetic Anglo migrant, observed
that “blood flows in the streets—justice weeps. All is anarchy.”19
The Los Angeles-Southern California area was a distinctly violent
and lawless region in the period following the Mexican American War
and even after the formation of a city marshal’s office. The Zavalete
killing was only one of many. Take, for instance, the 1856 case of
Antonio Ruiz. Los Angeles deputy marshal William Jenkins killed

Ruiz after he resisted having his guitar repossessed. In an interesting
twist of fate, the Mexican community organized a posse of approxi-
mately three hundred men to find and arrest Jenkins. This role rever-
sal did not sit well with white authorities. They organized their own
posse, variously called the Committee of Safety or the City Guard,
which consisted of a number of former Texas Rangers. According
to historian Richard Griswold del Castillo, the City Guard was Los
Angeles’s first police force. The City Guard eventually captured the
Mexican American posse’s leader, Fernando Carriaga, which seemed
to diffuse the tension in Los Angeles. Still, many of the racist and
gendered stereotypes of this period appeared in this incident. The
Mexicans, in forming their own vigilance committee, were fomenting
“revolution,” not exercising law and order as would be the excuse if
Americans had formed such a committee. Thus the incident necessi-
tated a re-subordination and marginalization of Mexican men. In a
final twist of fate, Officer Jenkins stood trial for killing Ruiz, and was
acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury.20
Even well after the Mexican American War and the “unending
Mexican War” period had ended, Anglos continued to lynch Mexican
American men in a continued effort to emasculate them and dem-
onstrate the superiority of the American national project. In 1874,
for example, a local lawman arrested Jesus Romo for an alleged rob-
bery and attempted murder. He was taken from this lawman by a
group of masked men who hung Romo. Repeating the refrain of
civilized American justice over Mexican criminality, the Los Angeles
Star explained away the incident by calling Romo “a hardened and
blood-stained desperado, who deserved richly the fate which over-
took him.”21 Jesus Romo represented two equally distasteful themes
in southwestern American society. First, as a “desperado” he signi-
fied Mexican lawlessness, even though his guilt or innocence had not
been established. Second, as a man who allegedly thumbed his nose at
American law and order, he represented an element of Mexican com-
munity strength that had to be eliminated.
Along with the continuing violence that occurred after the conclu-
sion of the Mexican American War, Mexicans also continued to experi-
ence violence and social marginalization for their perceived opposition
to American Negro slavery in Texas and other parts of the Southwest.
For many Americans, especially those in the South, slavery was as much
a part of American nationalism as was the flag. Scholars have long known
that Mexican antipathy to slavery provoked the 1836 Texas Revolution
and probably played no small part in the subsequent Mexican American
War. They have also shown how Mexican antislavery sentiments led to
slaves frequently running away to Mexico.22 What these scholars have
not addressed is how American reaction to these issues provoked not
only warfare and revolution, but also a law enforcement solution to
this “Mexican problem.” Texans in particular became obsessed with the
presence of Mexican “peons,” whom they believed were actively entic-
ing slaves to run away to Mexico. They responded to this obsession by
channeling law enforcement to arrest, remove, and eradicate Mexicans
who seemed threatening or subversive. As with other aspects of Anglo-
Mexican relations during this period, these law enforcement initiatives
went hand in hand with the emasculation of Mexican men. Moreover,
the protection of slavery also became a part of American nationalism,
especially in Texas, which returns us once again to the themes of national
development and gender marginalization in the Southwest.
Texan anger over the threat Mexicans represented to the slave sys-
tem reached a critical mass in the mid-1850s. After economic crises
in the late 1840s and early 1850s, and after continuing border dis-
putes with Mexico, many Americans came to believe that Texas was
threatened from within and without. Male Mexican workers came
to bear the brunt of this latent white anxiety. Texans created a host
of semigovernmental agencies, which reflected national bodies and
represented the on-the-ground nationalism of many Anglos, to elim-
inate the perceived threat posed by Mexicans. For instance, in 1854
citizens in Seguin, a small town outside of San Antonio, organized an
anti-Mexican congress and succeeded in passing a resolution banning
Mexicans from entering and living in Guadalupe County. The mem-
bers of the Seguin congress referred to Mexicans, as a group, as “a
vagrant class,” “robbers,” “thieves,” and “idle vagabonds.” The tone
of these statements, like others that came after it, had a law-and-order
quality even though the legitimate criminal justice system in Seguin
and Texas was absent.23 Colorado and Matagorda Counties, among
others, drove out their Mexican populations in the 1850s.24
The anti-Mexican congresses formed in the 1840s and 1850s
almost exclusively penalized men, whom white Texans found threat-
ening to slavery and their way of life. The law-and-order nature of
these “congresses” directly resembled American institutions of gov-
ernment and in many cases ridiculed Mexicans while simultaneously
extolling the patriotism and national fervor of local white people.
In October 1854, for instance, a group of “delegates” met in a con-
vention in Gonzales County “for the purpose of devising means to
remedy the evil resulting from the transient Mexican peon popula-
tion in our midst.” The “evil” revolved around the fact that these
Mexicans evidently placed “themselves on an equality with the slave,

they stir up among our servants a spirit of insubordination . . . [and]
are always ready to assist the runaway slave in effecting his escape to
the Mexican frontier.” In a rather flowery language, the members
of this convention vowed that since the state was negligent in their
duties it fell to the citizens of Texas to implement some type of cor-
rective law enforcement measure.25 The delegates ultimately adopted
a list of resolutions, appropriately titled “Peons,” that among other
things resolved that citizens would form a “Vigilance Committee”
that would “enforce strict compliance” with the goals of the delegates
and the laws of the State of Texas.26 A follow-up list of resolutions,
reprinted in the Texas State Gazette, went further and demanded that
all “transient Mexicans . . . be warned to leave within ten days from
the passage of this resolution . . . all remaining after that time [will] be
forcefully expelled.” This list of resolutions also called for a body of
“ten energetic gentlemen” to form a “vigilance committee” with the
purposes of enforcing this list of resolutions.27
Travis County quickly followed the example of Gonzales County,
although they one-upped their neighboring county by forming a vig-
ilance committee composed of 20 men. They also listed the names of
individuals appointed to the committee. They included two US Army
majors, one Army captain, and one judge.28 Newspaper editorials of
the time described the vigilance committee in patriotic terms and the
Mexicans in deprecating terms. The Mexicans were a “serious evil,”
“pernicious,” and “peons.”29 Peon was itself a dehumanizing and
emasculating term at the time. The term implied the racial, social,
and masculine inferiority of Mexican men and was used with some
frequency at this time to demarcate Mexican men from white men.
Fortunately, the Texas State News reported on October 28, 1854,
barely two weeks after the vigilance committee had been formed,
that through stern warnings and outright violence, “the vigilance
committee have [sic] discharged their duties.”30 The Annals of Travis
County also reported that “no further trouble was apprehended.”31
Many scholars have explored this situation by examining Mexican
antislave sentiments and how and why Mexican-origin people would
assist runaway slaves. Missing from this discussion is the specifically
nationalistic aspect of these conventions and the law-and-order char-
acteristics of the vigilance committees. More importantly, scholars
have not fully addressed the distinctly dehumanizing and emasculating
aspects of these conventions. Mexican men were seen as a threat not only
to slave owners but also to law and order, commerce, and the American
mission in Texas. The Texans not only demeaned these individuals by
calling them “robbers,” “peons,” “a troublesome class,” and other

such language, but also violently drove them from their communities.
Americans did not regard Mexican men as equals and their marginal-
ized status called into question how they fit, or if they would ever fit,
into the American national vision. The language of these committees
and congresses, as well as the ways in which they vilified Mexican men
as less than men, demonstrates one of the ways the marginalization of
minority masculinities undergirded white male American nationalism.
Lynching served as another method of demonstrating American
national vigor through pseudo-legal law enforcement as well as the
marginalized status of Mexican men.32 In Texas, lynching proved more
extensive than in other parts of the Southwest and, as elsewhere in the
United States, was almost exclusively conducted by white men against
men of color. As William Carrigan and Clive Webb have shown, the
lynching of Mexican men in Texas was almost as likely to occur as the
lynching of African Americans. Unlike black men, Mexicans were not
usually lynched for alleged sexual crimes and lynch mobs did not disfig-
ure their bodies in the same way that black male bodies were mutilated.
Instead, whites lynched Mexican men most often for crimes such as rob-
bery or murder, and they killed them without the spectacle associated
with the lynching of blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Nevertheless, the lynching of Mexican men must be under-
stood as an attempt to enforce American national hegemony in the
region by marginalizing Mexican masculinity through racial violence.
The “threat” posed by Mexican men and lynching was not lim-
ited to Texas. In the Arizona Territory, for example, white men also
founded vigilance committees and lynched Mexican-origin individ-
uals. A group of men proposed forming a vigilance committee in
1871 to combat lawlessness and “the alarming frequency of deeds
of violence in our community.” Calling vigilance committees “the
self-constituted arbiters of justice,” and noting that “society has been
outraged,” these men blamed “lawless and desperate men”—a veiled
reference to Mexicans—for the situation. A few years later, in 1877,
some whites proposed a new vigilance committee to combat a rash of
stagecoach robberies. While asserting that they hoped to prevent law-
lessness, this group made sure to note that they were not advocating
disrespect of the law or lawlessness themselves by forming such a com-
mittee. Beyond the vigilance committee, this group also asserted quite
openly that the string of robberies would cease if a few of the robbers
were “strung up to limbs, or shot down like sheep-killing dogs. . . . ”
An Arizona newspaper advised the formation of a vigilance committee
in 1881 after a local shooting in Phoenix. “We never counsel violent
or hasty action,” the paper argued, but suggested nonetheless that
violence—“a little wholesale hanging of bad characters”—would help

alleviate problems.33 In 1881, individuals in the Arizona-New Mexico
border region formed a vigilance committee to halt horse stealing
between the United States and Mexico. “Hanging,” wrote the editors
of the Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner, “is the antidote employed.”34
That whites suggested forming lynch mobs is not unusual for this
period. That they suggested forming those mobs as a substitute for
legitimate law enforcement, and that they coded their requests in lan-
guage clearly intended to separate decent, law-abiding Anglos from
their lawbreaking, unmanly Mexican counterparts, is important.
As in Texas and California, vigilance committees in Arizona also
lynched Mexican-origin people for alleged crimes. For example,
shortly after the organization of the 1871 vigilance committee, a
group of white men lynched a “‘half-breed,’ of Mexican nativity . . . ”
in September of 1871. The unnamed individual had evidently been
excluded from a game of cards and in his anger had shot into a crowd
of men, wounding two. A group of men pursued the Mexican indi-
vidual and killed him in a hail of bullets the following day. In a rebuke
of law enforcement in Arizona, the lynchers defended their actions
based on their perceptions of lawlessness in the region. Once again
averring Americans via lynching brought law and order and civiliza-
tion to the region, they asserted that such justice “suggests to men
the propriety of defending themselves.”35
Even where legitimate law enforcement was present, white Americans
still resorted to lynch justice. In 1872, for instance, Maricopa County
sheriff Tom C. Warden arrested Ramon Cordova for a string of alleged
stagecoach robberies. A few days later, a group of men broke into
Cordova’s cell in the county courthouse and hanged him. In an odd
twist, a coroner’s jury found Cardova, in absentia, guilty the following
day. As the Weekly Arizona Miner put it, “this is harsh medicine, but a
sure cure.”36 In 1878, an unnamed Mexican allegedly shot and killed a
Mr. Kimble near the small town of Planet. Although he fled to Mexico,
a local lawman named Hank Williams retrieved this individual. The
townspeople, evidently convinced of his guilt, lynched the unknown
Mexican. The Weekly Arizona Miner, which had come to serve as the
voice of both legal and illegal law enforcement, turned this lynching
into a punch line when they reported that the people at Planet “let him
go, and he was turned loose. Whether there might have been a rope
around his neck, and it tied to the limb of a cottonwood tree, when he
was let loose, is a horse of another color. Served him right.”37
Extralegal justice in many parts of the Southwest superseded legit-
imate law enforcement for many years. Many whites viewed vigilante
justice as a noble stand-in for actual law enforcement agencies. Not
only could they use vigilance committees for pseudo-law enforcement

purposes, they could use this type of extralegal justice, as many of the
examples above demonstrate, to promote American nationalism and a
hegemonic form of white masculinity that also served to marginalize
Mexican men. When newspapers and other sources referred to white
men as “men of propriety” and “arbiters of justice” they reinforced the
idea that American men possessed a superior form of masculinity and
an enlightened sense of nationalism, characteristics that were said to
be missing from the “half-breed Mexican” who was “lawless” and of
“bad character.” The binary between hegemonic masculinity and mar-
ginalized masculinity, between nationalism through law and order
and against those who did not have it, could not be more striking.
Legitimate American law enforcement used its own methods to
debase the Mexican-origin community. For example, arrest and court
records demonstrate that local police agencies primarily arrested
Mexican men. Police arrested men at a rate approximately 85 percent
higher than Mexican women.38 In this gendered and racialized hier-
archy, Mexican men were almost exclusively the criminals, Mexican
women were largely invisible, and white men served as the arbiters of
justice, in this case legally so, in order to promote American national
hegemony. Arresting men removed them as a threat while simulta-
neously demonstrating the superiority of the American nation. Most
of these arrests were for various petty crimes, from drunkenness
to petty theft, from “affray” to “vagrancy.” The crimes are not at
all unusual. However, the way law enforcement cataloged Mexican
men is unusual. Of all the various ethnic and national communities
described in these arrest records, Mexican men were the sole group
police regularly recorded with only their first name, with no name,
or with only an ethno-racial designation. For instance, a Mexican
man arrested by Austin city marshals on January 30, 1876, has no
name written in the box for “name.” This person’s “nativity” was
recorded as “Mexican,” which means they are nameless and identi-
fied solely by an ethno-racial label.39 On February 12, 1876, Austin
marshals arrested a Mexican for “intoxication.” His name was listed
as “unknown.”40 Similarly, on November 30, 1878, Austin marshals
arrested a male Mexican laborer for “intoxication” and recorded his
name as “Mex.”41 Most offensively, on February 4, 1878, Austin police
arrested a Mexican peddler. They recorded his name as “Monkey.”42
A similar pattern existed in the Arizona Territory. As in Texas, law
enforcement in Arizona tended to arrest Mexicans for rather mundane
crimes: burglary, intoxication, or fighting. They also frequently referred
to Mexican men, and almost exclusively Mexican men, by their first
name, no name, or an ethno-racial term. In October and November

1890, the Gila and Yuma sheriff’s offices delivered to the Yuma ter-
ritorial prison two convicted burglars. The prison registry recorded
them only as “Antonio” and “Guadalupe.”43 In a similar situation,
four individuals convicted of burglary were discharged from the Yuma
prison in 1892. Their names were listed as “Miguel,” “Nicholas,”
“Antonio,” and “Ramon.”44 These examples are significant given that
these individuals were neither at the local law enforcement level nor
in city jails. Instead, they were prisoners at the Yuma territorial prison,
one of the most infamous prisons in southwestern history. It strains
credulity to think that city, county, and territorial officials, as well as
the staff at the prison, failed to determine who these individuals were
beyond their first names. It seems likely these officials simply did not
care. Arizona law enforcement agencies also categorized Mexicans with
“John Doe”-type designations. For example, officials in Tombstone
issued a warrant for the arrest of “John Doe (a Mexican)” in 1892 for
an undisclosed crime.45 In a similar case, Tombstone officials issued
warrants for “John Doe unknown Mexican” in February of 1893 and
“John Doe Mex.” in April 1893. Interestingly, “John Doe Mex.” was
later arrested and his warrant amended to record his name as “Refugio
Bernal.”46 In perhaps a more honest example, an arrest warrant for a
“John Doe—Mexican” also noted “true name unknown.”47
The elimination of an individual’s name erased them from American
society. For law enforcement in Arizona and Texas, this meant that
Mexican men listed as “Mex,” “Mexican,” “John Doe, Mexican,”
“Unknown Mex,” “Monkey,” or nothing at all were made nonex-
istent. By recording their nationality as “Mexican,” law enforcement
also denied those arrested any inclusion in the American body pol-
itic. The expunging of a person’s name from the criminal and his-
torical record indicated that they had no identity in Southwestern
society, were interchangeable one from the other, and were treated
as a group with disdain and opprobrium. Law agencies treated no
other ethno-racial group in this way. Records of arrests of Chinese
nationals, Syrians, Ethiopians, Indians, Germans, Czechs, citizens of
Japan, Native Americans, and African Americans, just to name a few,
were all accompanied by a first and last name. Deleting the names
of Mexican men marginalized them as people in Arizona and Texas.
Because only men received such treatment it also marginalized their
status as men. Mexican women encountered their own issues at the
hands of Texas and Arizona law enforcement. Most Mexican women
detained by police were arrested for prostitution, intoxication, and
other similar crimes. Occasionally they were listed by first name only,
but rarely with the “Mexican” or “unknown Mexican” designations,

which seems to have been reserved for men. It seems likely that
law enforcement agencies in other parts of the Southwest recorded
Mexicans and Mexican Americans in a manner similar to Texas and
Arizona.
Mexican Masculinity, Mexican American

Masculinity, and Resistance
Mexicans, of course, were not helpless at this time. The Mexican pop-
ulation did fight back and many men challenged their marginalized
status. Even if Americans regarded Mexicans as inferior and Mexican
men as a marginalized masculinity, Mexicans and Mexican Americans
did not accept that sense of inferiority. Many continued to see them-
selves and their manhood as hegemonic, even if white Americans
did not. While it is difficult to determine how, or if, Mexicans saw
themselves as Americans and participated in displays of American
nationalism, it seems clear that some did. It is also true that some
Mexicans continued to see themselves as part of the Mexican nation
and demonstrated their nationalism as Mexicans. In either case, since
both American and Mexican nationalisms were tied to masculinity,
Mexican and Mexican American men absorbed nationalism and mas-
culinity much like their Anglo American counterparts.
In many parts of the region and in many towns and cities, Mexicans
constituted a majority of the population, and they resisted American
law enforcement, both legitimate and extralegal. For example, the
Taos Revolt demonstrates most clearly that Mexicans, and in this case
exclusively Mexican men, not only continued to oppose the American
takeover long after the Americans considered the region pacified
but also resisted the methods by which law enforcement marginal-
ized them as men. In a similar example, when William Jenkins killed
Antonio Ruiz he mobilized the Mexican community to not only resist
racist law enforcement, but also to follow the American example and
form a vigilance committee to apprehend Jenkins. In this case, the
Mexicans used extralegal justice for their own purposes and against
a white law officer. Mexican masculinity could be just as martial as
American, and many Mexican men well understood that they had to
protect their own status and communities through extralegal chan-
nels. That this example ultimately met with failure demonstrates the
precarious nature of Mexican resistance at this time.
In another example of the resistance of this period, in 1867 four
Los Angeles lawmen were found dead on the outskirts of the city.
The Committee of Safety organized a posse that captured four mexi-

canos, who were probably innocent, and rounded them up for justice’s
sake. At the makeshift trial, a judge asked a crowd of white men if the
four should be hanged. All hands went up, including the judge’s. But
the hanging went badly; during one of the executions the rope broke.
The judge attempted to shoot the man, missed, and then the prisoner
seized the judge and his gun, shooting wildly into the crowd. The
crowd opened fire killing the prisoner and the judge.48 Although the
execution of this unnamed—and most likely innocent—individual
ultimately took place, his resistance demonstrates that Mexican indi-
viduals did not simply accept their fates.
The marginalized masculinity of Mexican men during this period
is also disputed by the memories of those Mexicans and Mexican
Americans who lived during this period. Their insights reveal how
Anglos could view Mexican men as a marginalized masculinity and
also how Mexican men could enjoy hegemonic masculinity within
their own homes and in their own communities. Francis Esquibel, for
example, described her grandfather, Vicente Flores, as a virile, tough
sheepherder who owned land and conducted business across the state
of New Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
He was the family patriarch and an imposing figure who comported
himself in a manner that hardly showed he was a part of a margin-
alized masculinity.49 Similarly, Richard Rodriguez remembered his
grandfather, who lived in the nineteenth century, and his father who
lived in the twentieth century, as strong, hardworking men. They were
hardly weak or effeminate, as the American understanding of Mexican
masculinity might have suggested.50 Finally, Elva Treviño related her
opinions about her grandfather, a hardworking Mexican rancher who
accumulated significant property in the late nineteenth century, only
to lose most of it in the Mexican Revolution. Trevi ño also notes that
he was an exceptionally caring and brave man, who sacrificed every-
thing to save his three sons from the violence of the Revolution: “He
left everything to save his sons and ran away to the United States with
only his family as baggage.” Brave, a good provider, and a good father,
Treviño’s grandfather hardly seems an example of marginalized mas-
culinity.51 In all of these examples, the masculinity of the individu-
als under discussion is conditioned by hard work, physical strength
and toughness, business acumen, and protection of the family, among
other features. In other words, these Mexican-Mexican American men
comported themselves in a manner consistent with R. W. Connell’s
explanation of hegemonic masculinity as well as Héctor Domínguez-
Ruvalcaba’s definitions of Mexican masculinity.
This counter narrative of male autonomy and hegemonic masculinity

within the Mexican-origin community, as well as the violent resistance
evident in the Taos Revolt or the Antonio Ruiz example in Los Angeles,
is important to a discussion of masculinity because while Connell and
others have shown that hegemonic masculinity is bolstered by its mar-
ginalized counterpart in ethnic communities, this view of marginalized
masculinity remains one-sided. Most problematic is the assumption
that what the dominant group viewed as marginal may in fact be heg-
emonic within the community itself. Mexican men were only marginal
to American men. They were not complicit in their marginalization and
resisted their emasculation in a variety of ways. Mexicans constructed an
alternative, different form of masculinity in the Southwest that was heg-
emonic within their communities. This Mexican hegemonic masculinity
was normative within Mexican dominant parts of towns and cities such
as Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Los Angeles,
and in other parts of the Southwest. The shelter of a segregated Mexican
ethnic enclave meant that Mexican-origin people could find a measure
of safety from the Anglo American community. Segregated spaces also
allowed for the continuation of Mexican masculinity that within this
community was certainly not marginal. Only outside the community,
of course, did Mexican men find their masculinity marginalized. And
while whites may have seen them as marginal people and men as having,
at best, a marginalized masculinity, Mexicans knew better.
Conclusion
Broadly speaking and in the eyes of the dominant society, Mexican
emasculation did occur. The vehicle for making the American national
mission and the concomitant emasculation of the Mexican commu-
nity a reality came from law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies in
the form of the US Army provoked violence with Mexicans by acting
violently itself. Mexicans were demeaned as uncivilized, as less than
human, as “greasers.” Those terms were freighted with meaning and
connoted the benighted sense of masculinity that many Americans
assumed about Mexican men. This racist thinking and the violence
that accompanied it followed Mexicans into the postwar period. In
Texas, concepts of masculinity and national dominance collided with
the institution of slavery and Mexicans’ alleged support of runaway
slaves. Americans in vigilance committees again abused and debased
the Mexican population, drove them from some towns and coun-
ties, and lynched Mexican men in order to protect slavery and ensure
an American way of life. Finally, local law enforcement across the
Southwest denied many Mexican men not only status as men but also
as legitimate, identifiable people. The court records that name Mexican
men as “Mex,” “unknown Mex,” “John Doe, a Mexican,” and “mon-
key” signified an erasure of not just status, but of existence as well.
William Wallace’s sad observation that “blood flows in the streets—
justice weeps. All is anarchy” was quite telling. “All is anarchy,” indeed.
Such a statement suggests that the “civilizing” process in the Southwest
was hardly as neat and tidy as many American scholars and the lay pub-
lic might think. It was, instead, a grossly violent and bloody process.
It was also a gendered one. In the southwest, the Americans signified
national vigor and their efforts represented a process of nationalization.
They were, as Connell has noted for other periods, the paragon of heg-
emonic masculinity. The Mexicans represented not only a marginalized
group, they represented for the Americans a debased and degraded form
of masculinity—a marginalized masculinity. However, within their own
communities, Mexican men were far from marginalized. The way in
which Americans sought to exercise control, nationalize the Southwest,
and exercise their manhood was through government agencies such as
law enforcement. The other part of William Wallace’s quotation is thus
the most important: “Justice weeps.” It was through the implementation
of “justice” that white individuals and people in authority sought to con-
trol los hombres mexicanos and in the process marginalize them as men.
Notes
1. David Lavender, Bent’s Fort (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), 293. See
also Carlos R. Herrera, “New Mexico Resistance to U.S. Occupation,” in
The Contested Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico, ed. Erlinda
Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 2000); Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at
the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge
2. “Details of the Insurrection in New Mexico,” Niles National Register,
April 3, 1847.
3. “Trail Dust: Vicious Fighting Marked Taos Revolt,” Santa Fe New Mexican,
April 24, 2009, accessed February 24, 2012, http://www.santafenewmex-
ican.com/Local%20News/Vicious-fighting-marked-Taos-revolt.
4. For an overview of these events, see Laura E. Gómez, Manifest
Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New
York University Press, 2007), chapter 1; William H. Wroth, “The Taos
Rebellion—1847,” accessed February 24, 2012, http://www.newmexi-
cohistory.org/filedetails.php?fileID=515.
5. “The War,” Democratic Review, February 1847.
6. The long history of the Mexican community and its relationship with
American law enforcement has yet to be written. For a good starting
point, see Armando Morales, Ando Sangrando (I Am Bleeding): A Study of

Mexican American-Police Conflict in Los Angeles (La Puente: Perspective
Publishing, 1972); Edward J. Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making
of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police
Department, 1900–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999);
William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb. “The Lynching of Persons of
Mexican Origin or Descent in the United States, 1848 to 1928,” Journal
of Social History 37, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 411–438; William D. Carrigan
and Clive Webb, “Muerto por Unos Desconocidos (Killed by Persons
Unknown): Mob Violence against Blacks and Mexicans,” in Beyond Black
and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, ed.
Stephanie Cole, Alison M. Parker, and Laura F. Edwards (College Station:
Texas A&M University Press, 2003); William Carrigan, The Making of a
Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas, 1836–1916
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006); and William D. Carrigan and
Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United
States, 1848–1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
7. Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American
Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2–3.
8. William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the
Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2005), chapter 1. The struggle of white power with ethnic communities
in the Southwest is not altogether different than that discussed by authors
such as Thomas Hietala, Arnoldo de León, and Reginald Horsman. See
Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late
Jacksonian America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Reginald
Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Arnoldo
De León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in
Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).
9. See Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee, “Toward a New Sociology
of Masculinity. Theory and Society 14, no. 5 (September 1985): 551–
604; R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual
Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); R. W. Connell,
Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); R. W. Connell and James
W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,”
Gender and Society, 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 829–859.
10. For some of those critiques, see Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, “Connell’s
Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society 30,
no. 3 (June 2001): 337–361; Cliff Cheng, “Marginalized Masculinities
and Hegemonic Masculinity: An Introduction,” Journal of Men’s
Studies 7, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 295–315; Richard Howson, Challenging
Hegemonic Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2006).
11. See Hietala, Manifest Design; Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny.
Laura Gomez offers a short discussion of gender, but it is primarily lim-
ited to women and femininity. See G ómez, Manifest Destinies, 25–27.
13. Jacqueline N. Moore, Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities
on the Texas Frontier, 1865–1900 (New York: New York University Press,
2010), introduction and chapter 1. Moore does write about Mexican-

descent people, but does not clearly discuss Mexican masculinity and
marginalized masculinity.
14. See Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 82–83. On effeminacy scholar-
ship, see Peter Hennen, “Powder, Pomp, Power: Toward and Typology
and Genealogy of Effeminacies,” Social Thought and Research 24, no. 1
and 2 (September 2002): 121–144; Peter Hennen, Fairies, Bears, and
Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), particularly chapter 2.
15. Héctor Dom í nguez-Ruvalcaba, Modernity and the Nation in Mexican
Representations of Masculinity: From Sensuality to Bloodshed (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1. See also Robert McKee Irwin, Mexican
Masculinities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
16. As quoted in Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 13.
17. See Greenberg, Manifest Manhood.
18. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 13.
19. As quoted in Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 13–14.
20. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio 1850–1890: A
Social History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979),
108–109; Lawrence E. Guillow, “The Origins of Race Relations in Los
Angeles, 1820s–1880s: A Multi-Ethnic Study” (PhD diss., Arizona State
University, 1996), 98–108.
21. Carrigan and Webb, “The Lynching of Persons of Mexican Origin or
Descent in the United States,” 416.
22. For the fullest account of slavery and Mexicans, see Randolph B. Campbell,
An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). See also Jesús F. de la Teja,
ed., A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence
of Juan N. Seguín (Austin, TX: State House Press, 1991).
23. “Mexicans in Texas,” Texas State Gazette, September 2, 1854; “Public
Meeting in Seguin—Vagrant Mexicans,” Texas State Gazette, September
9, 1854. See also “Runaways to Mexico,” Texas State Gazette, September
9, 1854; “Mexican Aiding Negroes,” Texas State Gazette, September 30,
1854.
24. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery, 218, 219; David Montejano, Anglos
and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1987), 25–30.
25. “Gonzales Convention,” Texas State Gazette, October 14, 1854.
26. “Peons,” n.d., in folder “Mexican ‘Peons’ 1854–1855,” Camacho Family
Papers (Austin History Center, hereafter AHC).
27. “Resolution,” Texas State Gazette, October 14, 1854. See also,
“Editorial,” Texas State Times, October 21, 1854.
28. “Grand Ratification Meeting,” Texas State Times, October 21, 1854.
29. “Gonzales Convention,” Texas State Gazette, October 14, 1854;
“Meeting of Last Saturday,” Texas State Times, October 21, 1854.
30. Title unknown, Texas State Times, October 28, 1854, in Camacho Papers
(AHC).
31. Frank Brown, “Peons,” Annals of Travis County, 1854, 40.
32. Lynching has gained increasing scholarly attention over the past few years
as scholars have expanded the focus on such extralegal violence out of the
South. See, for example, Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead; Manfred
Berg and Simon Wendt, eds., Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism
and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Nicole M. Guidotti-Herná ndez, Unspeakable
Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2011); and Michael J. Pfeifer, ed., Lynching
Beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2013).
33. See Edward Lawrence Abney, “Capital Punishment in Arizona, 1863–
1963” (MA thesis, Arizona State University, 1988), 41–42.
34. “Editorial Notes,” Arizona Weekly Journal-Miner, July 8, 1888.
35. “Summary Proceedings,” Weekly Arizona Miner, September 16, 1871.
36. “Letter from Phoenix,” Weekly Arizona Miner, June 1, 1872.
37. “Local Intelligence,” Weekly Arizona Miner, December 13, 1878.
38. See, for example, “Record of Arrests,” Austin, Texas, January 1,
1876—January 1, 1879 (AHC); “Record of Arrests,” Austin, Texas, June
1885—May 1891 (AHC); “Calaboose Jail Log,” Dallas, Texas, August
1901—October 1902 (Dallas Public Library, hereafter DPL).
39. “Record of Arrests,” Austin, TX, January 30, 1876 (AHC).
40. “Record of Arrests,” Austin, Texas, February 12, 1876 (AHC).
41. “Record of Arrests,” Austin, Texas, November 30, 1878 (AHC).
42. “Record of Arrests,” Austin, Texas, February 4, 1878 (AHC).
43. “Report of Prisoners,” October 2, 1890 and November 8, 1890, in RG6
1873–1901, Secretary of the Treasury, box 33, folder 470, Arizona State
Library, Archives, and Public Records (hereafter ASL).
44. “Discharges for Third Quarter,” August 17, 1892, in RG6 1886–1892,
Secretary of the Treasury, Box 34, Folder 479 (ASL).
45. “Territory of Arizona v. John Doe (a Mexican),” July 24, 1892, Tombstone
Courthouse, Justice Court Register of Actions, 1889–1893 (ASL).
46. “Territory of Arizona v. John Doe (unknown Mexican),” February 12,
1893, and “Territory of Arizona v. John Doe Mex.” April 30, 1893, both
in Tombstone Courthouse, Justice Court Register of Actions, 1889–
1893 (ASL).
47. “Territory of Arizona v. John Doe—Mexican, true name unknown,”
May 8, 1895, Tombstone Courthouse, Justice Court Register of Actions,
1893–1898 (ASL).
48. Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 21.
49. Frances Esquibel Tywoniak and Mario T. García, Migrant Daughter:
Coming of Age as a Mexican American Woman (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2000), 2–8.
50. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard
Rodriguez (New York: Dial Press, 2004), 127.
51. Elva Treviño Hart, Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child (Tucson,
AZ: Bilingual Review Press, 1999), 61.
C H A P T E R 8
“Failure to Provide”: Mexican

Immigration, Americanization, and
Marginalized Masculinities in the
Interwar United States*
Claudia Roesch
“Failure to Provide” was the category that social workers of the

California Immigration and Housing Commission (CIHC) used for
many Mexican immigrant families that came to their agency to seek
financial assistance during the interwar period.1 It referred to family
fathers who failed to earn enough money to pay the rent, grocery bills,
and other necessities. Whether this financial difficulty was due to the
absence of a male breadwinner, unemployment, illness, or low wages
was irrelevant to the caseworkers because they assumed that it was the
father’s duty to provide for their families. In this categorization, which
was based on ideals of masculine duties, social workers linked their
understanding of the role of the male breadwinner to their perception
of who was to be part of the American nation. “Failure to provide”
charges had serious consequences for Mexican fathers: if the family
became a public charge, it was denied naturalization and thus mem-
bership in the nation. In the wake of the Great Depression, this could
result in deportation of the whole family, including US-born children.
This chapter analyzes the interconnections between concepts of
masculinity and interpretations of the American nation in discourses
about Mexican immigration from 1920 to 1939. It argues that cer-
tain ideals of masculinity were inextricably intertwined with concepts
of citizenship, since requirements for naturalization defined who was
150 CLAUDIA ROESCH
to be part of the nation and what that nation was going to look like.
It probes these concepts of national belonging by analyzing the ways
that four groups of actors—social workers, social experts, eugenics
advocates, and Mexican-origin civil rights activists—defined require-
ments for Mexican immigrant men to become US citizens. First, I
trace the marginalization of immigrant men on the level of embodi-
ment by studying how eugenic discourses on immigration restriction
especially targeted male bodies. In a second step, I identify institu-
tional aspects of this marginalization by looking at standards that
men were required to meet in order to receive public aid or to be
eligible for naturalization. Finally, I deal with the self-representation
and agency of Mexican American men who asserted their claim to cit-
izenship and demanded their civil rights as members of the American
nation in political organizations such as the League of United Latin
American Citizens (LULAC).
To understand these complexities, I follow Raewyn Connell’s con-
cept of hegemonic masculinity.2 According to Connell, hegemonic mas-
culinity is an ideal of masculinity that is subscribed to by a majority of
men even though most of them are not able to attain to it.3 Hegemonic
masculinity works on several levels, which can also be applied to the
situation of Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans in the 1920s
and 1930s: the normative/institutional level, on which social workers
denied men access to naturalization based on their masculinity; the
symbolic level, on which men were associated with childlike charac-
teristics, the level of embodiment contained in eugenic motivations
to curb Mexican male immigration; and the identity level, on which
Mexican men established hybrid forms of masculinity.4
Marginalized masculinities are closely connected to hegemonic
masculinity.5 According to Connell, marginalization takes place
through the interplay of gender norms with race and class. Since
a correspondence between a cultural ideal and institutional power
establishes hegemonic masculinity, “marginalization is always rela-
tive to the authorization of hegemonic masculinity of the dominant
group” within a society.6 This means that the dominant group defines
hegemonic masculinity in relation to seemingly deviant masculini-
ties, especially minorities and homosexuals. In the interwar United
States, these hegemonic norms and ideals were those of the protes-
tant white middle class, which dominated expert discourses as well
as public debates and the realm of social work. While some minor-
ity men may have been able to attain certain aspects of hegemonic
masculinity, the hegemonic group exercised their powers through
institutional oppression and physical terror to keep their dominant
“FAILURE TO PROVIDE” 151
status intact. These forms of oppression shaped minority men’s mar-

ginalized masculinities. Minority communities idealized aspects of
manhood that the national discourse dismissed as non-hegemonic.
Therefore, locally hegemonic forms of masculinity clashed with the
hegemonic ideal produced in a national discourse. Clinging to either
ideal meant marginalization for minority men: If they stuck to their
local ideals of masculinity, they would conflict with demands of the
national state apparatus. If they assimilated to the national ideal, they
were accused for being disloyal to their own ethnic communities.
The case of Mexican men who immigrated to America in the inter-
war period reflects these predicaments. Social experts regarded them
as inferior to white Anglo-Americans7 and denied them US citizen-
ship. In turn, some Mexican American men tried to appropriate cer-
tain aspects of US American hegemonic masculinity in their efforts
to become members of the nation, albeit with little success. More
importantly, this appropriation presented them with an enormous
challenge because the hegemonic ideal that Mexican immigrants were
expected to adhere to in their home communities differed substan-
tially from the concepts promoted by American social workers. In the
eyes of these experts, Mexican concepts of masculinity made these
newcomers be seen as foreign intruders who could not become part
of the nation. Within the US context, the image of the self-made
man was inexorably linked to the self-definition of the American
nation. Michael Kimmel has defined this concept of masculinity as “a
model of manhood that derives identity entirely from a man’s activ-
ities in the public sphere, measured by accumulated wealth and sta-
tus, by geographic and social mobility.”8 The ideal of the self-made
man included the notion that “being a man meant being in charge
of one’s own life, liberty and property. . . . A man was independent,
self-controlled, responsible.” 9 In Mexico, by contrast, the pistolero
epitomized the national ideal of masculinity, an ideal that revolved
around a notion of honor derived from patriarchal pride, bravery, and
extended family ties.10 Unlike the American individualist self-made
man, the pistolero respected gender and age hierarchies within his
extended family network and was expected to subordinate his own
interests to that of the extended family.
When I speak of nation, I follow Benedict Anderson’s under-
standing of nation as an “imagined community.”11 Joane Nagel has
pointed out that in addition to being imagined, the nation-state is
also a “masculinist project,” since national institutions have usually
been created by men in order to give them the power to dominate
decision-making processes as well as the labor market and to regulate
152 CLAUDIA ROESCH
women’s rights as well as their bodies and their labor. In the nation,
virtues associated with masculinity, such as honor and bravery, are
emphasized and perpetuated in institutions granting civic participa-
tion, especially the military. On the other hand, virtues associated
with femininity are found in the realm of the family, which is concep-
tualized as the basis of the nation through its biological and norma-
tive reproductive function.12
Women are of central importance in nationalist discourse because
of their functions as cultural, symbolic, and biological reproduc-
ers of the nation.13 They bear and raise children as “mothers of the
Americans of tomorrow” and thus ensure the survival of the nation.14
Due to their reproductive and child-rearing functions, women are
imaged as weak and constantly in danger of seduction or rape from
men outside the national community, bringing “bastard children”
into the nation. Therefore, the protection of women against out-
side intruders becomes one central aspect of the continuation of the
nation-state. During the interwar period, institutional authorities
such as the CIHC served to protect the nation against these types of
“intrusions,” which included the marginalization of male immigrants
who did not conform to the ideal of hegemonic masculinity.15
Historian Robert O. Self has shown in a recent publication on
American family ideals that the institution of citizenship became an
important field of contest between hegemonic and marginalized mas-
culinities. Citizenship was the legal requirement to become a member
of the nation. However, the concept of citizenship not only included
rights of the individual, it also entailed certain duties that the indi-
vidual had to fulfill as a service to the nation. According to Self, these
civic duties were defined along “core masculine norms [of] bread-
winning, soldiering and heterosexuality.”16 It was a male citizen’s
duty to serve the nation economically through his labor, to defend
it by serving in the military, and to preserve it by fathering children
in a heterosexual marriage. Although African American men were
US citizens and fulfilled these requirements, they were marginalized
and discriminated against in American society. Mexican immigrant
men were treated similarly and denied US citizenship because social
experts and social workers perceived them as being incapable of ful-
filling the three duties of manly citizenship.
Japanese migration historian Yuko Matsumoto has demonstrated
that in the context of interwar Americanization programs the con-
cept of citizenship was extended from a political concept including
political rights and duties to a cultural concept, which upheld white
middle-class standards of clothing, nutrition, home decoration, and
hygiene. This broadening of the concept of citizenship to include cul-

tural aspects led to a more inclusive role of women in the nation, par-
ticularly the right to vote, which they gained in 1920. While granting
white middle-class women a more active role within the nation, how-
ever, these cultural dimensions of citizenship also offered additional
grounds on which to exclude immigrant men who failed to adopt
dominant ideals of family and related notions of manhood.17
Research on Mexican American families has shown close connections
between gender norms and the nation. Richard Griswold de Castillo’s
study on Mexican American families prior to World War II has demon-
strated that these families were more diverse and egalitarian on a prac-
tical level than the patriarchal ideals that they clung to. Nevertheless,
social experts interpreted the ideal of family structure according to age
and gender as the major distinctive factor between Anglo American
and Mexican immigrant families well into the 1960s. In their works,
family structure became an indication of national loyalty, especially in
the context of national crises such as war. Highlighting the symbolic
meaning of family structure with regard to national affiliation, histo-
rian Mario T. Garcia has pointed out that Mexican mutual aid socie-
ties of the 1930s regarded more egalitarian family structures as a sign
of Americanization. Scholars of the Americanization movement have
focused on the role assigned to immigrant mothers: Americanizers
perceived mothers as an important target group for assimilation pro-
grams and the main transmitters of values within the family, which was
important both in context of the social gospel movement and shift-
ing notions of citizenship. Only families structured along the lines of
breadwinning fatherhood and scientific motherhood would transmit
values of independence, rationality, and industriousness to future citi-
zens. Meanwhile, Americanizers considered families that were struc-
tured according to Mexican traditions of patriarchy as a threat to the
American nation because they were believed to inculcate obedience
and fatalism, values that ran counter to the values of self-reliance and
progress, along which they imagined the nation.18
Research on Mexican immigrant masculinities in the United States
has focused primarily on the post–World War II era and discourses
on machismo, a twentieth-century concept of hegemonic masculin-
ity in Mexico that revolved around honor, bravery, and chivalry. But
machismo was also associated with negative traits such as binge drink-
ing, sexual promiscuity, and family desertion.19 Sociologist Alfredo
Mirandé has pointed out that machismo was not an ancient concept
but became popular only in the 1940s in Mexican cinema and political
campaigns.20 Anthropologist Matthew C. Gutmann has historicized
154 CLAUDIA ROESCH
the concept of machismo and linked it to the development of Mexican

nationalism, since machismo developed in the phase of national res-
titution after the Mexican Revolution. Gutmann has demonstrated
that the concept played an important rike in the lives of working-class
men in Mexico City even though most of them were unable to live up
to it.21 Similarly, Chicano film scholar Sergio de la Mora has studied
the connections between Mexican nationalism and hypermasculine
self-representations in post-revolutionary Mexican cinema, since the
filmic representation depicted revolutionist Francisco “Pancho” Villa
as the prototype of a macho as well as a Mexican national hero.22
According to de la Mora, the hypermasculine ideals of this “cinema-
chismo” served to suppress femininity and subtle forms of homoerot-
icism within a nationalized heteronormative context.23
By analyzing the connections between nationalism and gender
concepts of the 1960s’ Chicano movement, Ernesto Chávez has been
able to show that Chicano activists closely linked their ideals of man-
hood to their concept of nationalism, since they envisioned a chivalric
ideal of Chicano masculinity with men being honorable protectors
of the nation, while they envisioned women as the symbolic bear-
ers of the nation’s future, in need of protection from Anglo penetra-
tion. Such notions of gender can be regarded as what Connell has
described as protest masculinities. 24
In general, historical research has demonstrated that there were
considerable differences between American and Mexican ideals of
masculinity and femininity, that ideals of masculinity were strongly
tied to nationalist ideology, that Mexican women were the prime tar-
gets of Americanizers, and that Mexican American interest groups
tended to consider gender equality as a sign of Americanization. What
is largely missing in this narrative is a thorough analysis of discourses
and nondiscursive practices that marginalized Mexican immigrant
masculinities vis-à-vis the American nation in the realm of embodi-
ment and on an institutional level as well as a study of how Mexican
American men voiced their claims to citizenship in response to these
exclusionary practices.
Embodied Marginalization and Eugenics

Social workers of the interwar period assigned mothers the role of
educators of their children. By contrast, fathers’ main functions
within the family were confined to providing financial support and
to becoming producers of healthy offspring. Consequently, programs
for mothers and girls focused on homemaking, while boys were
taught that fatherhood, citizenship, and leadership qualities could

be attained only through a healthy body. The ideology of eugenics,
which was very popular in the interwar period, heavily influenced
these programs because it appeared to represent a seemingly rational
and scientific way of dealing with reproduction and social problems.
According to gender historian Nancy Ordover, eugenic ideology was
strongly connected to nationalism, since it was deeply concerned with
what the nation would look like.25 Within this context, advocates of
eugenic ideology employed both implicit and explicit forms of racism
to create a homogeneous nation that they believed either needed to
expel inferior races from or oppress them within the nation.26
In eugenic discourse, physical and mental strength were intercon-
nected with citizenship. For example, a brochure for a Los Angeles
Methodist “Christian Citizenship” program from 1926 quoted a
young Mexican-American member of a weight lifting club as follows:
“I want to build a strong body so that my brain will be able to develop
strong too. I want to learn and become a leader. I don’t want to be
a dumb Mexican!”27 This quote discursively connects mental ability
to physical strength and health, implying that weight lifting would
enhance one’s intelligence while suggesting that lacking intelligence
would lead to disease and physical weakness. Since this program was
designed to turn second-generation Mexican immigrant boys into
Christian citizens, it defined the ideal citizen as a physically strong
and intelligent man. Health and physical strength along with intel-
ligence and education, however, were prerequisites for fulfilling the
hegemonic ideal of the self-made man, who was required to have both
the physical strength to work hard, and the intelligence and knowl-
edge to make smart investments and increase his wealth. Underlying
this conceptualization of what made a good Christian citizen was the
eugenic assumption that intelligence was genetically transmitted and
tied to the physical body.28 This argument was frequently used to jus-
tify school segregation for Mexican immigrant children throughout
the American Southwest.29 Since the basic concern of eugenicists was
to shape the nation’s future membership, programs such as the weight
lifting clubs suggested that strong, healthy, and intelligent men would
be the backbone of the American nation.
As suggested by this Eugenicist discourse, individual citizens’ phys-
ical health and mental strength tended to be equated with the health
of the body of the nation. Accordingly, social experts concerned with
national health represented Mexican immigrants as not being phys-
ically and mentally fit to be part of the nation. As medical historian
Emily K. Abel has shown in her study on tuberculosis prevention
156 CLAUDIA ROESCH
in Los Angeles, city officials rarely saw poor housing standards as

the cause of the health conditions that they observed in Mexican
men living in urban slums or rural labor camps. Instead, they asso-
ciated dread and disease with the foreigners’ bodies, marking them
an “illegitimate presence who not only endangered others but also
represented weakness and failure and imposed unbearable economic
burdens.”30 Thus, they discursively associated bodies of Mexican men
with disease, which posed a threat to the American nation both in
medical and economic respects.
Since the 1920s and 1930s represented the heyday of eugenic
thought, many members of organizations that were concerned with
Mexican immigration used eugenic arguments. Archbishop Edward
J. Hanna of San Francisco, who became president of CIHC in 1926
and was a member of the eugenicist San Francisco Commonwealth
Club, illustrates this influence.31 Hanna sent a letter to all Californian
members of US Congress in March 1926, asking to include Mexicans
in the 1924 immigration quota system because he feared that “they
diminish the percentage of our white population.”32 The underlying
idea of this statement was that Mexican-origin families would have
more children than Anglo-American families, thus threatening the
dominance of white citizens in the nation.
Hanna embraced not only such quantitative eugenic arguments;
he also concerned himself with the “quality” of Mexican-origin off-
spring in the context of the development of the American nation. In
a speech that he gave in Los Angeles in May 1926, Hanna declared:
“Any American having the future welfare of his country at heart must
agree that we could not admit too many immigrants and that we could
not admit men lacking in mental and physical qualities that fathers of
our citizens of the future should possess.”33 Hanna argued that the
cost of admitting men who were physically unable to produce healthy
offspring would be more detrimental than would be the financial ben-
efits of having cheap agricultural workers. By tying reproduction to
citizenship, he presented a vision of the American nation that revolved
around white, able-bodied, and mentally fit citizens who needed to be
protected from those who did not meet these standards.
Hanna was especially concerned about lower-class Mexican men’s
reproductive qualities, while scholarly studies on Mexican immigrants
had distinguished between five socially and racially marked groups of
Mexican origin living in the United States.34 The largest group of these
contained Mexican migrant workers of indigenous ancestry from the
country’s rural areas.35 In their writings, experts focused on this group
and made stark generalizations about its members. Commonwealth
Club advocates, for instance, completely neglected distinctions, apply-

ing sociological observations of Mexican lower-class migrant workers
to all Mexicans on the basis of class and race. Explaining these obser-
vations in biological terms, the Commonwealth Club’s most promi-
nent eugenics advocate, Charles M. Goethe, associated characteristics
of Mexican farm laborers with their racial origins when proposing a
Mexican immigration quota that would allow men to enter the United
States as farmworkers but would not allow them to become citizens:
“He is a docile laborer and will live uncomplainingly under conditions
which disclose in Indian origins.”36 He based these characteristics on
biological essentialism and did not see any possibility to change them.
Claiming that Mexicans were descendants of those Aztecs who had
submitted to Spanish colonialism rather than fighting for their free-
dom, he stated that “they were docile then, and they remain docile
now.”37 In his publications, Goethe made Darwinian arguments about
this seemingly docile character, claiming that it had been transmitted
genetically since the conquest of the Aztec empire. While those brave
members of the Aztec society who had fought and lost against the
Spanish conquistadores had not been able to procreate in colonized
Mexico, the society’s docile members had reproduced for four hun-
dred years, producing a people whose main characteristic was docil-
ity. Goethe conceded that those men were good farmworkers, but he
vehemently opposed their integration in the American nation because
they would genetically transmit docility to their children and thus to
future US citizens. Of course, the alleged docility of Mexican men
itself was a stereotype that discursively de-masculinized them. Various
reports of labor union activities and strikes show that Mexican-origin
men were not accepting bad working conditions passively. 38
Surprisingly, the eugenics advocates Hanna and Goethe did not
question Mexican women’s reproductive function to bear healthy
and intelligent children. Hanna’s CIHC organized Americanization
classes in cooperation with women’s clubs such as the Daughters of
the American Revolution or Mobilized Women to teach Mexican
mothers aspects of rational and scientific motherhood, hoping that
mothers would instill values like thrift and cleanliness in their chil-
dren.39 By disputing that Mexican lower-class men were able to father
American citizens while his commission trained Mexican women to
mother such citizens, Hanna thus singled out men in his eugenicist
argument and implied that women could be changed through assim-
ilation classes. Immigration commissioners thus believed that women
transmitted only nonbiological values to their children, while men
were thought to transmit primarily genetic characteristics that were
158 CLAUDIA ROESCH
more closely connected to the ability to work and to adjust to a cap-

italist society. When Hanna claimed that it was immigrant men that
lacked the physical and mental qualities required to father future citi-
zens, he constructed them as a threat to the financial welfare of the
American nation. Meanwhile, Goethe represented them as a threat to
the national body in biologist terms because they would bring neg-
ative characteristics into the nation that he assumed to be transmit-
ted genetically. Ultimately, immigrant men threatened the collective
masculinity of the American nation because their offspring would
challenge American hegemonic masculinity.
Institutional Marginalization and

the Breadwinner Ideal
In addition to the physical ability to father future citizens, immigra-
tion commissioners considered the ideal of the breadwinner as a pre-
requisite for citizenship. Marginalization of Mexican immigrant men
took place on an institutional level when social workers in welfare
agencies made decisions about their capability of fulfilling this ideal.
Social workers were convinced that it was the father’s role within the
family to be the financial provider. Mexican immigrant fathers often
could not fulfill this function, as many complaint files show. Those
cases were usually categorized as “Failure to Provide” or “Desertion
and Non-support,” regardless of whether this “failure” was due to
poverty, illness, old age, unemployment, or the low wages that immi-
grants were given in the agricultural sector.40
In those cases, social workers had the power to file an official
charge against the husband with a City Persecutor to obtain the
money. In a 1931 case, a man named Jose L. stated that he had always
worked and could provide for his family but that “recently, due to the
difficulty of securing employment, he has been unable to do anything
for them.”41 The family then went to the Catholic Welfare Bureau,
where he was urged “to support his family regardless of whether he
has work or not,”42 and he was convicted by the City Persecutor to
providing financial support for his two daughters. In the case of the
Los Angeles common-law couple Dominga A. and Porfirio G., who
had quarreled over how to finance their house and how to provide
for their child, Dominga was told “to talk to defendant and appeal
to his manhood”43 so that he would marry her and pay for the fam-
ily. Men were accused of being unmanly if they failed to meet his
financial obligations. Since the American hegemonic ideal of the self-
made man was based on a man’s success in the economic sphere and
his ability to fulfill his role as breadwinner, those who were forced
to apply for charity could not call themselves real men. Overcoming
class barriers and rising socially were essential parts of this concept,
and it did not take into consideration racial discrimination or eco-
nomic crises as barriers to upward mobility.
Social workers’ main objective was to prevent wives and children
from becoming a public charge. The term “public charge” applied
only to those immigrants who would potentially cost the nation more
than they contributed to its welfare though their labor. As a result of
this concern, social workers even urged wives to stay with husbands
who had been convicted of domestic violence to uphold the bread-
winner ideal. An ideal husband was to make good money, be industri-
ous and ambitious, be clean, sober, and to provide a nice home for his
family. Social workers tried to discipline men into working harder to
reach these goals by advising wives to appeal to their manliness. If a
man failed in their eyes, these experts had the right to and frequently
did undermine the father’s male authority by issuing a warning or
referring cases to City Persecutors or divorce attorneys.44
Being labeled as a public charge presented problems to the finan-
cial situation of families and the local communities they lived in.
Immigrants were also no longer eligible for naturalization once they
had relied on public support. During the Depression of the 1930s,
when the anti-immigrant policies were particularly harsh, “failure to
provide” charges could easily become a reason for deportation. This
gave caseworkers the power to determine single-handedly whether
immigrant families who had financial difficulties could become part
of the nation or not. The entire family’s eligibility to become US
citizens depended on Mexican men’s ability to provide for their fami-
lies. Ultimately, it was the Anglo-American middle-class ideal of mas-
culinity rather than civic nationalism that determined who was to
become a member of the American nation.
Symbolic Marginalization and

Mexican Culture
Social experts blamed the seeming failure to live up to white mid-
dle-class ideals of masculinity on men’s attitude, not on structural
circumstances such as racial discrimination. However, in contrast
to eugenicists, who believed that Mexican immigrants’ genetic fea-
tures were the root cause of their poverty, progressive social workers
believed that Mexican immigrants could learn how to change their
attitudes and that these attitudes were an element of a “defective”
160 CLAUDIA ROESCH
Mexican culture. In 1931, Emory S. Bogardus, a Los Angeles-based

social scientist who had participated in the Chicago settlement move-
ment, wrote in an article on the poverty of Mexican immigrants: “A
large family of children is viewed carelessly by the father. If the strug-
gle to feed all the hungry mouths becomes too great, the father may
desert. His attitude of partial irresponsibility is representative of an
elemental, undeveloped culture.”45 Here, he used Mexican culture
to explain cases of men deserting their families rather than working
harder to feed them. This behavior, referred to as irresponsible, was
considered to derive from culture rather than biological essentialism.
By claiming that Mexican culture was undeveloped, Bogardus
defined it as deficient and as an undesirable element in the American
nation. His studies depicted Mexican men as lacking initiative and lead-
ership qualities, which was why they supposedly accepted bad working
and housing conditions.46 Bogardus argued that “employers’ attitudes
are favorable to the Mexican because of the latter’s docility”47 by which
he meant that Mexican immigrants were easily satisfied, complained
rarely, and were unlikely to become members of labor unions. According
to Bogardus, “paternalistic attitudes are greatly appreciated by the
Mexican peon,”48 which was why they would not question an employ-
er’s authority. This social expert depicted the lower-class Mexican
worker as “a child—supposed to have his immediate needs met fairly
well—and nothing more.” This attitude, Bogardus pointed out, was
“not biologically inherited, of course, but passed down through the
social heritage.”49 According to Bogardus, it expressed itself in the
Mexican peon’s lack of thrift, his inability to accept American prop-
erty laws and his “both simple and far-reaching” attraction to colorful
artwork and music.50 Even though Bogardus was careful to point out
that these attitudes were found only among lower-class Mexican immi-
grants and were not racial traits, his depictions nevertheless constitute
a form of emasculation of these men. By associating their interests and
attitudes with children and irrationality, Bogardus depicted these men
not as independent and self-sufficient individuals who could become
productive citizens of the American nation, but as dependent members
of an “undeveloped” Mexican nation.
These child analogies disregarded Mexican immigrants’ concerns
and ideals but suggested that Mexican men could be improved in the
same way that children would eventually grow up and become rational
adult citizens. Similarly, with paternalistic bosses and social workers
taking an interest in them, Mexican men were physically and mentally
able to grow into citizenship. Bogardus himself was involved in the
Methodist church and taught Mexican boys the concept of Christian
Citizenship though progressive social work and bodybuilding. From

the perspective of Bogardus and other progressive social workers, the
sons of Mexican peons could become part of the American nation,
despite their racial origins, if they were exposed to American culture
outside their families and communities. Their fathers, however, were
not manly enough to become citizens, to take part in the civic life, or to
be entrusted with inculcating American civic values to their children.
Stereotypes of dependent Mexican peons also found their way
into Immigration Commission reports, one of which claimed that
“the Mexicans . . . are extremely dependent and about as helpless as
children.” Consequently, the report continued, “the Mexican is not
assimilable in the vast majority of cases, socially or politically. He is
assimilable industrially for certain work if he does not enter in too
great number.”51 Against the backdrop of the debate whether to
include Mexicans into the immigration quota system established in
1924, this report stated that these men were needed as workers but
should not be able to become citizens, which meant that they were
welcome to assist in economic nation-building but should be denied
any role in its social and political dimensions.
In these debates, culture became important because citizenship
and civic nationalism were increasingly defined in terms of moral-
ity, thrift, and self-control during the interwar period. The American
public regarded Mexican men as lacking a sense of morality and the
other civic virtues that eligibility for membership in the American
nation required.52 In these reinterpretations of nationalized norms
and values, it was generally believed that the civic virtues of men and
women differed because they had to serve different functions within
the nation. Men were expected to advance the nation in the public
realm and therefore needed to be industrious and ambitious; they
were also required to have moral integrity and self-control. Women
were believed to advance the nation in the private realm of the fam-
ily by raising children as the future of the nation. Thus, it seemed
plausible for social reformers of the interwar period to exclude those
men from any involvement in American nation-building who did not
possess the virtues that were required for manly citizenship. At the
same time, men who claimed that their spouses veered away from
these cherished virtues received support from reformers. Extramarital
affairs that fathers brought to the attention of caseworkers were
labeled as a “contribution to delinquency of children.”53 Thus, they
moved the effects of the mother’s moral life for the education of chil-
dren into the center of charges against mother. Men and women were
to fulfill different functions within the family as a micro-unit and the
162 CLAUDIA ROESCH
nation as an extended community: within the family, men were to be

breadwinners and women value transmitters; within the nation, men
were to be public figures and women educators.
The cultural aspects of citizenship thus became yet another justi-
fication for immigrant men’s marginalization within the American
nation. While advocates of eugenics highlighted the bodies of Mexican
men as a factor in their marginalization and social workers focused
on their alleged failure to fulfill the breadwinner ideal, social workers
made white, middle-class culture as a requirement for citizenship and
active membership in the nation. In each realm, social actors had sin-
gled out Mexican-origin men as not meeting the requirements for cit-
izenship, while they did not pay special attention to Mexican-origin
women. In the end, these men were marginalized for not fulfilling
the hegemonic ideal of masculinity.
National Identity and Mexican

Men’s Agency
In reality, Mexican-origin men were not as docile and passive as
contemporary social expert literature depicted them. Instead, they
founded civil rights organizations to collectively voice their claim to
citizenship and to demand their right to take part in the American
nation. Their agency is expressed in their founding of political orga-
nizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens
(LULAC) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Since LULAC initially
excluded women, gender historian Cynthia Orozco has interpreted its
chapters as homosocial spaces.54 Historian Guadalupe San Miguel has
analyzed LULAC’s strategy to claim civil rights for Spanish-speaking
Americans by highlighting their “whiteness” and their European
ancestry rather than portraying themselves as nonwhite victims of
racism.55
LULAC contained the word “citizen” in its name to emphasize
that its members were part of the American nation through their
legal citizenship and only accepted naturalized Mexican immigrants
as members of their organization until the 1960s. Politically, LULAC
exhibited a clear pro-capitalist liberalist, American patriotic stance.
Founded in 1929 in Texas, the League tried to fight legal and de facto
discrimination by asserting their status as “white” American citizens
through appropriating white middle-class standards of living. Their
journal LULAC News regularly featured portraits of their leaders as
success stories of social mobility. The obituary of the first LULAC
president Ben Garza recounted how he lost his father, how hard he
had worked to support his family as a teenager, and how he was able
to become a wealthy owner of a restaurant and real estate. “From the
humblest kind of beginning,” the obituary commented on this from-
rags-to-riches story, “when as a boy of 15 he had to take his dead
father’s place at the head of his family, he rose through hard work
and sheer determination to a position of respect and reverence among
Americans and Latin-Americans alike.”56 The combination of hard
work and industriousness, emphasized in the American hegemonic
ideal and family loyalty cherished within the Mexican American com-
munity gained him respect among both groups. By describing their
president’s life as a Horatio Alger story, the editors of the LULAC
News highlighted that citizens of Latin American origin deserved to
be part of the American nation since they were as ambitious and inde-
pendent as white, American, self-made men. Thus, LULAC appropri-
ated Anglo American professional middle-class values of masculinity
for their own members in order to voice their claim to civil rights.
The LULAC Code, a strict code of morality, which members
pledged to obey, can be read as an instruction manual to achieve
the ideal of Mexican American masculinity. It propagated values
like respect, honor, patriotism, pride in one’s ancestry, and loyalty,
although it remained unclear whether that loyalty was family or
national allegiance, as well as courage. It demanded of members to
actively express American patriotism by serving in the army: “In war
serve your country, in peace your convictions,” and to “learn how to
discharge your duties before you learn how to assert your rights.”57
It contained the idea that citizenship was not a privilege awarded to
somebody in their own merit, but that one had to fulfill duties to
the nation, such as military service, before claiming the privileges
of American citizenship. Thus, having become a US citizen was not
enough to be considered an active member of the nation. A male
member of the organization also had to conform to white middle-
class values before being justified in demanding his rights as a mem-
ber of the American nation.
Alluding to the ideal of the self-made man, the code demanded
of members to constantly educate themselves, to “believe in God,
love Humanity and rely upon the framework of human progress” to
“learn how to be self-reliant upon your qualifications” and to “dis-
cern, investigate, meditate, think, study, and at all times be honest
and generous.”58 The ideal Mexican American man was to behave in
a rational fashion, act in a reflected manner, and base his opinions
on knowledge and study. He should practice religion and express in
his behavior values of middle-class respectability: rationality, belief in
164 CLAUDIA ROESCH
progress, self-reliance for the own economic and educational success.

By appropriating values that defined Anglo-American middle-class
hegemonic masculinity, LULAC did not question the exclusionary
practices that served to perpetuate this hegemonic model of mas-
culinity in the first place. Instead, by calling upon its members to
appropriate these preexisting concepts in order to become part of the
nation, it confirmed the image of the American nation as consisting
of respectable self-made men and their families.
In contrast to the Chicano movement of the 1960s, LULAC mem-
bers of the 1930s cannot be regarded as representatives of what Connell
has termed “protest masculinities” because they did not challenge
white hegemonic masculinity. Instead, they tried to reconcile their
locally hegemonic forms of masculinity that were defined by patriar-
chy with the national hegemonic model. The ideal member was self-
reliant but not socially independent of family ties. The LULAC Code
urged him to transmit these values to his children: “Let your firmest
purpose be that of helping to see that each new generation shall be of
a youth more efficient and capable and in this let your own children
be included.”59 In this case, it was the father who was to instill values
such as efficiency in his child. His role was not confined to fathering
future citizens; he was also the one responsible for their moral and
civic education. In this way, LULAC strongly differed from common
conceptualizations of gender and the nation in the Americanization
programs, where mothers were the value transmitters and ideological
reproducers of the family. In addition, it adapted American hegemonic
masculinity and created a hybrid form of manliness, even though this
particular blend affirmed rather than questioned the hegemonic ideal
since it was meant to make the organization’s members respectable in
both the white American nation and their local communities.
LULAC contested stereotypical depictions of Mexican American
men as docile, immoral, passive, and fatalistic. The organization
therefore asserted its claim to citizenship through a set of values that
would distance them from working-class culture as well as behaviors
associated with people considered racially inferior by Anglo society.
Like the Americanizers, LULAC confirmed the shifting notion of
citizenship from a political concept to a cultural concept by depicting
their value-based code as a means to obtain access to citizenship. In
order to become citizens with the ability to shape the nation, LULAC
members therefore had to subscribe to a certain set of values that
guaranteed that they would only shape the nation into the direction
of modernization, capitalism, and liberalism. Yet, despite its hybrid
character, LULAC, whose members were part of Texas’s Mexican
American business and professional community, was an elitist orga-

nization. It claimed to speak for all Spanish-speaking American
citizens and implemented civic education programs for working-
class immigrants that were as patronizing as white social reformers’
Americanization programs. By accepting white middle-class require-
ments for citizenship, LULAC affirmed the very same gendered
mechanisms that marginalized lower-class Mexican immigrant men.
Conclusion
During the interwar period, Mexican immigrant men constituted a
marginalized masculinity because their identity as men was seen as
being contrary to the American hegemonic ideal of the self-made man.
However, the various groups of American social experts that discur-
sively marginalized these men focused on different aspects of their
seemingly defective manhood. Eugenicists argued along the lines of
biological determinism that male Mexican immigrants’ physical fea-
tures as well as their purported low intelligence and docile behavior,
all of which were assumed to be passed on genetically transmitted,
would prevent them from fathering children who possessed the desir-
able characteristics of future citizens. Social workers in immigration
agencies regarded them as unmanly if they failed to provide financially
for their families through their own labor. Failure to fulfill the male
breadwinning ideal had the institutional consequence of deportation
and thus physical removal from the nation. Progressive social experts
argued that these men lacked the moral qualifications for citizenship,
chief among them a sense of responsibility and self-control. However,
these experts did not believe that such qualifications were a matter
of biology; rather they considered them to be a matter of culture,
which meant that social workers could mold second-generation immi-
grants into citizens who would ultimately conform to white, Anglo-
American hegemonic masculinity. Although these various groups of
social experts focused on different aspects of Mexican-origin men’s
male identity, they all agreed that these men’s seemingly flawed mas-
culinity prevented them from fulfilling the requirements for full mem-
bership in the American nation. Mexican and Mexican American men’s
marginalization thus served to strengthen the national ideal of the
white, able-bodied, self-reliant, and independent breadwinner, who
came to epitomize the American nation during the interwar period.
Although the founding of LULAC and its political activism coun-
tered social experts’ stereotypes and reflected Mexican American
agency, the organization did not challenge this model of hegemonic
166 CLAUDIA ROESCH
masculinity as a requirement to become part of the American nation.

Instead, LULAC affirmed it by instructing its members to make stren-
uous efforts to adopt white, American ideals of manliness, although
the organization did attempt to reconcile hegemonic masculinity with
Mexican traditions of manhood. The processes of marginalization
that men of Mexican ancestry were subjected to and the ambiguous
forms of adoption and adaptation that these men chose to legitimize
their claims to citizenship underline the power of the white, Anglo-
American middle class to shape ideals of manhood and to determine
which men were manly enough to become members of the nation.
Notes
* This chapter is the result of research that I conducted for my PhD
project Macho Men and Modern Women: Mexican Immigration, Social
Experts and Changing Family Values in the 20th Century United States
(Munich: de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), which is part of the University
of Mü nster’s Research Group “Family Values and Social Change: The
American Family in the Twentieth Century.” This research group is
funded by the German Research Foundation.
1. Adele S. Calhoun, “Marital and Domestic Trouble—Failure to Provide,”
Complaint File of Carmen G. vs. Manuel G. (Los Angeles, August 10,
1925), California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration
and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194, The Bancroft Library,
University of California, Berkeley. Surnames of complainants and defen-
dants have been abbreviated by the author for privacy reasons.
2. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 80–81.
3. R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 184.
4. For efforts to theorize the four interrelated elements of applying gen-
der theory to historical analysis, see Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful
Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review 91, no. 5
(1986): 1067–1068. See also Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method?
Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” Gender &
History 11, no. 3 (1999): 504.
5. See Connell, Gender and Power, 183–188; Raewyn Connell and James
W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,”
Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 829–859.
6. Connell, Masculinities, 81.
7. The term “Anglo American” denotes native-born, English-speaking
Americans of European descent. For the use of the term “Anglo” in
the context of Mexican immigration to the Southwest, see Richard A.
Garcia, Rise of the Mexican American Middle Class: San Antonio, 1929–
1941 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 18.
8. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press 2006), 13.
9. Ibid., 14.
10. Américo Paredes, “The United States, Mexico and Machismo” (1967),
manuscript, Américo Paredes Papers, Benson Latin American Collection,
General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin, Texas. A Spanish version
of this article was first published in 1967, the English translation in 1971.
See Américo Paredes, “The United States, Mexico, and Machismo,” in
Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, ed. Américo Paredes
(Austin, TX: CMAS Books, 1993), 215–234.
11. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 6–7.
243, 249, 251, 253.
13. Ibid., 252–253.
14. “The Church of All Nations: A Constructive Answer to the Crucial Problem of
Christian Americanization“ (undated), All Nations Church and Foundation
Records, Collection No. 0403, California Social Welfare Archives, Special
Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern California, 22.
15. See Connell, Masculinities, 77.
16. Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy
since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 8.
17. Yuko Matsumoto, “Gender and American Citizenship: The Construction
of ‘Our nation’ in the Early Twentieth Century,” Japanese Journal
of American Studies 17, no. 2 (September 2006): 159; Gayle Gullett,
“Women Progressives and the Politics of Americanization in California,
1915–1920,” Pacific Historical Review 64, no. 1 (February 1995): 71.
18. Richard Griswold de Castillo, La Familia: Chicano Families in the
Urban Southwest, 1848 to the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984), 132; William Madsen, Society and Health
in the Lower Rio Grande Valley (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1961), 10–11; John F. McClymer, War and Welfare: Social Engineering
in America, 1890–1925 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1980), 78;
Mario T. Garcia, Mexican Americans: Leadership, Ideology & Identity,
1930–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 25; George
J. Sá nchez, “‘Go after the Women’: Americanization and the Mexican
Immigrant Woman, 1915–1929,” in Mothers & Motherhood: Readings in
American History, ed. Rima D. Apple (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1997), 480; Matsumoto, “Gender and American Citizenship,”
159; Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood, Science and Childrearing in
America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 66.
19. For a discussion of positive and negative aspects of machismo, see
Alfredo Mirandé, “Macho: Contemporary Conceptions,” in Men’s Lives,
ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Michael A. Messner (Boston, MA: Pearson,
2004), 30.
20. Ibid.
21. See Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in
Mexico City, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007),
260; Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 835.
168 CLAUDIA ROESCH
22. According to de la Mora, Francisco “Pancho” Villa himself had camera

teams follow him on the revolutionary battlefields. Sergio de la Mora,
Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2006), 8.
23. Ibid., 70–71.
24. Ernesto Chávez, “‘Birth of a New Symbol’: The Brown Berets’ Gendered
Chicano National Imaginary,” in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures
and History in the Twentieth Century America, ed. Joe Austin and
Michael N. Willard (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 217;
Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 834.
25. See Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the
Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2003), 38.
26. Ibid.
27. Charles S. Thompson, “The Pathfinder to Health (1925)” (hereafter
cited as Thompson, “The Pathfinder to Health”), All Nations Church
and Foundation Records, Collection No. 0403, California Social Welfare
Archives, Special Collections, USC Libraries, University of Southern
California.
28. See Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford, “Introduction: Eugenics and
the Modern World,” The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed.
Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2010), 5.
29. School segregation was scientifically justified by lower scoring of Mexican
American children in intelligence tests, but already in the 1930s, edu-
cational researchers T. Manuel and George I. Sá nchez pointed out the
biases of those tests when giving instructions in English to Spanish-
speaking children. See Herschel T. Manuel, “The Educational Problem
Presented by the Spanish-Speaking Child of the Southwest,” School and
Society 40 (November 1934): 7; George I. Sá nchez, Forgotten People: A
Study of New Mexicans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1940), 32; Garcia, Mexican Americans, 253.
30. Emily K. Abel, “From Exclusion to Expulsion: Mexicans and Tuberculosis
Control in Los Angeles, 1914–1940,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine
77, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 831.
31. Among other things, the club studied the works of German race ide-
ologist Hans F. G ü nther and established an immigration committee
that was headed by Sacramento eugenics advocate Charles M. Goethe.
See Commonwealth Club of California, “Minutes to the Meeting
of February 5th, 1931,” California Dept. of Industrial Relations,
Division of Immigration and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A
194.
32. Edward J. Hanna, “Letter to Senator Samuel M. Shortridge” (March
1926), California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration
and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
33. Newspaper Clipping Los Angeles Examiner, May 25, 1926, California
Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration and Housing
Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
34. See Emory S. Bogardus, The Mexican in the United States (New York:
Arno Press, 1970), 12.
35. The other groups were US citizens of Mexican origin living in the
Southwest even before the incorporation of these territories into the
United States, descendants of Spanish aristocracy marked as European in
the origin and thus white, middle-class refugees from the Mexican rev-
olution, educated middle-class professionals working inside the United
States temporarily (e.g., as diplomats). See Bogardus, The Mexican in the
United States, 12.
36. Charles M. Goethe, “Other Aspects of the Problem,” Current History
28, no. 5 (1928): 767.
37. Ibid.
38. On these developments, see Juan Gómez-Qui ñones, Mexican American
Labor, 1790–1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1994).
39. See Matsumoto, “Gender and American Citizenship,” 145; Gullett,
“Women Progressives,” 77.
40. For example, caseworker Adele S. Calhoun charged a man named Jose M.
with “Desertion and Non-support” after his wife went to seek help from
the commission after his paycheck from a migrant labor camp had not
arrived in three weeks and she was out of money. After several telegrams,
however, it turned out that mail was delayed and he had not deserted her.
See Adele S. Calhoun, “Marital and Domestic Trouble—Desertion and
Non-Support,” Complaint file of Carmen M. vs. Jose M. (Los Angeles,
October 28, 1922), California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of
Immigration and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
41. Adele S. Calhoun, “Marital and Domestic Trouble,” Complaint file of
Jose L. vs. Guadalupe S. (Los Angeles, February 13, 1931), California
Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration and Housing
Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
42. Ibid.
43. Adele S. Calhoun, “Marital and Domestic Trouble—Common Law
Wife,” Complaint File of Dominga A. vs. Porfirio G. (Los Angeles,
September 22, 1924), California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division
of Immigration and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
44. See Charles A. Degnan, “Marital and Domestic Trouble,” Complaint
File of Manuel S. vs. Helena G. (Fresno, April 18, 1923), California Dept.
of Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration and Housing Records,
BANC MSS C-A 194.
45. Emory S. Bogardus, “Attitudes and the Mexican Immigrant,” in Social
Attitudes, ed. Kimball Young (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), 308.
46. Los Angeles lawyer Carey McWilliams, who advocated Mexican America
Civil Rights in the 1930s and 1940s, stated that employers preferred
Mexican immigrants due to their complacency. See Carey McWilliams
and Clive Belmont: “Farm Labor Demands in California,” in Pacific
Weekly, March 30, 1936, California Dept. of Industrial Relations,
Division of Immigration and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
47. Bogardus, “Attitudes and the Mexican Immigrant,” 296.
170 CLAUDIA ROESCH
48. Ibid., 296.

49. Ibid., 298.
50. See Bogardus, The Mexican in the United States , 66.
51. Report “The Mexican in the United States,” (n.d.), California Dept. of
Industrial Relations, Division of Immigration and Housing Records,
BANC MSS C-A 194, 3.
52. See Matsumoto, “Gender and American Citizenship,” 145.
53. See Frank deAndreis, “Contribution to Delinquency of Children”
(Sacramento, February 16, 1928), Complaint file of Guadalupe V.
vs. Jennie V., California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Division of
Immigration and Housing Records, BANC MSS C-A 194.
54. See Cynthia Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise
of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2009), 208.
55. See Guadalupe San Miguel, “Let all of them take heed”: Mexican Americans
and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910–1981 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1987), 76.
56. “Ben Garza Spent Life in Hard Work and Activity for Civic Betterment,”
LULAC News 4, no. 2 (March 1937): 4–6.
57. “Code of LULAC,” LULAC News 1, no. 8 (March 1932): 11.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
C H A P T E R 9
Marginal Centers: Martial Masculinities

in Late Meiji Japan
Denis Gainty
In the July 8, 2011, edition of the journal Science, the little worm
Caenorhabditis Elegans was used to provide important support for
the so-called Red Queen hypothesis.1 Crudely put, this hypothesis
proposes that sexual reproduction—seemingly a waste of important
resources and effort—evolved in order to provide genetic variabil-
ity that would ensure defense against pathogens, parasites, or other
deadly inputs from the environment. Because such pathogens and
parasites themselves constitute a constantly changing threat, the
evolution of a species to match such evolving environmental dan-
gers results in a sort of stasis; as Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen put it in
Through the Looking-Glass, “It takes all the running you can do, to
keep in the same place.”2
Like Alice in Lewis Carroll’s famous work, the evolution of a
species is supposed to run as fast as possible, to expend all possible
energies, just to keep in the same position relative to its antagonistic
environmental partners. This particular bit of running is the addi-
tion of a male to the reproductive process—that is, the creation of a
distinct fertilizing, non-offspring–bearing sex—in order to provide
just enough genetic tweaking to prevent pathogens from “catching
up with” the defenses of a given species. While these experiments
surely have all sorts of deeper significance for biology and related
disciplines—and while playing with the natural sciences is a danger-
ous pastime for a historian of gender—it is tempting to take from
this research the delightful notion that maleness may exist solely as
172 DENIS GAINTY
a strategy to deal with an annoyingly parasite-ridden world. From

this perspective, the male sex is a sort of evolutionary afterthought,
a lately added exterminator function. And if we posit any connection
between biological maleness and masculinity, this may point us to
the conclusion that all masculinities are by definition and their very
roots marginal.
This intrusion of biology into the social sciences is not intended to
derail useful discussions of hegemonic masculinity and masculinities
with offhanded essentialisms. Since well before Joan Scott’s ground-
breaking 1986 article on the value of gender in historical studies, the
construction and wielding of gender categories has been an increas-
ingly central concern of historians.3 Married to Foucauldian insights
into the discursive nature of power and born of decades of turbu-
lent postwar identity politics in Western academia and society, gender
is indeed now a singularly important category of historical analysis.
But the example of the Red Queen—the possibility of a biologically
essentialized scientific marginality of males—may act as a useful,
if ahistorical, interruption of typical readings of gender and power,
especially as they relate to the notion of hegemonic masculinities pio-
neered by Raewyn (R. W.) Connell. In this chapter’s consideration of
modern Japanese masculinities, and especially of turn-of-the century
Japanese men and their efforts to produce and popularize martial
arts practice as a feature of embodied national identity, I investigate
the supposed marginalization both of modern Japanese masculini-
ties and, more broadly, of the Japanese nation against a number of
supposedly hegemonic (Western) models. I argue that typical applica-
tions of hegemonic masculinity, especially when paired with histories
of the modern nation, have tended inevitably to reify the basic model
of centralized, normative power to which disenfranchised margins
can only offer either resistance or complicity. Such readings of heg-
emonic masculinity do not adequately capture the agency experienced
and expressed through such local Japanese experiences of masculinity
and national identity. Accordingly, I hold that the Japanese examples
here support the fundamental resituating of the very notions of “heg-
emonic” and “marginal” as primarily local constructions of global
realities. By taking seriously the self-centering, universal nature of the
supposedly particular and marginal masculinities active in the expe-
rience of the individuals who embodied the modern Japanese nation,
we can push beyond the simplistic narrative of power, resistance, and
incorporation fundamental to the basic model of hegemony and cen-
tral to the understanding of hegemonic masculinities and the modern
nation.
MARGINAL CENTERS 173
Specifically, an experientalist view of masculinity—based in the

work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and emphasizing the
foundational role of the physical body in making social meaning4 —
helps us to avoid the trap set by central, structural narratives, in which
the actual performance or understanding of masculinity—that is,
local masculinities—are assumed to be “complicit,” “subordinate,”
or—in the case of “nonhegemonic patterns of masculinity”—simply
“well-crafted responses to race/ethnic marginalization” inevitably
incorporated “into a functioning gender order.”5 An experiential-
ist consideration of the modern Japanese masculinities presented
here de-emphasizes Connell’s basic assignation of “hegemonic”
and “marginal” masculinities—through which local agency is eval-
uated according to a supposedly objective assessment of structural
factors6 —in favor of the possibility that one’s own experience of mas-
culinity can more usefully be considered generative of, rather than/
as well as incorporated into, a functioning gender order. Taking up
Connell and Messerschmidt’s category of “local” hegemonic mascu-
linities, intended as a tertiary category subject to higher-order heg-
emonic masculinities,7 I argue instead that the local iterations of
modern Japanese masculinities can be productively understood as
foundational to any conception of margin or center involving the
modern nation, masculinities, or any other broad category. As such,
the Japanese cases I introduce point to the essentially and fundamen-
tally local nature not only of modern masculinities and their role in
the modern nation, but also of all grand narratives of structure and
power.
Hegemony and its Discontents

In order to show how the Japanese examples contained here pre-
sent challenges to the heuristic value of a hegemonic masculinity (or,
indeed, the hegemonic nation) it is useful to review how the basic
idea of hegemony has operated in analyses of gender and modern
history. Hegemony, the brainchild of Antonio Gramsci, is an impor-
tant development on the Marxian obsession with false conscious-
ness, oppression, and liberation. Crudely put, hegemony as a concept
answers the nagging question of why and how any social actor would
voluntarily participate in a social ordering of power that, according to
some observers, seems contrary to the actor’s best interests. In a mod-
ern society, hegemony comprises the mechanisms by which political
power is consolidated, as Brennon Wood puts it, through “cultural
mobilizations of consent across diverse social sites.”8 While Wood
174 DENIS GAINTY
and others rightly note the flexibility (indeed, the instability) of hege-
mony as wielded by Gramsci and those who have followed him,9 it is
useful to note that hegemony typically refers to (1) a diversity of social
agents, (2) their cooperative action through shared meanings or val-
ues, and most importantly (3) the resulting privileging of an elite
ideological position. Without the third point, “hegemony” would
simply describe any culture; it is the turn to a sinister, normative ideo-
logical framework that stamps hegemony as a Marxian concept of
structural forces and liberation therefrom.
While this is not to deride either Marxian or, more generally,
structure-heavy interpretations of society and history, it is important
to point out the inherent bias toward a master narrative of central
order and marginal resistance. And certainly such narratives have
operated—have indeed seemed to “go without saying,” themselves
hegemonically active—throughout many analyses of both modern
masculinities and modern nations. By their very nature, modern
nations are analyzed—with good reason—as coercive, coherent
communities of imagined commonalities and elided differences,
through which massive economic, labor, informational, military,
and other resources can be mustered and directed under the aegis of
a singular national purposive identity.10 Ernest Gellner put it most
clearly in his stark assertions that “there is no point in considering
the possibility of the absence or diffusion of centralized power in
a modern society” and that “it is always the case, in an industrial
society, that some have [power] and some do not.”11 For Gellner,
the modern nation is a narrative of centralized power and attendant
epiphenomena.
Masculinity is similarly rendered as hegemonic, and for similarly
good reasons. In the treatments of early feminist scholars, mascu-
linity (in the singular) constituted a relatively undifferentiated and
implicitly normalized power pole against which femininities strug-
gled variously for agency. Early studies in gendered history, therefore,
tended toward a simplistic reading of masculinity as a looming struc-
tural force that supported patriarchy, a coercive central narrative in
both societies and analyses thereof, against which the individual resis-
tant agency of feminists/female actors was analyzed. In a more exact
reading of hegemonic masculinity, however, groundbreaking works
by Connell and others have asked how a wide range of masculini-
ties, broadly defined as relational cultured behaviors and ideas asso-
ciated usefully with (but not the sole provenance of) biological men,
were organized around and against universal notions of maleness—
that is, how the trope of normative, universal masculinity operated
as a context for multiple and varied local understandings and per-

formances of masculine identity.12 This interweaving of particular,
local masculinities into a macro-level status quo—a sort of global
masculinity—is a closer fit to Antonio Gramsci’s original notion of
hegemony. As we will see, however, Connell’s formulation diverges
importantly from Gramsci’s.
The same observation holds true in most depictions of the inter-
section of masculinity and the nation. It is beyond the scope of this
chapter to review the entirety of arguments linking the phenome-
nal complex of modern nationalism with masculinity—that is, posit-
ing nation-building as a masculine enterprise. Happily, we can turn
to Joane Nagel’s 1998 summation of these arguments and her own
assertion—following authors such as Cynthia Enloe and Raewyn
Connell—that “nationalist politics is a masculinist enterprise”13
and that “the national state is essentially a masculine institution.”14
Nagel’s argument neatly captures not only the strong associations
posited between masculinity/masculinities and nationalisms but
also their shared definition as “hegemonic structures.”15 In the case
of modern Japan, attention in recent decades to gender in modern
history—especially around the (re)formation and maintenance of the
Japanese nation-state in the context of global imperial modernity—
has resulted in an impressive number of studies.16 For the most part,
however, these studies support the notion of a (masculinist) national
enterprise against which feminine or “subordinate” masculinities are
de facto situated as either complicit or resistant, but almost always as
reactive.
Key to understanding the various mobilizations of the concept of
hegemony is the insight that, again, hegemony refers finally to a polit-
ical philosophy of liberation. Hegemonic structures and relationships
are identified not in order to celebrate but to challenge the embed-
ded inequalities that they conceal and support.17 Thus the identifi-
cation of hegemonic masculinities, hegemonic nationalisms, and of
course hegemonic masculine nationalisms is implicitly or explicitly
paired in each case with the identification of those diverse, nonnor-
mative, noncentral identities out of which the hegemonic system is
forged. These identities, discourses, beliefs, etc. are most always given
dual purpose; they are theorized as both central to the construc-
tion of a hegemonic system, because they are the social stuff out of
which hegemony is forged, and as marginal or oppositional to the
hegemonic system, because the very definition of Gramscian hege-
mony assumes a Marxian antagonism of economic or social interests.
Margins, therefore, are central to the notion of hegemony.
176 DENIS GAINTY
In the case of Connell’s work on hegemonic masculinities, however,

margins play a curious and distinct role. As Demetrakis Demetriou
astutely observed, Connell’s stance on marginal or subordinate mas-
culinities tacks between two courses.18 On the one hand, Connell
claims that masculinities not cleaving to or supporting hegemonic
systems—resistant, divergent, or otherwise Other—are, per Gramsci,
importantly part of the system by which hegemonic and norma-
tive masculinities are constructed. On the other hand, Connell also
asserts that “hegemonic masculinity presumes the subordination of
nonhegemonic masculinities,” and thus a “hierarchy of masculini-
ties” inevitably prevails. Cultural consent is only sometimes neces-
sary for Connell’s hegemony, which also depends on the power of
“marginalization or delegitimation of alternatives.”19 The consent of
those who embody such alternatives is presumably not necessary for
the workings of hegemonic masculinity. Despite her own claims to
the contrary, in Connell’s analysis, some masculinities are apparently
more equal than others.
Masculinity on the Margins: The Case

of Modern Japan
If we take the modern masculine nation to be a hegemonic trope, it
may be that Japan presents the ideal margin from which to analyze
it. Following a legacy of Orientalist mirrorings of the western imag-
ination, 20 Japan’s modern history has frequently been presented as
a tale of imitation. After the burst of energy that produced nations,
nationalism, and modern empire—first in the United Kingdom and
France, and followed in the nineteenth century by a bumper crop of
new nations in Europe and the Americas—Japan was forced at gun-
point in 1853 to enter the modern world when American naval com-
modore Matthew Perry arrived in his fleet of “black ships.” Quickly
appraising the brutal opportunities for international success or failure
(and especially noting the British-led evisceration of Chinese sover-
eignty and society) Japan seized Western modernity with both hands,
refashioned itself in the Western modern image, conducted a quick
revolution/coup d’état deposing the sh ōgun or military dictator in
favor of an emperor newly reimagined as modern quasi-constitutional
monarch, and became thoroughly modern in the Meiji (1868–1912)
period. Or so the story goes.21
That Japan’s modernization and nationalization were more or less
synchronous with, for example, Germany’s is often lost in this explana-
tion. But even if ahistorical, this explanation boasts nonetheless great
epistemic traction in presenting modern world history as a Western

Enlightenment story. There existed (and still exists) for many interna-
tional and some Japanese observers a narrative of normative Western
models of progress and modernity during the nineteenth century.
Within this narrative, Japanese modernity is basically comprised of
mimetic appropriations of those Western models in order to struggle
beyond precisely the Orientalist rendering of Japan as the feminine,
traditional, and backward Other. Moreover, such narratives of moder-
nity are intertwined with ideas of masculinity, empire, and race; as
the historian Edward Dickinson points out in his work on European
sexuality and the Yellow Peril, “given the deep penetration of imperi-
alist politics and values in European societies, theorists of masculin-
ity often sought to place manliness in the context of imperial—and
racial—relations.”22 Overlaid with the logic of social Darwinism and
muscular nationalism in the nineteenth century, Japan’s turn to the
modern thus resembles an attempt to craft a Western masculinity to
win membership in the men’s club of developed imperialist industrial
nations. At best, Japanese masculinity is an afterthought, an effort to
catch up—at worst, a pale imitation that is always and forever marginal
to the basic, normative, nineteenth-century Friedrich Jahn, Charles
Kingsley, Max Nordau masculinity of the modern West, through
which the scientific and racialized development of bourgeois male
bodies was linked to the Social Darwinian success of Western nations
and empires.23 The fact that all of these archetypes of Western mascu-
linity are themselves wonderfully complicated and subject to multiple
positionings in multiple frames does not, of course, undo the mythic
power of the normative, hegemonic Western masculinity.
We can read evidence from modern Western-Japanese contact as
supportive of this idea of Japanese masculinities on the margins of a
putative, hegemonic, Western definition. When the first Japanese del-
egation visited the United States in 1860, American observers were
impressed by the dignity of the Japanese but also amused, according
to a comic Harper’s Weekly piece, by how much the Japanese ambas-
sadors in formal Japanese attire “looked for awl the wurld like little
old lady’s dressed up tew kill, with queer littel things tide on there
heds.”24 In Vanity Fair, on the same date, the Japanese were described
as “pretty pretties,”25 while an article in the same publication the pre-
vious week noted the delegation’s “silk petticoats.”26 Although these
Japanese men were visually impressive, they were also quickly femi-
nized in the American public eye, rendering their masculinity at least
tangential to if not less than the American gender ideals to which they
were contrasted.
178 DENIS GAINTY
The same basic understanding of a normative Western masculin-

ity and the deficiency of Japanese versions can be detected in various
expressions of Meiji Japanese culture, especially during the early years
of Meiji. The prominent Meiji thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi, who touted
in his writings the importance of bringing Japan “out of Asia,” wrote
in 1867 a how-to guide on Western clothing and etiquette designed
to advance Japan toward “civilization and enlightenment,” or bunmei
kaika.27 The first Meiji minister of education Mori Arinori famously
championed Western calisthenics after his own experiences abroad,
including time spent at a utopian, rigorously ascetic Christian com-
munity in upstate New York called the “Brotherhood of the New
Life.”28 And in the most dramatically visible admission of the desir-
ability of Western models of masculinity, the newly foregrounded
Meiji Emperor was physically and visually transformed over the
decades of his rule.29 Beginning with his appearance in traditional
(i.e., nonmodern) court dress through his portrait as a slouching ado-
lescent male with Western military uniform and aspirational facial
hair to his complete transformation into a broad-chested, mustache-
and-beard-wearing martial monarch, he was—to mangle Gilbert and
Sullivan—the very model of a modern masculinity.
But probably the best and most dramatic depiction of transformed
Japanese masculinities during the Meiji period is found in the writ-
ings of the international statesman, Quaker, and samurai fantasist
Nitobe Inazō. His 1900 presentation of bushidō, the so-called way of
the warrior, explains Japanese manliness through the lens of a mythis-
torical samurai identity.30 Nitobe’s work—written in English, and
couched heavily in Western points of reference including Shakespeare,
Roman history, Nietzsche, and Christianity—was an important artic-
ulation of Japanese attempts not only to create but to communicate
a globally intelligible national identity. Nitobe’s particularly mimetic
Japanese masculinity includes taking up what he called the “Brown
Japanese Man’s Burden” in order to “resuscitate” Korea and its “poor,
effeminate people.”31 With Nitobe’s eager appropriation of Rudyard
Kipling’s formulation, we see a direct and explicit marriage of mascu-
linity, modernity, Social Darwinism, and the imperialist ambitions of
the Japanese nation.
So here we have a narrative that fits larger trends in Japanese and
world history; the general story is of Japan’s unique position among
non-Western countries to “get with the program,” to attempt—never
quite successfully, but always impressively—to transcend its Asian
nature and, in its striving, both improve itself and reinforce the cen-
trality of the Western model toward which it aspires. This allows a
sort of double marginalization of Japanese masculinity: pre-Meiji

masculinity was derided as primitive and traditional while its modern
incarnation was, at best, a satellite orbiting the sun of Western man-
liness at a proper distance.
Complicating the Center, Muddling the

Margins: Experiences of Modern
Japanese Masculinities
But when we dig deeper into early modern and modern visions of
both foreign and domestic masculinities by both Japanese and
Western observers, we are presented with a more complex range of
understandings of manliness. Since the early 1600s, the Dutch had
been the only Europeans formally allowed to trade with Japan under
the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1867). This was largely a result of
their tactful disinterest in religious proselytization and their focus
on profitable trade, which set them apart especially from the Spanish
and Portuguese. The presence of Dutch merchants and their guests
in Japan, confined largely to an island near Nagasaki, constituted
a unique nexus of Japanese/Western contact. Within this sphere, a
great deal of meaning-making revolved around masculinity. In 1690,
the German physician and traveler Engelbert Kaempfer, a rare foreign
visitor to the interior of Tokugawa Japan, commented on the curious
appearance of the inhabitants of the town of Uchino, who had “beau-
tiful faces but, at the same time, masculine figures.”32 Elsewhere
Kaempfer noted variation in Japanese appearance: “Although the
Japanese in the main, particularly the common People of Nippon, be
of a very ugly appearance, short siz’d, strong, thick-legg’d, tawny, with
flattish noses, and thick eye-lids . . . [others are] somewhat more maje-
stick in their shape and countenance, being more like the Europeans.
The Inhabitants of the Provinces Satzuma, Oosijmi, and Fiuga, are of
a middle-size, strong, couragious, and manly. . . . ”33
Later Western observers followed Kaempfer’s perception of diver-
sity among Japanese men; the travel writings of Western women,
particularly, observed with disgust the near-nudity of male labor-
ers, while a man from the higher classes might be described approv-
ingly as “a burly-looking individual, with a pleasant, good-humoured
expression of countenance.”34 Notably, these parsings of Japanese
masculinity do not occupy the neat margins described above of fem-
inine Orient or mimetic Japanese; instead, they cleave along planes
of class, physiognomy, and location. The same confusion of mascu-
linities was true for the 1860 embassy mentioned above; just as the
180 DENIS GAINTY
Japanese were rendered as “pretty pretties” by some, others noted

with consternation or approbation the attraction the Japanese men
held for American women, who were “in a state of excitement” and
“fairly wild” for the young English interpreter in particular.35 And
no less an American voice than the poet Walt Whitman, in his ode
to the Japanese embassy’s visit to New York, described the Japanese
simultaneously as “impassive” swordsmen and as the “Originatress
[ . . . ] Florid with blood, pensive, rapt with musings, hot with pas-
sion; Sultry with perfume, with ample and flowing garments [ . . . ]”36
Western views of Japanese masculinities may have been strongly
expressed, but they showed a marked lack of coherence.
All of this shows that Japanese masculinities were rendered mar-
ginal by Westerners along many axes, more than just those of tra-
dition/modernity and western/oriental. There are so many axes, in
fact, that it is tempting to conclude that the only thing these mar-
ginalizations have in common is the identities of subject and object
in their construction—that the act of marginalization is simply an
expression of Western subjectivity about Eastern identities.
One might reasonably object that the identification of the Japanese
as marginal, however, does not depend on who is in the centering
position of the subject; as the performance of the Meiji Emperor and
the writings of Nitobe Inazō demonstrate, some Japanese also viewed
Western masculinity as normative and, accordingly, per Connell’s
hierarchy of masculinities, marginalized Japanese manliness. But
this, too, is a small part of a much more complex picture. Turning
again to the Dutch, we see that they not only provided subjective
views of Japanese masculinity but also presented a colorful portrait
of strange manliness to modern Japanese observers. The scholar
Hirata Atsutane wrote in 1813 a startling meditation on the genitals
of Western men, comparing Dutch men to dogs: “When [the Dutch]
urinate they lift one leg, the way dogs do [ . . . ] This may explain
also why a Dutchman’s penis appears to be cut short at the end,
just like a dog’s.”37 While Hirata’s claims—which also included the
amusing observation that Dutch wore wooden heels because “their
feet do not reach to the ground”—were dismissed outright by most
observers, his fascination with outrageous Dutch masculinity betrays
a larger concern with understanding self and others through the lens
of the masculine. After the US naval officer Matthew Perry’s voyages
to Japan in 1853 and 1854 brought Western nations more forcibly
to Japanese attention, public Japanese reaction offered a range of
responses crafted around notions of Japanese and foreign mascu-
linity. In one striking example, a sketch prepared for the daimyō or
lord of Ogasawara showed a rikishi or sumo wrestler meeting sev-

eral American marines from Perry’s second voyage in 1854, who are
visibly overwhelmed—one physically—by his sheer, fleshy power.
Another illustration from 1861 by the woodblock artist Ippōsai
Yoshifuji presented a rikishi throwing a Western naval officer to the
ground. There’s a great deal that we could say about these images;
most noteworthy for our purposes is the fact that the Japanese per-
son in both is unclothed with his masculine power being very much
on display and that the relative position of Japanese and American in
each image establishes the dominance of the Japanese male. In the
sketch for the lord of Ogasawara, the Japanese corporeal masculin-
ity is even the subject of a sort of weak-postured wonder from the
American marines.
A different sort of attention to foreign masculinities is presented
by scholars such as Kume Kunitake. Kume traveled to America and
Europe in the 1870s, learning a great deal about Western culture
and society. In the process, Kume observed a disturbing tendency of
American men to be attached to their wives and deferential toward
women in general; these obvious faults in American masculinity he
attributed to the essential weakness of Indo-European racial stock.38
At the same time, many Japanese themselves cast a critical eye toward
their own newly Western-masculinized men: critics of the new, mod-
ern Japanese leadership, such as Honda Kinkichirō, illustrator for the
magazine Marumaru Chinbun, depicted prominent men in Western
dress as monkeys.39
Accompanying the sense we saw earlier of the desirability of imi-
tating Western masculinity was also a public perception of the faintly
pathetic nature of such imitations. So for the Japanese as for the
West, the construction of masculinities—Japanese or otherwise—
involved a lot of fluid marginalizations, including the situating of
both Western and Japanese masculinities in explicit contrast to and,
importantly, concurrence with shifting central norms. While Connell
claims that “ambiguities” such as these constitute a “mechanism of
hegemony,”40 such radically different positionings of what mascu-
linity could mean—and, more importantly, how compellingly and
effectively masculinity and nationhood could be mobilized in con-
structing locally consistent, meaningful, and agentive visions of self
and other—seem to reduce hegemonic masculinity to a meaningless
term. If any ambiguity can be written off as proof of a hegemonic
order, then there exists no masculinity, no human behavior, that is
not reducible to an element in the hegemonic system, and the very
term becomes so capacious as to be meaningless.
182 DENIS GAINTY
Martial Masculinities: The Dainippon

Butokukai and the Masculine National Body
A specific instance of Japanese masculinity-making throws the sub-
jective nature of nation, marginalization, and masculinity into sharp
relief. The example I present here is the Dainippon Butokukai, or
Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association. While not well known
now—even by Japanese—this organization’s efforts to codify and
popularize martial arts in modern Japan produced two very impor-
tant results. The first and more practical was the transformation
of Japanese physical education curricula; by 1912, thanks to the
Butokukai’s efforts, the “traditional” martial arts of kendō and jūdō
were made a formal element in Japanese public school education.41
The second more important result, flowing from the first, was an
important set of interconnections forged through Butokukai rhetoric
and practice, within which the physical, local body were associated
powerfully with the Japanese nation-state through the logic of a body
politic.
The Butokukai was founded in 1895, and its creation coincided
with the 1100th anniversary celebrations of the capital of Heian-kyō
(present-day Kyoto). The founders—a local tax official, a policeman,
and a kimono designer—initially conceived of the organization as a
means to foster both martial virtue and martial arts practice through-
out the populace. Major early initiatives included the publication of
a monthly journal (beginning in 1906), within which much of the
organization’s activities and rhetoric are recorded. These include a
heavy emphasis on body training and its value in strengthening the
nation, especially on the international stage.42
The logic put forward repeatedly in the organization’s journals was
complex, but it rested on two main points: First, that the actions of
individual Japanese bodies had an important effect on the greater
Japanese body politic, or kokutai (literally country-body); second,
that the kokutai was not only the essence of Japan, but inextrica-
ble from the body of the sovereign (from the Meiji period called the
Emperor) so that “nation” was a framework incorporating both indi-
vidual human bodies and the divine body of the Emperor. So when
martial arts were finally introduced to public schools, this represented
an important step toward guaranteeing a healthy, strong Japan among
other modern nations playing the high-stakes, rough-and-tumble
game of social Darwinism.43
What is most striking here is not simply the development of a
physical culture that dovetails with the modern nation. Nor is it the
masculinity of that physical culture—in that men were overwhelm-

ingly the martial artists who joined and enjoyed and even spectated
at Butokukai events, and that the national body rendered analogous
to—or even consonant with—citizen bodies was male. More impor-
tantly, the Butokukai and its martial arts program provided an inti-
mate association for bodies with the masculine, corporeal identity of
the Imperial nation. We have already seen the visible presentation of
Imperial masculinity and how the Emperor’s male identity becomes
increasingly clear in a Western sense, and therefore how the ties
between Emperor’s body, the national body, and one’s own body are
given a masculine cast.
The mere fact that modern Japanese bodies were associated with
a masculinist national project seems to coincide neatly with the heu-
ristic of hegemony. But equally important for our purposes is the fact
that, although the organization had important ties to government,
we see wide variations in practice and rhetoric in the local instantia-
tions of the group. The Butokukai, though led ostensibly by a central
headquarters in Kyoto, consisted of dozens of local branches at the
prefectural and sub-prefectural level. At each of these local branches,
the broadly conceived signifiers of nation, national body, martial arts,
and masculinity were appropriated and mobilized in very different
ways. The 1906 annual festival of the Yamagata Prefectural branch
of the Butokukai celebrated with a range of activities, including not
only martial arts such as kendō or swordsmanship but also horse and
bicycle races. Five years earlier the Butokukai had already assumed
responsibility for boat races (in the Western style of crew/regatta) on
Lake Biwa, incorporating those events into its celebration of mascu-
line Japanese martial virtue. And in 1908 in Hashima-gun, Gifu pre-
fecture, the local Butokukai organization complemented more usual
martial activities with organized mochi-throwing.44
All of these practices—from martial arts in schools to local
jūdō tournaments to horse, bicycle, and boat races—celebrated
Butokukai members’ claims to represent the physical health of the
Japanese national body. The local variability of practice—the very
wide range of events that were comfortably accommodated within
the Butokukai, and through which Butokukai members partook of
the sheen of the modern, masculine nation—indicated the freedom
enjoyed by Butokukai members to fill categories of nation, mascu-
linity, and modernity with their own local meanings. The work of
the Butokukai as a national organization revealed a nation open to
comfortable appropriation and mobilization by an impressively broad
spectrum of beliefs and ideas.
184 DENIS GAINTY
Moreover, the range of activities was matched by an emphasis on the

importance of the individual’s role in this embodied collective. Over
and over, theorists writing for the Butokukai stressed the dependency
of the Japanese national body on the activities of its citizens; over and
over, readers were reminded that the nation-state, the kokka, could
be made genki —healthy, energetic—only if its citizens made the con-
scious effort to be genki themselves. This means that while a norma-
tive, corporeal Imperial masculinity was understood to be the de facto
identity of the Japanese nation, and while Japanese citizens45 were
understood to be linked to the corporealized, Imperial masculinity of
the national body, this linkage was not the top-down subjugation and
mobilization of individual humans by social structures that we have
come to expect from dominant social theories of the body and soci-
ety.46 That kind of model, to be sure, would encourage us to think
yet again of the agentive masculinity of the Butokukai—conceived by
non-state actors in a non-Western country, practiced in nonstandard
ways in the nation’s hinterlands—as marginal both to the regional
hegemonic masculinity of the corporealized Japanese nation and
empire and to the Western/global model of hegemonic masculinity.
Following Connell’s hierarchy of masculinities, “marginal” seems the
best description of local imaginations of embodied agency against the
far grander vision of a nationally endorsed, Western-emulating mas-
culine identity supposedly fed to Japanese subjects for the purposes
of mobilizing them in the grander plans of oligarchs bent on political,
economic, and social stabilization—the celebration of hegemony so
often applied to bodies, to masculinities, and to the nation in mod-
ern Japanese historiography. But the example of the Butokukai shows
precisely the lack of control, and even coherence, enjoyed by any ideo-
logical program of the state; instead, it was individuals who, through
their bodies, conceived and controlled their notions of national col-
lective identity—not by resisting an a priori structure, but by under-
standing and claiming the state as their own bodied project. That
national identity could be achieved in any number of ways: through
the nominally traditional practices of Japanese martial arts, through
boat or horse racing, or—under the auspices of the Martial Virtue
association’s publication—through the ultra-modern, just-published
European calisthenics of the Danish fitness enthusiast Jørgen Peter
Mü ller. Here, clearly, the manly agency, the active central mascu-
linity, was experienced—paradoxically, both uniquely and multiply—
by each participant in the Meiji story. Through the metaphor of the
embodied nation, in a broad range of ways, individual Japanese bod-
ies shaped their own masculine cosmologies; the realms of nation
and masculine were in every case projections of individual embodied

experiences, and the notion of a globally, regionally, or even locally
normative hegemony does not apply. Alternately, and perhaps more
usefully, we could understand that each and every individual Japanese
man was paradoxically the sole provenance and central arbiter of heg-
emonic masculine nationalism—that hegemony simply has no mean-
ing beyond one individual’s embodied production thereof.
This is, in essence, a fairly basic argument for local agency over
structural order: the idea that nationalist masculinity has the poten-
tial to reside at the center of whomever is shaping, experiencing, and
communicating that national masculine identity. That any given
masculinity can be viewed as marginal from a range of perspectives
should be no surprise; as both Western and Japanese examples above
show, any masculinity can be rendered foolish, animal, crude, dan-
gerous, or otherwise Other. But what Connell has achieved in her
assertion and subsequent defense of the viability of hegemonic anal-
ysis of masculinities is an essential marginalization of masculinities
that are not central to her own assessment of the order of society. By
taking a general view of masculine norms, Connell’s theory assumes
two key points. First, even in an admitted plurality of masculinities,
a dominant normative masculinity can be identified; as Connell and
Messerschmidt bleakly assert, “Whatever the empirical diversity of
masculinities . . . gender hierarchy does not have multiple niches at the
top.”47 Second, the single top-level niche is necessarily determined at
a level beyond the individual; the perception and evaluation of heg-
emonic masculinities is the business of social theorists, and the per-
ception of agency or subordination by local actors—the production
of reality by persons in history—is evaluated through the interpretive
lens of the historian.
This is in no way to argue for a historiography devoid of interpre-
tation, a “true account” of the past. Such an endeavor is at best na ïve,
and at worst a cover for the denial of alternative theoretical stances.
Nor, to be clear, do I suggest that Connell’s work on masculinities is
anything but an important contribution to our understanding of the
interrelationship of gender and power in history. Instead, my aim is
to suggest an alternative viewpoint that assumes the fundamental role
of the embodied self in constructing global visions of masculinity and
the nation. To do so, it may be useful to revisit what Connell in her
initial formulation described somewhat dismissively as “positivist”
masculinity, or masculinity as defined by the performance of men.
Connell’s critiques of “positivism”—that it cannot exist free from
interpretive perspective, that the category of “men” is dependent
186 DENIS GAINTY
on the definition of “masculine” and therefore locked in self-refer-

ence, and that such definitions cannot allow for a non-man to act in
a “masculine” fashion48 —are of course useful, especially in under-
standing the very real political struggles around gender, power, and
participation in modern societies. But hidden in the notion of “pos-
itivist” masculinity is the attention to local behavior and experience.
The value of mining the experiences of individuals for definitions of
masculinity is that it allows for a reinsertion of meaningful agency
into the social theorization of masculinities and the modern nation.
By dismissing positivism, we run the risk of dismissing that agency
in favor of structural, macro-level interpretations and assumptions.
This is exactly the problem with Connell and Messerschmidt’s atten-
tion to the possibility of “local” hegemonic masculinities. According
to Connell and Messerschmidt, such local masculinities are, with
regional masculinities, “shaped” by global processes; global institu-
tions “pressure regional and local gender orders”; and “regional heg-
emonic masculinity shapes a society-wide sense of masculine reality
and, therefore, operates in the cultural domain as on-hand material
to be actualized, altered, or challenged through practice in a range of
different local circumstances.”49 Connell and Messerschmidt do not
deny outright the importance of local (hegemonic) masculinities, but
their focus continues to be on macro-level structures that invest and
inform the micro.
Conclusion
It would be simplistic, if satisfying, to return to our vermicular friend
C. Elegans, to say that the semiotic fluidity of masculinity and the
nation charted in this chapter ultimately leads us back to the idea that
all gender constructs are marginal to some putatively central idea,
some Grand Unified Theory of culture and history. The wasteful
design, the essential marginality, that is the male sex—with its frills
and displays, its spectacular poses and conflicts, all for the sake of a
little roll of the genetic dice—seem somehow to underscore all actual
experiences of masculinity. Such a model, of course, posits the essen-
tial femaleness of the asexual reproducer—the de facto femininity of
the single worm parent—leading us back into the use of a normative
gender against which the Other can be constructed. That this is the
same kind of normalization applied to masculinity, the same heg-
emonic recourse to hegemony, against which this chapter contends
leads me to wonder again whether every local construction of gen-
der might not always depend on the simultaneous construction and
maintenance of a holistic and self-contained microsystem of margin

and center for its operation.
In the case of the modern nation—the modern Japanese nation,
and perhaps the modern nation more generally—I am suggesting that
margin and center are crucial for the understanding and experience
and transmission of masculinities, but most importantly so as cat-
egories created and maintained by each individual’s experience and
performance of masculinity. For Japanese, the perception of marginal
masculinities—those of other Japanese, or those of Europeans or
Americans—was an important part of building their own center(s). At
the same time, I argue that male Japanese citizens only understood
nation and state as expressions of their own personal central mascu-
linities; that it was only through a subject-centered perspective that
nation made any sense at all. For male Japanese, one’s own national
masculinity was the central story, and to dismiss such perception of
centrality and agency as false consciousness is armchair theorizing at
its condescending worst.
I have argued here that the variable marginalization and centering
of Japanese masculinities negotiated a central problem in Japanese
and world history—and more broadly, in history and the social sci-
ences, through which individual agents could make meaning of the
play of world and body, of social and biological. By putting muscles
and mustaches onto nation, empire, tradition, self, collective, and a
host of other categories, Japanese masculinities provided Japanese and
foreigners a language of similarity and difference through which to
understand and narrate themselves and their cosmos. Through con-
texts such as the Greater Japan Martial Virtue Association, Japanese
appropriated and inhabited supposedly hegemonic notions of nation
and masculinity in order to imbue universals with their own local
meanings. Through the comparative consideration of Japanese and
foreign masculinities and national identities, a range of actors made
sense of their social and physical worlds.
In examining this sense-making, I have deliberately stressed here
the local agency experienced through tropes of masculinity and the
nation. This is offered less as the “best” interpretation of the modern
world than as a counterweight to the dominant interpretive schemes
of hegemony, ideology, and the like that continue to overwhelm
studies in the modern gendered nation and condition us to look for
dominance and resistance rather than cooperation or concurrence.
Structural arguments of hegemony and the like have an important
role in our historical consideration of gender and the modern nation,
and indeed in our lives as humans. But without the goad of other,
188 DENIS GAINTY
more personal, more local arguments, a structure-heavy reading of

history runs the risk of fostering complacency and stagnation. In
other words, I offer this chapter as a sort of environmental toxin, a
parasite, that challenges the idea of hegemony in order not to extin-
guish but to encourage and enhance. In the interests of the fullest
conversation, and the most complete understanding of ourselves and
our worlds, we must employ all the arguments available to us. In
the end, our goal must not be to find one interpretation of modern
humanity that “wins”; instead, it is truly the best we can do to mobi-
lize all perspectives just to keep in place.
Notes
1. Michael A. Brockhurst, “Sex, Death, and the Red Queen,” Science 333,
no. 6039 (July 8, 2011): 166–167.
2. Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), Through the Looking-Glass, and What
Alice Found There (Boston, MA: International Pocket Library, 1969),
42.
3. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,”
American Historical Review, 91 no. 5 (December 1986): 1053–1075.
4. For an overview of experientialism, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,
Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980),
especially chapters 25–29; George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). For a representa-
tive critique of experientialism, see Verena Haser’s Metaphor, Metonymy,
and Experientialist Philosophy: Challenging Cognitive Semantics (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2005), chapter 1.
Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005):
848.
6. Connell and Messerschmidt point, for example, to “economic resources
and institutional authority” as criteria for classifying masculinities as
hegemonically active or not. Ibid., 848.
7. Ibid., 849–850.
8. Brennon Wood, “Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies and the Problem of
Hegemony,” British Journal of Sociology 49, no. 3 (September 1998):
399–414, 401.
9. Ibid.
10. See Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking work Imagined Communities
(London: Verso, 1983) for an extended meditation on the systemic power
of the nation. David A. Bell, in his study of the coercive nature of nation-
building in his study of late-eighteenth-century French nationalism,
claims that “nationalism is a political program to construct [a nation],
casting its human raw material into a fundamentally new form.” The Cult
of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2001), 3. In the case of modern Japan, Carol Gluck’s
Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1985) emphasizes the coercive power of an
(admittedly multivocal) ideological program, while Sheldon Garron’s
Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997) similarly analyzes the Japanese nation-
state as a dominating structure that “molds” the minds of its citizens.
11. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1983), 85, 87.
12. See especially R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005) as well as Connell and Messerschmidt,
“Hegemonic Masculinity.” The latter contains a helpful review of early
and ongoing work in developing the idea of hegemonic masculinity in
studies of gay liberation; in social sciences such as psychology, sociology,
and criminal studies; and more broadly in the humanities and other fields.
Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity,” 830–835.
242–269 (244).
14. Ibid, 251.
15. Ibid, 261.
16. Jason Karlin, “Gender, Nationalism, and the Problem of Ideology,”
Social Science Japan 30 (December 2004): 5–7, offers a brief critique
of the historiographical tendency to portray women reductively as
resistant to/victimized by the implicitly masculine nation-state. The
masculine nature of the modern Japanese nation-state is given more
support in Jason Karlin’s “The Gender of Nationalism: Completing
Masculinities in Meiji Japan,” Journal of Japanese Studies 28, no. 2
(2001): 41–77. Similarly, Sandra Wilson’s thoughtful investiga-
tion of inconsistencies in state-sponsored gender/family ideologies
takes as its focus the work of the state and its top-down ideologi-
cal apparatus: “Family or State? Nation, War, and Gender in Japan,
1937–45,” Critical Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2006): 209–238. While
studies of postwar masculinity such as James Roberson and Nobue
Suzuki’s edited volume Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan:
Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa (New York: Routledge, 2002) prob-
lematize the centrality and coherence of modern Japanese masculinity
in the work of the nation, Yumiko Mikanagi’s “Masculinities and the
Reconstruction of Japan’s National Identity in the Postwar Period,”
Conference Papers—American Political Science Association (2005):
1–9, exemplifies the tendency to ascribe masculinity, in the singular or
plural, to the work of the nation-state.
17. That such focus on oppressive structures serves often to magnify
their importance and effect is an important if perverse effect of these
analyses.
18. Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic
Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society 30, no. 3 (June 2001):
337–361.
190 DENIS GAINTY
20. For the standard work on the exoticization of a reified East by an uncritical
West, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1979).
21. While many historians of modern Japan have moved beyond the sim-
plistic notion of a “closed country” prodded by the modern West to a
second-class, reactive modernity—an interpretation itself steeped in Cold
War struggles between Marxist and modernization historical camps—the
idea of mimesis remains strongly entrenched. See, for example, Robert
Eskildsen’s “Of Civilizations and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of
Japan’s 1874 Expedition to Taiwan,” American Historical Review 107,
no. 2 (April 2002): 388–418.
22. Edward Ross Dickinson, “Sex, Masculinity, and the ‘Yellow Peril’:
Christian von Ehrenfels’ Program for a Revision of the European Sexual
Order, 1902–1910,” German Studies Review 25, no. 2 (May 2002): 255–
284, 256.
23. For Ludwig Jahn’s influence on German physical culture, see Berit
Elisabeth Dencker, “Popular Gymnastics and the Military Spirit in
Germany, 1848–1871,” Central European History 34, no. 4 (2001):
503–530. For Charles Kingsley and muscular Christianity, see Norman
Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in
Victorian Literature and Religious Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985). For muscular Christianity in the United States,
see Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in
Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003). For muscular Judaism (Muskeljudentum) and Max Nordau, see
Todd Samuel Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics
of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007).
24. “Japanese Whittlings,” Harper’s Weekly, June 2, 1860, 340. The mis-
spelled text here is presented both as commentary on the Japanese and
mockery of then vice presidential candidate Hannibal Hamlin, whose
supposed observations were rendered in crude and incorrect spelling.
25. “Boston Relieved of a Cruel Doubt,” Vanity Fair, June 2, 1860, 355.
Cited in David Scott, “‘Power and Perceptions’ in American Encounters
with Japan, 1860,” Journal of World History 17, no. 3 (September 2006):
297–337, 305.
26. “A Japanese Curiosity,” Vanity Fair, May 26, 1860, 344. Cited in Scott,
“Power and Perceptions,” 308.
27. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Seiyō Ishokujū (Tokyo: Katayamashi, 1867).
28. Alistair Swale, The Political Thought of Mori Arinori: A Study in Meiji
Conservatism (London: Japan Library, Curzon Press, 2000).
29. The historian Takashi Fujitani captures this transformation in his
Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), especially 175–178.
30. Nitobe Inazō, Bushidō: The Soul of Japan (Philadelphia, PA: Leeds and
Biddle, 1900).
31. Cited in Luke Roberts, “Empowering the Would-Be Warrior: Bushidō
and the Gendered Bodies of the Japanese Nation” in Sabine Fr ü hst ück
and Anne Walthall, eds., Recreating Japanese Men (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011), 68–90, 75.
32. Engelbert Kaempfer, Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed,

Beatrice M. Bodart-Bailey, ed./trans./annotated (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1999), 388.
33. Engelbert Kaempfer, The History of Japan, Together with a Description
of the Kingdom of Siam1690–1692 , Volume 1, J. G. Scheuchzer, trans
(Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1906), 151.
34. Anna D’Almeida, A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan (London: Hurst
and Blackett, 1863), 270.
35. “Vanity Fair Welcomes the Japanese Embassy on Behalf of the Ladies,”
Vanity Fair, June 16, 1860; cited in Scott, “Power and Perceptions,”
307.
36. Walt Whitman, “A Broadway Pageant” in Leaves of Grass (New York:
Bantam/Dell, 2004), 203–204
37. Quoted in Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe 1720–1830
(reprint, 1952; New York: Routledge, 2011), 111.
38. Marlene J. Mayo, “The Western Education of Kume Kunitake 1871–6,”
Monumenta Nipponica 28, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 3–67, 60.
39. Marumaru chinbun, no. 105 (April 26, 1879): 1671.
41. In 2012, on the centenary of their first formal introduction into national
education, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science
and Technology again made Japanese martial arts mandatory elements in
Japanese physical education.
42. See Denis Gainty, Martial Arts and the Body Politic in Meiji Japan (New
York: Routledge, 2013).
43. For a more detailed discussion of the Butokukai and its work to define
the modern Japanese national body, see ibid.
44. Mochi is a sticky, sweet paste made from white rice, popular in Japanese
confections and not unlike a marshmallow mated with a gumball in con-
sistency. Mochi-throwing involves the festive, rambunctious hurling of
mochi from rooftops to a waiting crowd. For a discussion of local varia-
tions of Butokukai activities, see Gainty, Martial Arts, chapter 3.
45. The category of “citizens” did not explicitly include women in the Meiji
period, and would not—depending on the criteria applied—until 1946.
At the same time, it would be a serious error to assume that both women
and femininity were not importantly part of the project to define citizen-
ship, nation, and masculinity.
46. Of these, Foucault’s notions of atomization (the delineation and atten-
dant control over the individual subject) and bio-power (the mobilization
of many human bodies in the service of larger structures, such as nation-
state or empire) are perhaps most relevant and most widely applied.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction
(New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
48. Connell, Masculinities, 69.
49. Connell and Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinities,” 849–850.
C H A P T E R 10
The Transnational Origins of

Hegemonic Dominican Masculinity*
Maja Horn
The Dominican presidential campaign leading up to the 2012 elec-

tions littered the national landscape with political slogans. Among
these was the presidential candidate Hipólito Mejía’s ubiquitous
“Llegó Papá” (Daddy’s here). This slogan largely overrode more usual
political promises, evincing the power of the discourse of masculinity
in Dominican politics. The important role that gender plays in the
Dominican national imaginary and in constructing citizenship and
state power demands a more complex understanding of hegemonic
notions of Dominican masculinity, of the conceptions of femininity
that they produce, and of their historical emergence. In fact, notions
of gender have long modulated Dominican nationalist discourses in
incisive ways and continue to do so up until today. However, evo-
cations of masculinity in Dominican nationalist discourses are usu-
ally rationalized as instances of centuries-old “traditional” Latin
American patriarchal culture rearing its head. What is thereby elided
is how notions of masculinity evolve and change over time; indeed,
I argue that today’s hegemonic notions of masculinity were consoli-
dated during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–1961)
and thus are in many ways a distinctly modern formation. In turn,
Trujillo’s own pervasively hypervirile discourse was, at least in part,
a strategic response to the imperial and racialized notions of mascu-
linity that accompanied the US presence in the country, especially
during the US military occupation (1916–1924). Against the ten-
dency to equate Trujillo’s discourse of masculinity simply with that
of a stereotypical Latin American “strongman,” or caudillo, I point
194 MAJA HORN
to the importance of accounting for how transnational and imperi-

alist forces, including international political discourses of sovereignty
and Euro-American racism, also shaped its articulation and hence the
notions of masculinity that became hegemonic during the Trujillato
and largely remain so up until today.
The pivotal role of gender in Dominican national political dis-
courses has already been foregrounded in the work of various other
scholars. The most sustained engagement with notions of masculinity
in Dominican politics is found in the work of anthropologist Christian
Krohn-Hansen, first in his essay “Masculinity and the Political among
Dominicans: ‘The Dominican Tiger,’” and then in his book-length
study Political Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic.1 In the
latter, based on his ethnographic research in the country’s southwestern
region, Krohn-Hansen argues that “ideas of political life . . . were often
closely interwoven with notions of masculinity.”2 This includes how
“relations between leaders and followers, or patrons and clients, were
given meaning in terms of ideas about masculinity.”3 Other scholars,
including the historians Lauren Derby and Richard Lee Turits, show
in their scholarship how notions of gender played a key role in the
Trujillato’s discourse and how it was able to interpellate the Dominican
people. Importantly, Derby emphasizes that the masculinity that was
deemed appropriate by the dictator in the highest realm of political
power and at the helm of the nation differed from previous elite notions
of masculinity; instead, Trujillo embodied a previously marginal, pop-
ular form of Dominican masculinity that became hegemonic under his
regime. This chapter concurs with this scholarship and builds on it, but
I emphasize more strongly how the Trujillato occasioned a significant
reconfiguration and thus break in hegemonic notions of Dominican
masculinity that is reflected, for example, in the emergence of a new
predominant male popular subjectivity, the tíguere, during the dictator-
ship years. Most importantly, this chapter, drawing from recent schol-
arship by historians such as April Mayes, Neici Zeller, and Elizabeth
Manley, foregrounds that this reconfiguration of hegemonic notions
of masculinity cannot be understood without taking into account how
US imperialism, most notably during the US military occupation from
1916–1924, and its language of racialized imperial masculinity impacted
the country. This chapter thus suggests how notions of masculinity
that now have become a key part of Dominican national discourse and
self-understanding were shaped initially by transnational impulses that
remain largely misrecognized by scholars.
Dominican hegemonic gender notions today include, as the
Dominican sociologist E. Antonio de Moya suggests, a “consensus”
HEGEMONIC DOMINICAN MASCULINITY 195
that “(1) men are the ‘exact opposite’ of women, whatever any or
both of them could be; (2) homosocial relations among men are
experienced as competitive gendered relations in terms of domina-
tion-subordination.”4 These shared hegemonic norms exist alongside
a variety of Dominican masculinities and femininities, including a
“multiplicity of (situational) masculine identities displayed by each
man.”5 Drawing from Australian sociologist R. W. Connell’s work on
“hegemonic masculinity,” de Moya further notes how the majority
of Dominican men do not necessarily embody this norm, but rather
hegemonic masculinity functions as a “measure against which all men
will compare themselves.”6 In Connell’s own words,
Hegemonic masculinities can be constructed that do not correspond

closely to the lives of any actual men. Yet these models do, in various
ways, express widespread ideals, fantasies, and desires. They provide
models of relations with women and solutions to problems of gender
relations. Furthermore, they articulate loosely with the practical con-
stitution of masculinities as ways of living in everyday local circum-
stances. To the extent they do this, they contribute to hegemony in the
society-wide order as a whole . . . 7
Rather than the “normal” behavior of Dominican men, what this

chapter is concerned with are precisely these gendered ideals, fanta-
sies, and desires that structure relations in the Dominican private and
public sphere, including in the political realm.
American sociologist and prominent masculinities scholar Michael
Kimmel foregrounds the importance of understanding hegemonic
masculinity and gender more broadly as a relational construct that
structures and is structured by the social (and, as I emphasize also,
the political). Kimmel critiques approaches that make “gender a set
of individual attributes and not an aspect of social structure,” which
he finds ultimately “depoliticizes gender.”8 Indeed, gender needs to be
addressed as a structural force rather than solely through the lens of
individual identity in the Dominican Republic. For example, we need
far more nuanced understandings of how local gender formations
interact with what are thought to be the “modernizing forces” of eco-
nomic development, democratization, and globalization. The massive
entry of women into the workforce, new laws and political quotas, the
impact of globalization, and generational changes have not recon-
figured Dominican gender norms in easily predictable ways. Yet it
is not only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that
modernizing and outside forces have modulated Dominican gender
196 MAJA HORN
formations but rather, as I foreground in this chapter, these have been

mediated by outside impulses long before the age of globalization.
A more historically informed and nuanced understanding of these
interactions and relations helps to illuminate the particular forms of
political expediency that gender discourses have in the Dominican
Republic, where having power and being powerless, domination and
subordination, and being a leader or a follower are often phrased in
gendered terms and through notions of virility. These sexualized
forms of differentiation masculinize the political and public sphere,
inscribe men and women in particular sexualized gender dynamics,
and tend to divide women among themselves, while also entering
men into a competitive relationship with one another. The divisive
effects of these dynamics and their political impact in fact may not
be unrelated to the challenges that collective organizing has faced in
the country and to the oft-noted shortcomings of democratic gover-
nance in the country since the end of the dictatorship. In fact, both
the stagnancy of Dominican national politics and the recurrence of
discourses and beliefs of the Trujillato, I insist, are intimately tied up
with its gendered legacies.
This structural role and force of Dominican gender discourses and
their changes and reconfigurations over time are missed by the preva-
lent diagnosis of Dominican “gender trouble,” and of discourses such
as Mejía’s “Llegó Papá,” as a straightforward outgrowth of a per-
nicious “traditional” Latin American patriarchal culture with roots
in the Hispanic colonial past. Indeed, my premise is not to offer a
denunciation of Dominican masculinity as “a bad barbaric tradition”
that calls for proper “modern” schooling. Rather this study suggests
how modern Dominican gender mores have been and continue to be
shaped also through the interaction with “modern” outside powers
and their underlying patriarchal and often racist conceptions.
Historical Origins of Hegemonic

Dominican Masculinity
The century before Rafael L. Trujillo came to power tends to be
described as a long period of political instability marked by constant
battles between regional caudillos for power, the threat of Haitian inva-
sions, and the voluntary ceding of the country’s sovereignty to become
a colony of Spain again from 1861 to 1865. What historical accounts
emphasize much less, beside these predominant historical plotlines, is
the insistent meddling of US forces and its lasting consequences. The
United States began to have a notable presence in the country around
the mid-nineteenth century, and it took on a preponderant role with

the full takeover of Dominican customs operations “in progressive
steps between 1904 and 1907.” 9 Eventually, these events led to an
eight-year military occupation of the country, from 1916 to 1924.10
The effects of the long-lasting US presence on Dominican society,
politics, and national identity remain greatly understudied, especially in
comparison to the attention scholars and writers have paid to the coun-
try’s relations to its former colonial power, Spain, and to its neighbor,
Haiti. Indeed, insistent foregrounding of Dominican-Haitian enmity,
often represented as an almost inevitable struggle arising out of two
nations sharing the same island, omits how outside forces—both US
and European—helped produce and foster tensions between them in the
first place.11 I thus first address how the US presence and intervention
shaped Dominican national sentiments and gender formations in ways
that facilitated not only Trujillo’s rise to power but also Dominicans’
embrace of his national popular political rhetoric, including its hyper-
bolic language of masculinity. I then, through a close analysis of key
speeches and discourses of the Trujillato, outline the specific ramifi-
cations of this language of masculinity and its lasting impact on the
Dominican national imaginary, social relations, and political culture.
The United States began to play a preeminent role in the Caribbean
in the nineteenth century and cemented its supremacy in the region with
the onset of the Spanish-American War in 1898. In The United States
and the Caribbean: Transforming Hegemony and Sovereignty, Anthony
P. Maingot and Wilfredo Lozano describe the precepts that underwrote
the long-standing American involvement in the region as a “Caribbean
version of Manifest Destiny [that] was outright imperialism wrapped
in a thick ideology with geopolitical and neo-Darwinian racism.12 In
fact, it was greatly in the interest of Dominicans, in their many-decade
negotiations and dealings with the United States and its racist ideology,
to signal their “worth” by downplaying their own blackness and empha-
sizing their racial difference from their Haitian neighbors.
These racialized imperial dynamics firmly took hold when the
United States, then under President Theodore Roosevelt, took over
Dominican customs operations. This move was indicative of how
during this period “U.S. diplomats moved from a position of influ-
ence to one of decisive authority . . . in the Dominican Republic and
around the Caribbean.”13 This takeover was accompanied by a host
of political and cultural ideologies. As Emily S. Rosenberg describes,
“In his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1904), Roosevelt stated that
when nations of the Western hemisphere conducted their economic
affairs irresponsibly enough to raise the possibility of European
198 MAJA HORN
intervention, the United States would assume the role of an ‘interna-

tional police power. . . . ’ The Dominican Republic became the first of
what might be called dollar diplomacy dependencies (others would be
Nicaragua, Liberia, and Haiti).”14 The “dollar diplomacy” doctrine
was not just an intervention in a country’s economic and financial
affairs but was accompanied by an ideology that “blended discourses
about manhood, race, adulthood, managerial expertise, and national
interest into a program for spreading civilization.”15 Specifically, dol-
lar diplomacy fused gendered and racialized notions in its civilizatory
mission to provide “manly uplift to the darker-skinned peoples.”16
The countries on the receiving end of this “civilizing” mission thus
figured as racially inferior and inherently less manly.17
The gendered implications of this civilizatory project emerge in
this powerful comparison made by Rosenberg between dollar diplo-
macy and bourgeois marriage, which “involved a contract in which
the dominant (male) party promised monetary support (loans) and
supervision in return for obedience and acceptance of regulation.”
18
In turn, the countries on the receiving end of dollar diplomacy,
“like women in late Victorian bourgeois marriages, were coded as
weak, irresponsible, irrational, and prone to excesses that needed to
be brought under control.”19 As in marriage, there were thus embed-
ded “status inequalities” in dollar diplomacy, “even as the contracts
tended to be culturally presented as freely negotiated and based on
mutual attraction.”20 The impact of these ideologies and how they
shaped what may be called the psychological infrastructure of the
country remain insufficiently understood.
The US military occupation that began in 1916, however, no
longer offered the illusion of having been “freely negotiated.” Scholars
generally denounce this curtailing of Dominican sovereignty by the
United States but also quickly move on to the occupation’s often
lauded “modernizing” measures, including infrastructure construc-
tions (new roads and communication systems) and a more central-
ized governance system and police force, among others. One notable
exception to this emphasis on the physical over the psychological
impact of the US occupation is the oft-noted Dominican nationalist
fervor that awoke in response to the occupation.
Other important ways in which the US imperial presence affected
the country’s collective psyche and national imaginary remain largely
unexplored. However, more recently, various historians—including
Lauren Derby, April Mayes, Elizabeth Manley, Neici Zeller, and Melissa
Madera—have begun to pay closer attention to how the American mil-
itary occupation and Dominican nationalists’ reactions to it impacted
Dominican gender formations. Their scholarship shows how some of

the US occupation’s gendered discourses and policies were later perpet-
uated by Dominican governments, while others were strongly resisted
by Dominican nationalists; however, in either case Dominican gender
formations were shaped in lasting ways by the American presence.
Melissa Madera, in her 2011 dissertation “‘Zones of Scandal’:
Gender, Public Health, and Social Hygiene in the Dominican
Republic, 1916–1961,” describes how the US occupation, as part of
its civilizatory mission, implemented “‘modern’ public health and san-
itary reforms” that “aimed to control female bodies in the Dominican
Republic.”21 The occupation created an “official discourse against
prostitution, and female criminality more generally, which was seem-
ingly non-existent before the occupation, [and that] would become
more prevalent throughout the 1920s and the Era of Trujillo.”22 One
of the effects of this new public health discourse and practice was,
according to Madera, that women were “increasingly pushed . . . into
patriarchal relationships that served to help them [the occupation
powers] control and watch over ‘disorderly’ women.”23 Thus, dur-
ing the US occupation and thereafter, “disorderly” women became
a lasting concern of the Dominican state, while “orderly” woman
were pushed back into more conventional gender roles. Women were
enlisted into a patriarchal state project of controlling and denouncing
“disorderly” women and thereby dividing women among themselves
into “orderly” and “disorderly” or “good” and “bad” women.
If some of the US military government’s gendered interventions
were adopted by the Dominican government and became national
practice later, there was also at the same time an ardent rejection by
Dominican nationalists of what were seen as US-style “modern” gen-
der mores. As April J. Mayes describes,
During the occupation . . . Dominican nationalists embraced José

Enrique Rodó’s extraordinarily popular work, Ariel, published in
1900, and its “stridently anti-democratic,” inward-looking polemic
that called upon Latin Americans to protect the Latin race and its
high culture from Yankee imperialism, secular democracy, material-
ism, and Protestantism. For their part, Dominican nationalists ide-
alized the family and patriarchal authority as sources of Latinidad ’s
moral power.24
These idealizations resulted in a more conservative Dominican gen-

der politics, as “Dominican nationalists constructed a nationalist
mythology that removed women from the public sphere.”25 Their
vision of modern Dominican nationhood, in response to American
200 MAJA HORN
imperialism, placed emphasis on patriarchal control of women and on

motherhood as women’s principal role. In turn, “women who were
deemed ‘modern’ were criticized for dressing provocatively and were
viewed as unpatriotic” as “maternity and nationalism” became linked
in Dominican “modernizing discourse.”26
The US presence also impacted Dominican masculinity and gen-
dered the Dominican political imaginary in new ways. Neici Zeller,
in her dissertation, “The Appearance of All, the Reality of Nothing:
Politics and Gender in the Dominican Republic, 1880–1961,”
describes the gendered terms through which the curtailing of the
country’s sovereignty by the United States was understood. According
to Zeller, in accounts from that time period, “we can read a feminized
but valiant ‘la República Dominicana’ resisting the male forces of ‘los
Estados Unidos.’”27 Lauren Derby similarly notes how Dominicans
sensed that “the nation had been violated, penetrated by an occu-
pying force, and thus rendered passive, dependent, emasculated.”28
Derby thus speaks of a resulting “crisis of manhood” related to how
“during the occupation, Dominican men had been deprived of their
right to the National Palace, and their control over the home and
the street had been compromised.”29 In response to the emasculating
experience of the US occupation, Dominicans felt that the nation and
Dominican men needed to recuperate and reassert their virility.
Importantly, this view of Dominican national identity and male
subjectivity was not solely held by men but was also embraced and even
vigorously policed by Dominican women. Zeller recounts, for exam-
ple, the following anecdote of Ercilia Pepín, a renowned Dominican
women’s organization leader and schoolteacher: “Ercilia Pepín sent a
skirt to a neighboring male teacher who had lowered the Dominican
flag when the U.S. troops entered the town; a curt note asked him to
stop wearing trousers since he clearly did not need them.”30 Cowardly
behavior is here clearly (and problematically) linked to feminization,
including by women themselves. Interestingly, Pepín’s “dismissal of
the male teacher as unworthy of his gender simultaneously cast her
as virile, since she had kept the Dominican flag on its staff while
the troops marched by her school.”31 This episode thus points to the
strongly polarized meanings of masculinity and femininity, but also
reveals a certain transitivity that allows women to claim under partic-
ular circumstances this dominant position (vis-à-vis men).
The role played by women in policing Dominican masculinity as
part of a nationalist defense is also evident in Madera’s account of a
contest held by a Dominican women’s magazine. The magazine cri-
tiqued how Dominican men preferred to be clean-shaven rather than
sporting a mustache after the US occupation. In response, “the mag-

azine sponsored the ‘perfect mustache’ contest to try to recover this
manly feature and ‘Dominicanism,’” because of how “this new trend
emasculated men and was unpatriotic since Americans introduced it
to the country during the U.S. occupation.”32 The magazine contest
reflects clearly how closely patriotism and masculinity had become
linked in the Dominican national imaginary, and how this gendered
imaginary was shared by men and women. As Teresita Mart ínez-
Vergne insists, the “implicit maleness of the national character” of
the Dominican Republic cannot be understood outside of how the
dominant presence of the United States led to defensive stances in
the Dominican Republic, where “to properly protect the virtue of the
homeland, . . . virility was of the utmost importance.”33
In summary, what this body of historical scholarship suggests is
how the US military occupation prepared the Dominican collec-
tive psyche and national sentiments—or what I term the “psycho-
logical infrastructure”—for the Dominican populace to embrace the
Trujillato’s political discourse of hyperbolic virile masculinity as part
of a new nationalist project.
Trujillo’s National Politics and Gender

If one is concerned with the lasting hegemony of the legacies of the
Trujillato (and there is good reason to be) and their impact on the
Dominican national imaginary, close attention must be paid to its belief
system and ideologies. During his regime, Trujillo was consistently pre-
sented by his ideologues as a quintessential Dominican who was deeply
immersed in the Dominican soul, and vice versa. As the massive celebra-
tory publication for the Trujillo Era’s 25-year anniversary declares, “It is
not possible to determine to what point this brilliant and predestined man
is found immersed in the Dominican soul or to what degree, likewise,
our people find themselves lovingly captured in . . . Trujillo’s soul.”34
Relations between Dominicans and the dictator were portrayed
by official discourse as a veritable scene of seduction, with the pueblo
and national community swept away by the dictator’s extraordi-
nary persona. Indeed, Joaquín Balaguer, one of the regime’s main
ideologues (and later longtime president of the country), in his well-
known speech “The Principle of Alternability in Dominican History,”
addressed to a national audience in 1952, describes the Dominican
“multitudes” as immediately “seduced by the arrogance of this man
of arms or conquered by the prestige that already had begun to radi-
ate from this Cesarean personality.”35 Notably, the attraction of the
202 MAJA HORN
Dominican people to their leader is validated here by aligning Trujillo

with other heroic historical leaders through the strategic evocation of
Trujillo’s “Cesarean” personality. In the same speech, Balaguer refers
to Trujillo also as a “caudillo,” thereby placing him within a long line-
age of Latin American military strongmen.
Balaguer especially fawns over Trujillo’s virile ardor in what now
appear almost comical and certainly homoerotic terms: “The sole
presence of Trujillo on the national stage, causes admiration from
the first instance, and stimulates surprise, and lights up in his own
enemies astonishing forewarnings, disconcerting everyone with
his incandescent coldness and his icy violence. What an admirable
human physiognomy and what an unprecedented historical profile
is that of this hurricane-like caudillo . . . !”36 The regime thus itself
referred to Trujillo as a caudillo —though adding that he is a “caudi-
llo moderno”—and thereby tapped into a familiar language of Latin
American political leadership.
The strategic inscription of Trujillo into Latin American political cul-
ture effectively evades his close relation to US military forces and ideolo-
gies. Trujillo certainly contributed himself to his insertion into a political
lineage of Dominican strongmen. He presented himself, at least indi-
rectly, as the heir to the previous Dominican dictator Ulises Heureaux
(1882–1899). As Valentina Peguero describes, “On August 16, 1930,
wearing a military uniform with golden trimmings and a hat that resem-
bled those of Ulises Heureaux . . . Trujillo took his oath as president of
the republic.”37 This lineage is also often invoked in scholarly accounts;
as Peguero notes, “Scholars have indicated that when Trujillo became
president, he had Ulises Heureaux as a model.”38 Telling, for example,
is that the renowned Dominican historian Bernardo Vega ventured even
into the terrain of fiction to bring these two dictators together on the
pages of his book Domini Canes: Los perros del Señor where he stages
a fictional dialogue between them that gestures clearly to their close
political affinity and historical relatedness.39
However, what this historical lineage obscures is how, unlike with
previous Dominican caudillos, Trujillo’s rise and national dominance
was made possible largely by the US imperial presence in the country.
To begin with, American officials themselves acknowledged the key
role they played in Trujillo’s rise to power: a 1931 memo from First
Secretary Cabot to the US State Department notes that “Trujillo
was raised from the gutter by the Marine Corps and started toward
this present position.”40 Beyond the key role that the United States
had in Trujillo’s personal trajectory and military ascendance, his
path to power had been cleared by how the US military occupation
reconfigured Dominican power relations. As the Dominican sociolo-

gist Emelio Betances describes,
The U.S. military government broke the back of the caudillo political
system by restructuring society and disarming most of the population.
Regional caudillo rivalries were crippled by the new road network and the
sheer firepower of the military. The policies of this government strength-
ened the state apparatus but did so at the expense of the social structures,
creating the conditions for the emergence of a new type of national mili-
tary caudillo who would use state power to forge a new elite.41
Betances’s references to both a “new type” and the “old” concept

of the Latin American caudillo suggest how debates about whether
the Trujillo regime was a continuation of or a break with previous
Dominican political tendencies are far from settled. For example, in
contrast, Eric Paul Roorda concludes in less-ambiguous terms that
the Trujillo dictatorship is “directly attributable to the U.S. Marine
occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916–1924.”42
For the purpose of this chapter, I specifically want to address how
the United States and other international influences helped shape
the Trujillato’s performance and discourse of masculinity and the
Dominican people’s uptake of these. I thereby want to move into
sight how the Trujillato constituted a reconfiguration and not sim-
ply a continuation of previously hegemonic notions of Dominican
masculinity and how these notions phrased and naturalized rela-
tions of power in key new ways, including in the national political
realm. To begin with, Trujillo’s performance and discourse of mas-
culinity were clearly in part informed by the US military values that
he had internalized from the US Marines. This internalization is
implicit in Roorda’s description of how “the young officer’s appar-
ent assimilation into the culture of the U.S. Marine Corps, reflected
in the approval of his American superiors, accelerated his rise in the
Dominican ranks during the occupation.”43 Indeed, Peguero also
emphasizes how “Trujillo assimilated the Marines’ military culture
well” and was described as being “‘more Americanized’ than any
other Dominican.”44 Even after the end of the US military occupa-
tion, Trujillo “always considered himself a Marine Corps officer.”45
As a result, “competence, organization, and discipline were inherent
in Trujillo’s military persona,” which he constantly exhibited to the
public through his extreme personal cleanliness, vigorous lifestyle,
long hours of work, and incessant activity.46
In fact, Trujillo’s close identification with the US Marines and their
ideology makes appear what is presented often as one of the dictator’s
204 MAJA HORN
idiosyncrasies much less eccentric: his desire to present himself (and

the country) as mostly white. As Peguero describes, “The Marines
arrived with a heavy cargo of prejudice and an anti-black attitude” and
“viewed the Dominican Republic as a conquered land inhabited by
inferior black people.”47 This makes it hardly irrational on Trujillo’s part
to describe himself on his application to join the new Dominican force
organized by the Marines “as white when in fact he was mulatto.”48
US racialized imperial ideologies, long present before the occupa-
tion, thus must be taken into account when trying to understand why
“Trujillo wanted outsiders to believe that whites predominated among
Dominicans,” and why whiteness became important to present “‘a
better’ image of the Dominican Republic abroad.”49
If Trujillo’s racial discourse was molded, at least in part, in response
to the outside impulses and ideologies of US imperialism, the dicta-
tor’s discourse of masculinity cannot be understood outside of these
influences either. Trujillo’s role as the country’s patriarch, supreme
macho, and virile savior of the country was legitimatized and nat-
uralized by the widespread sense that the Dominican Republic had
been feminized and emasculated by the outside forces’ domination
and the curtailing of the country’s sovereignty. This pervasively gen-
dered nationalist rhetoric is reflected, for example, in the following
description in the Trujillato’s 25-year anniversary publication: “The
motherland was only a raggedy beggar who incited an offensive com-
passion and an insulting disdain. Trujillo restored her position and
prestige, returning to her the appearance of a respectable and honor-
able nation.”50 The feminized and dishonored nation was uplifted and
made respectable again by her supreme masculine defender, Rafael
L. Trujillo. What this proclamation suggests is how the Trujillato
inserted itself into a new narrative of the Dominican nation and the
strongly gendered and sexual meanings inscribed in this plotline.
The Trujillato’s emphasis on virility as a cornerstone of its political
discourse in defense of the nation, however, was not merely a quintes-
sential expression of “Latin” patriarchal masculinity. It was in fact very
much in step with contemporary international political discourses at
the time. For example, Michelle A. Stephens describes how a constit-
uency that appears to be very dissimilar from Trujillo, namely, radical
black (Anglophone and Francophone) Caribbean intellectuals, took
recourse to similar discursive strategies at the same historical moment.
Stephens notes how “the immediate years after World War I” were
“a key conjuncture in constructing a new world order based on new
forms of sovereignty and statehood.”51 These forms were embedded
in a “masculinist rhetoric of sovereignty essential to both imperial and
national visions of the state.”52 It is vis-à-vis this masculinist rhetoric

of sovereignty that Stephens explains the investment of black intel-
lectuals from the Caribbean and the United States in expressing “the
sovereignty of both the self and of the state” through “highly masculine
definitions of racial freedom, embodied in varying male figures and
tropes for the black, revolutionary hero.”53 Trujillo similarly wielded
his rhetoric of masculinity to signal the sovereignty of the self and of
the Dominican nation-state after its curtailing by US imperial powers.
This masculinist rhetoric of sovereignty is notably also at play in
the Trujillato’s justifications of its overstepping of democratic rules.
Democratic procedures were presented by the regime as a “for-
eign abstraction” and ultimately as “un-Dominican” constraints that
Trujillo, in a heroically manly act, rejects in a defense of Dominican
sovereignty. As Balaguer reasons, democracy was ultimately only for
effeminate “duds”: “The principle of alternating (in power) . . . has then
only had validity for those presidents who did not know how to wear
the toga of virility on the throne. . . . For a titan like Trujillo, superior in
political genius and in his ability to command to all his predecessors,
the principle of alternation had to be forcibly reduced to an inoperative
abstraction.”54 Trujillo was simply too much of a man for democracy.
This passage tellingly indicates how the language of masculinity nat-
uralized political leadership as an expression of “manly” ability. At the
same time, any constraints placed on it, including by the rules of democ-
racy, were denounced as an emasculating infringement of national sov-
ereignty and the national self. Importantly, this language of masculinity
was able to speak effectively to many Dominicans’ sentiments in the
wake of the US occupation. On the one hand, then, this masculinist
language spoke to Dominicans’ desires for modern sovereign nation-
hood, while at the same time it echoed a familiar “traditional” language
of patriarchal power that helped to justify and naturalize Trujillo’s grasp
on the country. In this sense it was doubly effective.
To grasp why and how the Trujillato’s legacies have continued to
impact the country long after the dictator’s death in 1961, one must
better understand the paradox of how this language of masculinity
naturalized a starkly hierarchical organization of Dominican society
and politics that was overwritten by an emphatically egalitarian dis-
course. Indeed, the Trujillato created a powerful national-popular
discourse that suggested that Trujillo had broken with ingrained
Dominican hierarchies in key ways. For one, the Trujillato’s officialist
ideology presented the Dominican Republic as a racially homoge-
neous place where racial differences among Dominicans did not mat-
ter and racism was declared to be absent. For example, the regime’s
206 MAJA HORN
25-year anniversary panegyric emphatically states, “We repeat: we

never have had the problem of racial discrimination.”55 At the same
time, Trujillo, who was not part of the upper echelons of society and
resented the Dominican elites for their initial rejection of him, iden-
tified himself insistently as the people’s candidate (el candidato del
pueblo). He was again and again portrayed as fighting against the
abuses and privileges of the Dominican elite and claimed to have cre-
ated a society where social class was not to matter much. As Balaguer
insists, “Trujillo eliminated from Dominican life the old and secu-
lar principle according to which elected public positions ought to be
passed on, because of a kind of hereditary privilege, to certain families
of distinguished ancestry.”56 The Trujillato thus appropriated key lib-
eral democratic terms, including “democracy,” “equality,” “liberty,”
“justice,” as well as antiracist and even feminist discourses.
Trujillo purposefully appropriated the language of gender equality
and feminism for his ends to help signal the particularly “advanced”
and even “liberal” nature of his regime and the Dominican nation.
Both Neici Zeller and Elizabeth Manley discuss the seemingly para-
doxical (self-)designation of the Trujillo dictatorship as a pro-woman
and even feminist regime. Manley describes how
the newly installed Rafael Trujillo officially recognized the forma-

tion of an all-women’s organization called the Acción Feminista
Dominicana (Dominican Feminist Action or AFD). . . . In this and
several subsequent steps he aligned the regime with the concerns of
women and took up the banner of this early feminist movement. In
so doing he effectively suppressed many of their more pressing issues
as he focused exclusively on granting women the vote and equal civil
rights in 1942.57
Adopting the political goal of women’s suffrage helped the regime

erect its democratic facade. As Zeller describes, “The presence of
urbane, articulate women in political gatherings gave the dictatorship
the veneer of democracy and modernity it desired for local and inter-
national consumption.”58
The term “feminism” was put to what now seem perplexing uses
in the country, not only by Trujillo but also by Dominican wom-
en’s organizations themselves. For example, “in the heat of their
involvement with the regime, during an assembly in April 1934, the
AFD leadership all but renounced their feminist priorities by pub-
licly asserting that their identity was that of ‘FEMINISTS (which
meant Trujillistas) . . . ’ The phrase often repeated in the speeches of
the day—‘Trujillo, the feminist president’—perfectly embodied this
change.”59 As Zeller notes, “the meanings assigned to the terms ‘fem-

inism’ and ‘feminist’ within the dictatorship” would lastingly distort
“the various meanings that Dominicans assigned to these concepts”
long past the end of the dictatorship.60
The Trujillato did expand women’s public and even political roles,
albeit always within its own narrow scripts: “During the decade
between 1940 and 1950, Trujillo and the Partido dictated the norms
for women’s political participation as citizens in ways that allowed new
expressions of female autonomy without challenging traditional gender
differences.”61 The Trujillato, in fact, further exacerbated gender differ-
ences, as Madera suggests in her discussion of the dictatorship’s public
health programs and how these “institutionalized maternalism.”
The discourse exalting motherhood existed in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth century. However, maternalist discourse became more
prevalent during the Trujillato, . . . and with it a more highly publicized
discourse of “non-mothering” or “bad mothers” emerged. The Trujillo
regime publicized its own discourse concerning female behavior on a
larger scale than Dominican society had previously experienced.62
Maternalist discourse, as well as the “social hygienic discourse and

reforms carried out by the Trujillato dictatorship,” thus “redefined
gender roles, regulated sexual and reproductive practice, and brought
the state into the domestic sphere.”63 Madera therefore rightfully
speaks of the “gendered foundation of the modern Dominican state”
that emerged under the Trujillo dictatorship.64
Given how discourses of racial and class difference were downplayed
during the Trujillato (and thereafter), gender took on a foundational
role as a language for articulating differences among Dominicans,
among good and bad women, and among men. In fact, the rhetoric of
masculinity served as a principal and highly overdetermined signifier
for apprehending political and social differences, where being more
or less “manly” reflected on one’s position in the social and political
hierarchy where Trujillo, as the manliest, was at the very pinnacle
of it.
The masculinity that was enacted and nationalized by Trujillo cer-
tainly relied on preexisting patriarchal concepts; yet he did not simply
reiterate previous dominant notions of masculinity. Rather, Rafael L.
Trujillo’s performance of masculinity brought previously more mar-
ginal elements of masculinity to the national stage to lasting effect.
When Trujillo came into power in 1930, Dominican society was
predominantly rural, and, as social scientist Michiel Baud describes,
“Patriarchal dominance was the one over-arching ideology” that was
208 MAJA HORN
“shared by peasants and elite members alike.”65 In the “male world”

certain prerogatives were shared across class lines, including the prev-
alent practice of having more than one family and mistresses. As
anthropologist Malcolm T. Walker notes, “Serial polygyny” was “the
norm, the male moving from one woman to another throughout his
life” and only rarely formalizing these relations through marriage.66
Nonetheless, there were key differences between lower-class and elite
forms of masculinity. Elite men hardly forsook the practice of concubi-
nato, but they would, unlike lower-class men, have to publicly keep up
a “proper” front, and they would be “legally married and, publicly at
least, lead moral and respectable lives” with their “official” family.67
In fact, before Trujillo came into power in 1930, he also was
compelled to comply with these elite norms. As Robert Crassweller
recounts in his Trujillo biography, during his second marriage to a
woman from the Dominican elite, Bienvenida Morel, Trujillo had a
lover, María Mart ínez, who would later become his third wife. But
beforehand, in 1928, “the liaison of the rising officer with the high-
spirited young woman was open enough to produce social scandal”
that the younger Trujillo could not simply ignore.68 To contain the
public scandal, Trujillo arranged, “for the sake of appearance,” a mar-
riage for María “with a Cuban who never seemed to appear on the
Dominican scene.”69 After Trujillo came into power, he certainly laid
claim to key privileges of elite masculinity, including a church-blessed
marriage with his third wife, María Mart ínez. He also demanded a
constant national official adulation of his family members, especially
of his mother, his third wife, their two sons (Ramfis and Radhamés),
and daughter (Angelita). Yet Trujillo had secured for himself this
veneer of elite masculinity in hardly traditional ways. Only by mandat-
ing changes in Dominican law was he able to marry with the Catholic
Church’s blessing his former concubine María Mart ínez and have his
out-of-wedlock children formally recognized as his heirs.
Such maneuverings reflect how, as Lauren Derby argues, Trujillo
did not represent primarily an elite model of “respectable” Dominican
masculinity. Rather, Trujillo embodied an “underclass mestizo style
of hombría or manliness forged through personal risk taking, bravado,
and sexual aggression.”70 Trujillo himself was of lower-middle-class
and mixed-race origins and was notorious for his many lovers and
sexual exploits. As Derby insists, “the excessive nature of Trujillo’s
sexual avarice in terms of both quantity and publicity invoked the
‘hypermasculine pose’ of Dominican underclass masculinity, one that
challenged the more controlled, respectable self-representation of the
elite.”71 Trujillo thus broke with previous public mandates of elite
Dominican masculinity by legitimizing and officializing this under-

class version of masculinity.
These key reconfigurations of Dominican masculinity are greatly
obscured by portrayals of Trujillo as a typical “traditional” Latin
American patriarch that elide how masculinity was reconfigured dur-
ing and by the Trujillato. Yet of course the Trujillato itself, as sug-
gested before, encouraged such interpretations through its strategic
use of the language of “tradition” and of patriarchal rhetoric that
were central to how the regime appealed to the Dominican rural pop-
ulation, as Richard Lee Turits’s scholarship incisively shows.
However, Trujillo’s adaptation of the language of traditional peasant-
patron relationships and peasant practices of patronage and compadrazgo
(discussed with much more detail in Turits’s important study Foundations
of Despotism) for his ends did not simply reproduce preexisting patriar-
chal traditions. Rather, their transposition from local contexts (and face-
to-face relations) to the national level reconfigured these in ways that are
not always immediately obvious. For example, the Trujillato’s emphatic
language of “order” that clothed its repressive mechanisms tapped into
peasants’ traditional culture of respeto, described by Turits as a “culture
of ‘decency,’ deference, and mutual respectfulness in interpersonal rela-
tions and across social hierarchies.”72 These patriarchal relations always
had been hierarchical, and peasants had been historically subordinate
and generally subservient to their patrons. However, there was a degree
of interdependency in their relation with the patron, who also relied
on their work and loyalty.73 In turn, while direct appeals could also be
made to Trujillo, and many peasants and Dominican citizens did just
that, this was no longer a relation of interdependence, and all hinged on
the goodwill and whims of the dictator.
The Trujillato’s use of patriarchal language, including the peasant
notion of respeto to rhetorically clothe its repressive practices and call to
“order” did not reinforce or facilitate interpersonal relations within rural
communities, but rather destroyed these. The Trujillato called on all cit-
izens to enforce order, including reporting on one another.74 As Turits
recounts, among peasants “most disconcerting perhaps was the knowl-
edge that acquaintances, friends, neighbors, and even (former) spouses
might denounce one, perhaps with false information, to gain benefits
from the regime or simply out of personal jealousy or animosity.”75 The
regime’s watchful eye peered deep into Dominicans’ lives and muzzled
speech and imposed silence within the confines of private homes.76
These “elaborate mechanisms of surveillance, and the potentially hor-
rific consequences for even the smallest slip of the tongue,” Turits con-
cludes, affected and “mined even the average peasant’s life.”77
210 MAJA HORN
Indeed, Walker, who studied rural social relations before and after
the Trujillato, detects a significant change that occurred during the
Trujillato. He finds that “the ‘Era of Trujillo’ was also the time when
families ceased to be cooperative and when interfamily and interper-
sonal relationships came to be marred by distrust and suspicion.”78
Rural society before Trujillo’s dictatorship had been a strongly hier-
archical patriarchy, but these social structures had assured an indi-
vidual’s place within the hierarchy and thereby offered a degree of
certainty. Such certainties never existed during the Trujillo regime.
Rather, as Chrisitan Krohn-Hansen describes, under the Trujillo
dictatorship “the individual is kept in a state of uncertainty regard-
ing fundamental social mechanisms, and this gives life to fear.” 79
Favors could be granted but also revoked at any moment, and no
Dominican citizen was secure in his or her social, political, and finan-
cial status independent of the regime and the goodwill of the dicta-
tor. Under these circumstances, “each individual is driven to live in a
state of loneliness and secrecy” and is “governed by the principle ‘one
trusted nobody.’”80 Inevitably, interpersonal relationships, commu-
nal and interdependent relations, which had been so central to rural
Dominican society especially, deteriorated under these conditions.
The resulting loss of all certainty and guarantees that an individual
could expect from his or her social surroundings, from relations with
kin, and from individual efforts resulted in an atomization of indi-
viduals that must have had far-reaching effects on the individual and
collective Dominican psyche.
Dominican national political and social relations were thus deeply
affected by the Trujillo dictatorship in ways that were masked by the
Trujillato’s use of the language of patriarchal masculinity that portrayed
the regime as a continuation of long-standing Dominican traditions.
Notions of political leadership, allegiance, and justice had become
decidedly phrased in the language of masculinity that naturalized a
strongly hierarchical, top-down system that was, however, obscured
through a national-popular discourse of equality and democracy. In
this system the “top” man hands down “rewards” and “favors” in the
form of government positions and other spoils and expects in return
unquestioning personal allegiance, loyalty, and obedience. While these
are certainly practices that preexisted the Trujillo dictatorship, what is
new is how at the same time horizontal relations among equals were
also damaged by a deep distrust that isolated individuals.
The profound impact that the Trujillato had on Dominican society,
subjectivities, and masculinity in particular, is attested to, I argue, by
a form of subjectivity that consolidated during its time—the figure
of the Dominican tíguere. In 1992 the Dominican sociologist Lipe

Collado released a guide to this twentieth-century phenomenon, El
tíguere dominicano: Hacia una aproximación de cómo son los dominica-
nos. While this type of masculinity had existed previously and elsewhere
too, it was, according to Collado, in the capital during the Trujillato,
when “the original tíguere . . . in the forties and fifties was able to place
himself above the top of Dominican juvenile leadership in the few tra-
ditional barrios of the limited urban space of the capital.”81 Collado
defines the tíguere as an urban figure who overstepped traditional
hierarchies and inhabited a calculating individualism. The tíguere is
described as a “social simulator,” “a hero of all his battles . . . who appears
at the center of the drama and manipulates the situation in his favor,”
and as someone who likes to “get his way,” who is an “opportunist”
and “a friend of lies.”82 But, on the other hand, in more positive terms,
the tíguere is also described as a “protector of friends, people close to
him, and family,” who has strong ties to his immediate surroundings.83
Thus, the tíguere does not represent a typical modern form of individ-
ualism but remains deeply embedded in kin and communal relation-
ships that are the key stage for the enactment of his public persona. On
the other hand, the tíguere constantly emphasizes his individuality and
opportunism: he is the protagonist of all his stories, in which he always
outsmarts the dominant system and its rules.
The tíguere emerged under the specific circumstances and con-
straints of the Trujillato and indicated “a change—that is, an example of
transformation of a people’s way of communicating about maleness.”84
On the one hand, as Derby suggests, the figure of the tíguere offered a
way for Dominican men to negotiate the many limits that the Trujillato
placed on individual aspirations and male agency, and in this limited
sense, he “was transgressive.”85 At the same time, the tíguere is not an
individualist rebel outside social structures, but rather he is a pragmatist
who knows how to navigate these structures to his own advantage. In
this sense, Derby describes the tíguere as having “a form of power that
is morally ambiguous,” since “tigueraje offers a paradigm of upward
mobility for anyone who is cunning and brave, yet it is a form that may
involve chicanery and dirty tricks.”86 Importantly, the tíguere’s “coun-
tercultural valence,” as Derby notes, was one that “Trujillo officialized
by bringing it into the corridors of power.”87 The tíguere is thus a trans-
gressive answer from men “below” to the constraints of the Trujillato,
and also an echo of the new hegemonic masculine scripts enacted and
officialized from “above” by the dictator himself.
Indeed, the tíguere is best understood as a response to the profound
“crisis of the subject” brought on by the Trujillato’s reconfiguration of
212 MAJA HORN
social relations in the country, and he represents a new predominant

form of pragmatist (if not unscrupulous) behavior in the Dominican
social and national political realm. As Miguel D. Mena argues, the dicta-
torship caused a “crisis” not only “of knowledge, but also of the subject,
of his self-perception. . . . The tyrannical discourse did not only found a
form of knowledge, but also an ethic, a corporality, a gesture, a form
of expressing oneself.”88 One of the forms of subjectivity that reflected
this new context is precisely the figure of the tíguere. The figure of
the tíguere and the notions of masculinity associated with it did not
wane after the end of the Trujillato; on the contrary, as Krohn-Hansen
asserts, “in the late twentieth century, this image of masculinity was in
the process of becoming a nationally hegemonic one, an image used by
men and women across the country, and also abroad, even in order to
answer the question ‘What does it mean to be Dominican?’”89
The t íguere embodies the impact that the Trujillato had on
Dominican social relations; historically, individuals in Dominican
society had been deeply embedded in and defined by reciprocal (but
also hierarchical) communal relations and a web of family, kin, and
patron relations. The dictatorship’s weakening of these ties, with its
inculcation of distrust and uncertainty, created the conditions for a
new type of subject. Individuals were atomized yet remained pro-
foundly dependent on relationships that escaped their control during
the Trujillato. In other words, the social structures that had assured
an individual’s place were profoundly undermined. However, these
communal structures were not replaced by an ideology and mate-
rial culture that promoted autonomy, self-sufficiency, and a meritoc-
racy with tools for social and material agency. Rather, the kind of
individuality and atomized subjectivity produced by the Trujillato
offered no certain paths and tools of agency for anyone under its
reign. Interdependent relations gave way to more atomized experi-
ences in which survival or improvement of living conditions depended
less on reciprocal relations than on favors or opportunities passed
down from above. These hierarchical relations in turn were natural-
ized by and rationalized through the language of masculinity. As the
Trujillato’s homogenizing national imaginary erased meaningful dif-
ferences within the national community, especially racial differences
but also class differences, masculinity became the official ruling logic
of differentiation. In this dispensation, political leadership, or any
equivalent form of coming out “on top,” was told through hegemonic
notions of masculinity that continue to circulate in Dominican soci-
ety and political culture today. Their survival and thriving up until
today speak to how lastingly the Trujillo dictatorship and its language
of masculinity, enabled and aided by US imperialism, has shaped the

Dominican social and political landscape. This study thus attests to
the importance of paying close critical attention to how masculin-
ity changes over time and what such reconfigurations tell us about
shifting power relations in a given context. While each context must
always be understood in locally specific terms, what this case study
of the Dominican Republic also suggests is how we cannot forego
accounting for how outside repertoires, international discourses, and
transnational impulses have modulated local iterations of masculinity
long before the onset of the so-called age of globalization.
Notes
* Portions of this chapter are reproduced from Masculinity after Trujillo:
The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature with the permission of UP
of Florida
1. Christian Krohn-Hansen, “Masculinity and the Political among
Dominicans: ‘The Dominican Tiger,’” in Machos, Mistresses, and
Madonnas: Contesting Latin American Gender Imagery, ed. Marit
Melhuus and Kristi Anne Stolen (London: Verso, 1996), 108–133;
Christian Krohn-Hansen, Political Authoritarianism in the Dominican
Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
2. Krohn-Hansen, “Masculinity and the Political among Dominicans,” 125.
3. Ibid., 134.
4. Antonio de Moya, “Power Games and Totalitarian Masculinity in the
Dominican Republic,” in Caribbean Masculinities: Working Papers, ed.
Rafael Ram í rez et al. (Puerto Rico: HIV/AIDS Research and Education
Center, University of Puerto Rico, 2003), 116.
5. Ibid., 139.
6. Ibid., 139.
Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 838 (my
emphasis).
8. Michael Kimmel, Gendered Society (New York: Oxford University Press,
2004), 97 (my emphasis).
9. Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo
Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003), 64.
10. Eric Paul Roorda, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and
the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998), 2.
11. This view of the two countries locked in a seemingly inevitable strug-
gle has been increasingly critiqued and modified in important ways by
a number of scholars. See Silvio Torres-Saillant, “The Tribulations of
Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity,” Callaloo 23, no. 3
(2000): 1086–1111; Samuel Mart í nez, “Not a Cockfight: Rethinking
214 MAJA HORN
Haitian-Dominican Relations,” Latin American Perspectives 30,

no. 3 (May 2003): 80–101; Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed:
Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004); Sara Johnson-La O, “The Integration
of Hispaniola: A Reappraisal of Haitian-Dominican Relations in the
Nineteenth & Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Haitian Studies 8, no. 2
(2002): 4–25.
12. Anthony P. Maingot and Wilfredo Lozano, The United States and
the Caribbean: Transforming Hegemony and Sovereignty (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 1.
13. Roorda, The Dictator Next Door, 15.
14. Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and
Culture of Dollar Diplomacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003),
41.
15. Ibid., 41.
16. Ibid., 60.
17. Gail Bederman puts it even more bluntly, arguing that US interna-
tional involvement at the time was driven by the “ideology of manly,
civilized stewardship of the savage and barbarous races.” Gail Bederman,
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),
196.
18. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, 73.
19. Ibid., 73.
20. Ibid., 73.
21. Melissa Madera, “‘Zones of Scandal’: Gender, Public Health, and
Social Hygiene in the Dominican Republic, 1916–1961” (PhD diss.,
Binghamton University, 2011), 22, 229. This finding is echoed by
Teresita Mart í nez-Vergne, who insists that “the public discourse against
prostitution . . . was neither well developed nor widespread” at that time in
the Dominican Republic. Teresita Mart í nez-Vergne, Nation and Citizen
in the Dominican Republic, 1880–1916 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2005), 140.
22. Madera, “Zones of Scandal,” 77.
23. Ibid., 69.
24. April J. Mayes, “Why Dominican Feminism Moved to the Right: Class,
Colour and Women’s Activism in the Dominican Republic, 1880s-1940s,
Gender & History 20, no. 2 (2008): 357.
25. Ibid, 357.
26. Madera, “Zones of Scandal,” 81, 17.
27. Neici Zeller, “The Appearance of All, the Reality of Nothing: Politics and
Gender in the Dominican Republic, 1880–1961” (PhD diss., University
of Illinois at Chicago, 2010), 50.
28. Lauren Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction: Politics and the Popular
Imagination in the Era of Trujillo (Durham: Duke University Press,
2009), 62.
29. Ibid., 62.
30. Zeller, “The Appearance of All,” 52–53.
31. Ibid., 53.

33. Mart í nez-Vergne, Nation and Citizen, 24.
34. Rafael L. Trujillo, La Era de Trujillo: 25 años de historia dominicana
(Santo Domingo: Impresora Dominicana, 1955), lxxvii (my translation).
35. Joaquín Balaguer, El principio de la alternabilidad en la historia dominicana
(Ciudad Trujillo: Impresora Dominicana, 1952), 5 (my translation).
36. Ibid., 5–6 (my translation).
37. Valentina Peguero, The Militarization of Culture in the Dominican
Republic: From the Captains General to General Trujillo (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 71.
38. Ibid., 23.
39. Bernardo Vega, Domini canes: Los perros del Señor (Santo Domingo:
Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1989).
40. Quoted in Roorda, The Dictator Next Door, 60.
41. Emelio Betances, State and Society in the Dominican Republic (Boulder,
CA: Westview Press, 1995), 6.
42. Roorda, The Dictator Next Door, 2.
43. Ibid., 22.
44. Peguero, Militarization of Culture, 46, 51.
45. Ibid., 75.
46. Ibid., 59.
47. Ibid., 38, 39.
48. Ibid., 131.
49. Ibid., 133, 132.
50. Trujillo, Era de Trujillo, xlvi (my translation).
51. Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary
of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005), 23.
52. Ibid., 20.
53. Ibid., 15.
54. Balaguer, El principio de la alternabilidad, 17 (my translation).
55. Trujillo, Era de Trujillo, 54 (my translation).
56. Balaguer, El principio de la alternabilidad, 11 (my translation).
57. Elizabeth S. Manley, “‘Poner un grano de arena’: Gender and Women’s
Political Participation under Authoritarian Rule in the Dominican
Republic, 1928–1978” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2008), 14.
58. Zeller, “Appearance of All,” 10.
59. Ibid., 100.
60. Ibid., 15. Zeller insists that this established a lasting pattern, namely,
that “forms of participation that allowed Dominican women’s political
insertion into the polity were intrinsically shaped by authoritarianism
and continue to be fundamentally undemocratic to this day.” Zeller,
“Appearance of All,” 16.
61. Ibid., 207.
63. Ibid., 161.
64. Ibid., 162.
216 MAJA HORN
65. Michiel Baud, “Patriarchy and Changing Family Strategies: Class and
Gender in the Dominican Republic,” History of the Family 2, no. 4
(1997): 365.
66. Malcolm Walker, “Power Structure and Patronage in a Community of
the Dominican Republic,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World
Affairs 12, no. 4 (1970): 495.
67. Ibid., 495.
68. Robert Crassweller, Trujillo: The Life and Times of a Caribbean Dictator
(New York: Macmillan, 1966), 51.
69. Ibid., 51.
70. Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction, 174.
71. Ibid., 133.
72. Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 19.
73. As Baud affirms, peasants’ “continuous commentaries about the behav-
ior of patrons in peasant discourse were an indication of the peasantry’s
attentive scrutiny of patron-client relations in which they were involved.”
Baud, “Patriarchy and Changing Family Strategies,” 364.
74. The Trujillato thereby transformed “peasants into unpaid soldier-spies
(as denunciation became more and more pervasive and institutional-
ized).” Peguero, Militarization of Culture, 107.
75. Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 229.
76. For example, Jesús de Gal í ndez recounts how it was “natural among
Dominicans to think that the maid or a visitor could be a regime spy;
the fact is that not even in the intimacy of the home would they dare to
speak freely.” Jesús de Gal í ndez, La Era de Trujillo (1958, reprint; Santo
Domingo: Letra Grá fica Breve, 2006), 246 (my translation).
77. Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 228, 230.
78. Walker, “Power Structure and Patronage,” 497.
79. Krohn-Hansen, Political Authoritarianism, 185.
80. Ibid., 183, 185.
81. Lipe Collado, El tíguere dominicano: Hacia una aproximación de cómo
es el dominicano (Santo Domingo: Editora Collado, 2002), 27 (my
translation).
82. Ibid., 156–158 (my translation).
83. Ibid., 157 (my translation).
85. Derby, The Dictator’s Seduction, 175.
86. Ibid., 174.
87. Ibid., 174.
88. Miguel D. Mena, Poética de Santo Domingo II: Identidad, poder, territorios
(Santo Domingo: Ediciones Cielonaranja, 2005), 61 (my translation).
C H A P T E R 11
Changing Heads and Hats: Nationalism

and Modern Masculinities in the
Ottoman Empire and the
Republic of Turkey *
Katja Jana
In 1922, the Ottoman-Turkish humorist magazine Ayine published

a caricature titled “Changing Heads,” which consisted of six strips
representing different historical moments. Set in 1918, the first
scene titled “War” depicts Ottoman soldiers and their German allies,
recognizable by the Ottoman military cap Kabalak and the Prussian
spiked helmet, respectively.* The second strip “After the War” from
1919 shows several headpieces with Ottoman connotations: the Fez , 2
the Kalpak,3 and the Kabalak. The next one refers to the armistice
of Mudros of October 1918, which sealed the end of World War I for
the Ottoman Empire.4 The image represents an Italian and a British
man wearing a military cap, and a French one with a bicorne. The
two other men wearing a turban and a Fez symbolize the occupied
territories in Northern Africa and Arabia. “After the Armistice,”
dated 1921, depicts the Turkish War of Independence and refers to
the British occupation of Istanbul on March 16, 1920, and the 1919
invasion of Asia Minor by Greece. The headwear that is shown in this
image consists of three European brimmed hats, a Greek national
headgear, and a military cap. The next sequence called “Peace”
addresses the Armistice of Mudanya that took place in the Autumn
of 1922, showing five Fezzes and a Turban. That Armistice led to the
1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which secured the subsequent founding of
218 KATJA JANA
a Turkish nation-state, an event that was actually predicted and antic-

ipated by the last strip “After the Peace.”5 The headgear depicted here
are indeed a military cap, several Kalpaks, and one Fez.
The cartoon illustrates the end of the Ottoman Empire and the
emergence of the Turkish nation-state through the appearance and
disappearance of different types of headgear. By representing male
bodies as national allegories, the comic strip tells an intertwined
history of nationalism, nation-building, and masculinity. At the
same time, it documents the conditions of nation-building in the
Ottoman Empire, its embedment in international politics, and
the Ottoman experience of Western imperialism and colonialism,
which played a central role in the creation of a Turkish national
identity. With regard to the interplay between nationalism and mas-
culinity, the strips draw parallels between national characteristics
and male identity; they point to the emergence of Turkish national
identity after the Turkish War of Independence depicting men as
the actors of the nation-building process. These men are national
allegories and actual representatives of the nation. Especially in the
last two strips the displayed male figures form a collective national
body, characterized by Ottoman or Turkish headgear. What the car-
toon did not anticipate, however, was the 1925 replacement of the
traditional and local headgear with the brimmed hat as the symbol
of modern Turkish identity.
In this chapter, I will examine the relationship between national-
ism and masculinities by analyzing late Ottoman and early Turkish
republican debates about appropriate headgear and dress styles and
by linking them to discourses on the degree of Westernization 6 in
modern Ottoman and Turkish identity. My analysis will show that
Turkish masculinity and the question of Turkish national sover-
eignty were closely connected. Notions of what constituted heg-
emonic masculinity changed, mirroring the complicated relation of
the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey to colonial states.7 Denoting
either resistance or acceptance of Western politics and values (or
something in between), headgear came to be seen as a crucial sym-
bol of these changing ideals of manhood. Ultimately, the poli-
tics of dress became a means to produce what was understood
as modern and “civilized” male bodies in the Ottoman Empire
and the Turkish nation-state. Examining this process sheds light
on the gendered dynamics of colonialism and imperialism in this
nation and helps us better understand the complex interrelation-
ship between nationalism and hegemonic as well as marginalized
masculinities.
CHANGING HEADS AND HATS 219
Theoretical Assumptions and the

Historiography of Anticolonial
Nationalism and Gender
The body is a discursive arena where nation-building and the pro-
duction of modern subjects intersect. Controversies over men’s head-
gear speak to the production and control of human bodies that are
supposed to form the collective national body. Individual bodies
represent the nation while the nation itself is commonly described
in metaphors of embodiment. Consequently, in nationalist discourse
the health of individual bodies is frequently equated with the nation’s
health as suggested by metaphors such as “the sick man of Europe”8
for the Ottoman Empire.
In their 2005 essay on hegemonic masculinity, Raewyn Connell
and James Messerschmidt emphasize the importance of such forms
of male embodiment. According to the authors, men’s bodies are
both objects and agents of social practice while bodily processes and
social structures are linked by social practice.9 Wearing headgear is
a social practice that produces such gendered bodies. In his study
on male clothing, for instance, historian Christopher Breward pro-
vides a useful framework of interpretation that can be applied to the
study of Ottoman headgear in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century. Breward demonstrates how fashion, the making of modern
male bodies, and nationalism are closely connected. The marketing of
men’s fashion in late nineteenth-century Europe increasingly prom-
ised “health, vitality and the palpable display of the youthful and
attractive manly body.”10 This reinforced emphasis on the male body
gave rise to a “new code of masculinity which stressed athletic vigor
alongside moral fiber and gave rise to a fashionable manly ‘look’ that
was overtly physical in its appeal whether the wearer was dressed for
riding, walking, tennis, dancing or even business.”11 More impor-
tantly, Breward shows how changes in men’s fashion gave rise to con-
cerns about the effeminizing effects of commodity culture on men
and the nation.12
A number of scholars have provided important insights into the
connections between anticolonial nationalism and masculinities in
different contexts. Arus Yumul has scrutinized the development of
a racialized discourse on “white” and “black” Turks. The discourse
on male national identity evolved from the Early Turkish Republic to
the present day through a notion of civilized bodies. Yumul’s study
sheds light on the impact of orientalist debates about Westernization
on nationalized male identities and Turkish modernity.13 Building
220 KATJA JANA
on her work, this chapter goes further back in time and traces the
transformations of the gendered dynamics of Ottoman and Turkish
nation-building from the late nineteenth century to 1925.
Partha Chatterjee has studied the general predicament of postcolo-
nial nationalism, while its interrelationship with masculinity has been
scrutinized in depth by Mrinalini Sinha. In her study on colonial
masculinity in India, Sinha analyzes how a new nationalist elite in
India simultaneously rejected and relied on colonialist stereotypes.
The colonialist discourse contrasted the “manly Englishman” to
the “effeminized” Western educated Bengali elite. The latter group
rejected such stereotyping as effeminized and reappropriated certain
ideals of masculinity to consolidate its power in the nation-state.14
Wilson Chacko Jacob has shed light on similar dynamics in mod-
ern Egypt. His study scrutinizes constructions of male identities
within the context of European imperialism and nationalism, using
masculinity as an analytical perspective to demonstrate how certain
disciplinary techniques produced the heteronormative male citizen.
Part of Jacob’s argument hinges on the Egyptian discourse on appro-
priate headgear for men, in particular on the question of whether
to wear the Fez or not.15 According to Jacob, what is specific about
this discourse is the way it is characterized by colonialism and by the
question of national sovereignty. In contrast to Turkey, where the Fez
was outlawed together with other headgear in 1925, the Fez became
an Egyptian national symbol. Jacob demonstrates how the quest for
national sovereignty was connected to a quest for an identity that
embodied male values, especially honor.16
Masculinity and Nation-Building in the

Ottoman Empire and the Turkish
Republic
From the beginning, the Ottoman and subsequent Turkish nation-
building process was haunted by a multifaceted dilemma: it took place
within a triangular relationship between colonialism, modernization,
and nationalism. The Ottoman Empire had thrived for centuries on
the ideological base of an Islamic theocracy that had in many spheres
adapted to the complex realities of multireligious, multilingual, and
geographic diversity. Following a series of military defeats at the
hands of its rivals in the late eighteenth century, Ottoman intellectu-
als and state elites declared that the empire would have to learn from
the success of its enemies; for example, the European Great Powers.
This would include creating a new model subject of the Ottoman
state that was no longer based on a theocratic hierarchy, but on the

subject’s loyalty to and identification with his state. The problem lay
however in how to find the exact dosage and way of modernity to cre-
ate such a subject. For it was believed that an unreserved adaptation
of modern Western ways would lead to the complete elimination of
Ottoman identity and reduce the individual to a colonial subject of
the West. On the other hand, a too timid approach to the moderni-
zation process would leave the Ottoman Empire or later the Turkish
Republic unable to catch up and thus hold its ground in the harsh
competition with the colonizing states.
To grasp contradictions inherent in postcolonial nationalisms,
Partha Chatterjee employs the differentiation between “problematic,”
which refers to the claims made by nationalism itself, and “thematic,”
the legitimizing structures that seek to justify nationalisms’ claims.17
According to Chatterjee, in the sphere of the “problematic,” postco-
lonial nationalism repudiates orientalist assumptions assigning sub-
ject status to the orientalized Other. On the level of the “thematic,”
by contrast, it continues to be dominated by the power of colonial
discourse, adopting essentialist conceptions based on the distinction
between “East” and “West.”18
Discussions about nationalized manhood were inextricably
intertwined with the impact of Westernization. Ottoman national
identity was constructed in relation to the ontological differentia-
tion between Orient and Occident, that is, between tradition and
modernity, a dichotomy analyzed in depth by Edward Said.19 In this
context, Ottoman reformists confronted a predicament that many
anticolonial movements struggled with: the creation of a nation that
embraced modernity while rejecting Western models of nationhood.20
Postcolonial nationalism sought to refute Western claims that “under-
developed” people were unable to govern themselves and endeavored
to prove that modernization was possible without adopting Western
norms and values.
Due to this dilemma, the partisans of an Ottoman or later Turkish
nation-building would have to fight a battle on two fronts: on the
one hand, they would fight against a presumed inertia on the part
of those that did not embrace change quickly enough; on the other
hand, they would also combat those that embraced change too liber-
ally and risked losing sight of their collective aim, that is, building a
modern Ottoman or Turkish nation.
This dilemma had a significant impact on bodily practices and
body regimes. We can explain the persisting narrowness in Turkish
nationalist conceptions of the body if we consider that from the
222 KATJA JANA
beginning, the body, its movements, and the way it was clothed had to
be distinguished from both a too limited and a too radical concept of
modernity. Moreover, what was considered too limited or too radical
changed several times over the course of time, leading to competition
and rivalry between different body regimes. For a particular concept
of modern nation to reach hegemony, competing discourses had to
be marginalized by means of slander, repression, or even violence. It
is this process of repeated marginalization that we can observe during
the period 1830–1930.
We can differentiate between three phases in the process of the
implementation of new regimes of masculinity and the suppression of
traditional ones. From Mahmud II (1808–1839) to Abdü lhamid II
(1876–1909), the Ottoman sultans and the bureaucratic elite tried,
through a system of enlightened absolutism, to install a concept of
Ottomanism according to which the state served its subjects’ interests
and demanded in return their loyalty and participation in the state
modernization project.
During the nineteenth century, Ottoman authorities and reform-
ists attempted to create a common Ottoman identity. The notion of
Ottoman citizenship put forward in this time intended to include
all parts of the diverse Ottoman population. With regard to mascu-
linity and nationalism, Ottoman citizenship constructed a national
identity that used masculinity to smooth over ethnic and religious
differences. Against this background, the Fez, introduced in 1829,
became a common marker of Ottoman national identity. This head-
wear became a symbol of the effort to adopt Western models of mod-
ern nationalism while retaining a non-Western national identity.
Since Western imperialism restricted the Ottoman Empire’s national
sovereignty and was perceived as a real threat to the existence of the
Ottoman state, national identity was expressed through a symbol of
difference. During the nineteenth century, the headgear became a
central marker of distinction from “the West.”21 Since it stood for the
Ottoman claim to national self-determination, the Fez thus became a
form of resistance to European imperialism. By contrast, in the nine-
teenth century, Ottoman Muslims, especially, regarded bearers of a
hat as the symbol and embodiment of the European imperial threat
to the Ottoman states sovereignty. This view was expressed in the dic-
tum “Behind the hat there are warships,” which referred to the fear
that insulting persons who wore hats might lead to diplomatic ten-
sions with a number of European nations who enjoyed special trading
and consular privileges in the Ottoman Empire.22
From the turn of twentieth century onward, we can witness a deci-

sive shift in the discourse on male headgear. This shift coincides with
the dawning of Absolutism, the coming of popular government, and
the ascendance of a more narrow definition of the nation, which lim-
ited nationhood to the Muslim and Turkish-speaking part of society.
On a much broader scale, pundits and authorities discussed what was
the proper headgear for Muslims. While some deplored the fact that
now even Muslims would prefer hats to Fezzes, others defended this
development because this signifier of the Mahmudian reform seemed
outdated in the twentieth century.23
Following the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the
dilemma between a rather limited or unlimited modernization and
Westernization of bodily practices appeared in a new light, thus open-
ing the third phase in headgear practices. After the genocide per-
petrated against the Armenians and the deportation of the Greeks,
the two rivaling nation-building projects in Anatolia had failed. The
European colonialist states had to concede Turkish sovereignty in
the Lausanne treaty. Therefore, distinction in face of the Christian
minorities or of West European influence was no longer a priority.
Instead, the new leadership gave priority to the rapid modernization
of the country in order to compensate the ravages of the successive
wars. As Houchang Chehabi has argued, the creation of a sovereign
Turkish nation-state made a redefinition of Turkish identity possi-
ble. The European or Western hat was therefore no longer regarded
as a sign of Western imperial domination but rather as an indicator
of Turkey’s equal status among independent nation-states. 24 Turkey’s
leader Mustafa Kemal, for instance, repeatedly called the Fez “a sign
of ignorance, religious bigotry and animosity towards progress and
civilization,” while hats were “worn by the civilized world.”25
Compared with other nation-building projects such as those in
India or Egypt, whose populations were experiencing direct colo-
nial administration and stressed national specificities in dress, the
Turkish postcolonial nationalism pursued a different form of identity
politics.26 Chehabi draws attention to parallels between the nation-
building projects in Iran and Turkey in the context of the European
imperial threat and the making of modern male identities. He stresses
the impact of the absence of formal colonial administration in Iran
and Turkey with regard to the politics of dress in both countries.27
Turkish nationalism became an anticolonial counter-discourse oppos-
ing the Western European view that the Ottoman population was
“unable to stand alone in the modern world.”28 The politics of dress
224 KATJA JANA
and especially the Hat Law of 1925 should therefore be analyzed

against the backdrop of Turkish anticolonial nationalism.
Hamidian Politics of Dress in the

Late Nineteenth Century
A law issued by Mahmud II in 1829 “sought to replace ancient
community and occupational signs of differentiation by dress” and
introduced Western style garments for men.29 The law meticulously
described a variety of different forms of dress for men, yet it speci-
fied only one single headgear—the Fez, a conical red felt hat. In the
Ottoman social order, the headgear had been until then a crucial and
central marker of identity, status, and rank. In his study on the Fez,
the renowned Ottomanist Donald Quataert states that clothing regu-
lations had been powerful tools to reshape state and society, no less
then bureaucratic reform, fiscal centralization, and military action.
The old Elites’ dress codes were suspended in favor of an uprising
bureaucratic and military elite. In addition, the measures introduced
by Mahmud II deleted visible differences between Muslims and non-
Muslims. The Fez was well accepted by well-off Muslims and non-
Muslims in urban centers.30
Commodity culture and its supposedly effeminizing impact as
analyzed by Christopher Breward was a similar prominent issue in
the Ottoman public debates about male fashion and national identity
in the late nineteenth century.31 For example, urban, upper-class men
were frequently ridiculed because of their predilection for Western
commodities, especially clothes. This critique was part and parcel of
heated debates about Westernization and its relationship to national
identity.32 In their novels, authors like Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem
and Ahmed Midhat presented the urban dandies’ supposed subjec-
tion to European imperialism as a loss of masculinity.33 These novels
were a persiflage of an uprising social class that developed during
the Tanzimat reform era, which began with the Imperial Rescript
of Gü lhane of 1839. The Tanzimat decrees promised legal equal-
ity for all Ottoman (male) subjects regardless of their religion and
equal obligations for all, especially military service.34 The clothing
laws issued by Mahmud II anticipated the Tanzimat reforms in their
“drive for equality”35 by abolishing a social order that had been reg-
ulated through a strict distinction of dress codes.
In 1876, the first Ottoman constitution was introduced and a par-
liament established. This is regarded as the accomplishment of Young
Ottoman intellectuals and state elites, who were motivated by their
resentment against the Tanzimat reform edicts of 1839 and 1856.

These thinkers argued that the reforms had been introduced only
due to foreign pressure. At the same time, they propagated reforms
that—in their eyes—were to protect Ottoman interests. This first
constitutional period did not last long. Shortly after its ratification,
Sultan Abdü lhamid II suspended the constitution and the parliament
to establish an autocratic regime.36
The Hamidian period was marked by the Russo-Turkish War (1877–
1878), which cost the Ottoman Empire most of its European posses-
sions as well as its financial autonomy. In general, the last decades of
the nineteenth century were a period of administrative, cultural, and
financial reorganization.37 As a consequence, the politics of dress dur-
ing that period attempted to reinforce the Empire’s integrity. In the
1880s, for instance, attempts were made to prevent Muslims from wear-
ing hats when they stayed abroad.38 However, apart from these early
cases, in which Muslims were targeted for not wearing the Fez, there is
evidence of Ottoman Christians being forced to wear the Fez within the
Ottoman territory. In the 1890s, several incidents that revolved around
the issue of headgear and national identity in the Ottoman Empire took
place. In a series of documents that were issued by the Ottoman govern-
ment in July and August 1894, government officials complained about
Christian male subjects who wore hats instead of the Fez. Ultimately,
the central government issued an imperial decree that designated the
Fez as the official headgear to be worn by Ottoman subjects.
In 1895, a conflict concerning local administrative councils in the
Island of Lesbos39 reflected concerns among government officials over
headgear and male national identity. The conflict revolved around the
issue of irredentist Greek nationalism among the population of Lesbos
and tensions between Christians and Muslims in local administrative
councils. Christian members of the councils had appeared with hats
in the councils meetings instead of the Fez. Corresponding with the
administrators of the island, the Ministry of the Interior was concerned
about the nationalist leanings of some Christian council members as
well as about having Christian majorities in the council. In a measure
that was intended to reestablish the authority of the Ottoman Empire,
the central government forced Christian administrators to wear the
Fez if they wanted to keep their political mandate.40
The local administrative councils were part of the bureaucratic
reorganization of the Ottoman Empire and became an arena in which
the local population and the Ottoman state negotiated ethnic, reli-
gious, and national identities.41 Much of these negotiations hinged
on the interrelationship between masculinities and the nation. The
226 KATJA JANA
case of Lesbos is an example of the reorganization of state power

and demonstrates how headgear was employed to negotiate this inter-
relationship. At the same time, it shows how the state directed its
measures of modernization toward the male body in the service of
nation-building, although these actions initially focused mostly on
political elites.42
The unequal distribution of seats in the council among communi-
ties is mentioned in these documents, since seats had to be distributed
evenly among Ottoman Muslims and non-Muslims.43 Exceptions
could only be made when an insufficient number of Muslims would
meet the required standards of wealth. The situation on Lesbos
reflected some major lines of conflict emerging in Ottoman society
during the nineteenth century. Tuning with European domination,
some members of the Christian communities had acquired higher sta-
tus and wealth through trade activities. The economic gap between
Muslims and non-Muslims had widened with the integration of the
Ottoman Empire into the world economy and the legal protection
that some Ottoman Christians gained through the capitulations.44
Consequently, with the introduction of local councils and the con-
sequent question of who was to represent the Ottoman state, the
Christian majority in Lesbos45 acquired a new weight. In this doc-
umented incident, state officials differentiated Ottoman men along
ethno-religious lines and class. Christian members of the local coun-
cils were asked to conform to modernized Ottoman identity symbol-
ized by the Fez, because they were seen as disassociating themselves
and their respective community from the Ottoman state by wearing
hats.46
Public Debates over Headgear after the

Young Turk Revolution
When talking about the issue of headgear, the Ottoman public debated
over national identity, masculinity, and modernization. Even though
some prominent Ottoman authors called for complete Westernization
at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman state followed
a different path. As evidenced by many unpublished documents as well
as newspaper articles, repressive actions against bearers of European
hats were common until the early 1920s. At the same time, however,
advocates of the hat appeared on the scene. Several public controver-
sies erupted during this period, on whether the hat was at all com-
patible with Ottoman Muslim identity or whether it was necessary
for the modernization of Ottoman society. Rumors circulated that
the Young Turk Regime sought to introduce the European hat. It

had meanwhile become common practice for Ottoman men to wear a
hat while traveling in Europe. In 1915, the author K ı l ıçzade Hakk ı,
one of the so-called Westerners [Garbcı lar], argued that the country’s
current fashion was not national in any case and that on the part of
Islam no objections to the hat existed.47
In 1908, a group of young officers, known as Young Turks, chal-
lenged Sultan Abdü lhamid’s autocratic regime and restored the con-
stitution by a coup d’etat. The rising protest against the Fez went
along with changing attitudes toward Westernization in nationalist
politics and Ottoman culture. While renewed discussions about ide-
als of “national headgear” were provoked in 1908 by the Young Turk
economic boycott against Austria-Hungary (one of the major produc-
ers of Fezzes), European hats became increasingly popular among
Ottoman Muslims.48 The ideal of the Young Ottoman gentleman,
who consciously disassociated himself from the West, was gradually
replaced by the Westernized Young Turk. Especially, government and
military elites who received a Western education in newly founded
military academies and military medical schools no longer regarded
Westernization as a sign of ridicule and emasculation. Instead, they
interpreted it as a process of active and self-confident adaptation of
Western skills and knowledge.
In 1910, 15 years after the heated debates about hats in Lesbos,
a series of incidents provoked police interventions in Istanbul: police
sent admonitions to a considerable number of high-ranking Muslim
members of the Ottoman military and the bureaucratic elite, exhort-
ing them not to let their sons and daughters wear European hats. Some
police reports described in great detail how and where these children
had worn hats. Most of these “incidents” had been observed either
on the landing piers of the Prince’s Islands and along the Bosporus,
on the ferry on the way to the islands, in the amusement quarter of
Pera/Beyoğlu, and in some other prominent public spaces.49 Reports
on these incidents first appeared in May 1910 and continued until
August 1910.50
One of the cases described most accurately by the reports took
place on Büy ü kada, the largest of the Princes’ Islands in the Marmara
Sea, close to Istanbul. The case shows how the hat was denounced as
“antinational” by certain state officials and institutions and how the
men addressed in the admonitions would use such hats to construct a
different version of Muslim Ottoman national identity through their
children. This case of inappropriate behavior of Muslim children con-
cerning headgear occurred on a Christian holiday, Ash Wednesday
228 KATJA JANA
(Fireng or Frenk in Ottoman Turkish), which the document called a

European holiday. The document refers to the church in which the
ceremony took place as “the European church,” which indicates how
the authors conflated national and religious identity. The document
is titled “Referring to the Matter that on Büy ü kada Some Put Hats
on their Children.”51 It is important to note that the document thus
explicitly addressed the children’s fathers as those being responsible
for allowing their children to wear hats. What was at stake here were
these men’s identities and not those of their children.
The police reported the event as follows: On Ash Wednesday, about
a hundred Christian women and students of a Christian school held
a procession, which was followed by a church service. What provoked
people’s wrath and subsequent police investigation was the fact that
two Muslim students participating in the procession, former general
İbrahim Paşa’s eight-year-old son and the ten-year-old daughter of
Büyükada’s former mayor Haf ız Efendi, took part in the ceremony and
took off their Fezzes both during the procession and in the church.
The incident is instructive because it suggests that Muslim children
participated in Christian ceremonies and that both boys and girls
wore the Fez at a time when its symbolism as a marker of Ottoman
identity was already questioned. Even though the document’s title
suggests that the fathers approved of their children’s behavior, or even
presents them as the offender, in this case Hafiz Efendi is reported to
have beaten his son and having expressed his disagreement about his
son’s participation and action. But this seems to be the exception or
at least in contrary to what the reports on these incidents suggested.
The parents’ initiative role in letting their children wear hats is exem-
plified in the case of İbrahim Paşa who is reported to have sent his
children intentionally to the ceremony, as they were students of the
above-mentioned Christian school.52
The report on İbrahim Paşa pertains to another, seemingly unre-
lated episode in the Christian holiday ceremony, which took place
about the same time on Büy ü kada. This time, the indicted person
was Şakir Paşa, a retired general, a resident of Büyükada. He report-
edly went for a walk to the pier with his two young daughters, who
were wearing white hats with black ribbons. The police file concludes
with the remark that the above-mentioned persons of high social
standing should receive a letter of admonition. All reports stress the
exalted social position of the protagonists. Many of the documents
stated that this kind of behavior was regarded as inappropriate vis-à-
vis national dress codes and customs, and that, if continued, it would
leave a permanent impression on the Muslim community, influence
public opinion, and offend Muslim feelings. The authors of these

reports and admonitions justified state intervention, insisting that
the occurrences had aroused indignation among the Muslim public
and threatened to undermine the Ottoman state if such behavior was
adopted by the masses. The commotion had caused the ministry of
the interior to commission a report on the matter of heads of families
permitting their children to wear hats.
All of this occurred at a time when antagonistic constructions of
masculinity within the Ottoman elite competed with each other, as
the repressive measures taken indicate. This is congruent to compet-
ing concepts of nationalism, be it Ottomanism, Turkish Nationalism
(also in its irredentist version), or the nationalisms of the minori-
ties living in the Ottoman Empire.53 The authorities now dealt with
Muslim subjects wearing European hats, as opposed to the case on
Lesbos, where wearers of hats were clearly reported as non-Muslims.
These cases show the complexity of Ottoman society at that given
time with regard to nationally and ethnically marked loyalties and
alliances. Children are crucial for the public representation of men as
heads of families. These are represented here as main actors trying to
manipulate norms of national behavior and appearance. Ultimately, it
was their masculinity that was at stake here. The adoption and public
display of Western symbols as part of Muslim Ottoman identity shows
that these could be used as a means to acquire hegemony by a specific
group in society. It remains unclear, however, why exactly these men
favored the hat over another headgear that might be regarded as a
symbol of the nation.54
One prominent example of the growing popularity of this novel
notion of Westernization and its relation to nationalism are the works
of Tüccarzade İbrahim Hilmi [Çığıraçan].55 Tüccarzade İbrahim
Hilmi was a publisher and author who wrote several books on the
subject of Ottoman defeats and decline.56 In his booklet “Becoming
European,” published in 1916, he compared two fictional families,
designated, respectively, as Oriental and European. He described
the European, that is Anglo-Saxon, “young man” as well educated,
adventurous, and brave. In Hilmi’s story, that man works as a clerk in
the day and reads his books and newspapers at night. Every morning
he gets up early, takes a shower, and changes his collar every day. His
cuffs and shirts are perfectly clean. He dines together with his family,
does not drink, and never goes to the coffeehouse. By contrast, the
male head of the Oriental family is described as a dirty, chaotic, lazy,
and uncaring husband who spends his evenings in the coffeehouses
and neglects his wife.
230 KATJA JANA
In Hilmi’s interpretation, these two men and their families repre-

sent two different concepts of nationhood. According to Hilmi, the
Oriental family stood for what he regarded as the chaotic and dis-
connected state of the Ottoman nation, whose members felt no alle-
giance to it. The European family, by contrast, came much closer to
the national ideal that Hilmi had in mind for the Ottoman Empire.
This ideal hinged on a certain type of masculinity that was het-
erosexual, monogamous, Western, modern, and middle-class. The
Westernization of Ottoman masculinity was thus regarded as a pos-
itive and coveted goal, but one that was necessary primarily because
of the Western imperial threat that had become even more serious
after the Balkan Wars. Hilmi’s thoughts clearly reveal the gendered
nature of Ottoman nationalists’ modernization discourse and the
gendered division of labor coming along with it as well as the inter-
dependence of colonialism and nationalism, since colonialist ideology
established the standards of civilization that nation-states were sup-
posed to aspire to. Within this framework, Hilmi perceived national
sovereignty as being contingent upon the reorganization of gender
identities: “If we do not reorganize our family life, or let’s better say
make it European,” he wrote, “we will be stripped of national wealth,
a strong army, our navy or an honorable state sovereignty.”57
Hilmi’s fictional account demonstrates how Ottoman moderni-
zation discourse negotiated between gendered relations and nation-
alism. Masculinity is a crucial subject in these negotiations, since
Hilmi puts particular emphasis on the husbands’ roles as heads of
their families.58 Their appearance and behavior was seen as crucial to
the well-being of the nation and was inextricably linked to debates
about Westernization and nationalism. Hilmi’s account reflects ten-
sions with regard to “proper” notions of nationalized manhood that
explain the fervor of the debates over male headgear during the last
decades of the Ottoman Empire.
The “Turkish Hat Law” of 

and Its Impact
In August 1925, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the
Turkish Republic, left for a visit to Kastamonu, a province close to
the Black Sea coast. He visited several towns and villages delivering
speeches propagating modernization in general and specifically the
wearing of the hat. Shortly after his return to the capital the govern-
ment issued regulations concerning a new dress code for government
officials. A set of directions spelled out exactly how the officials were
to wear the hat. While being in a building, for instance, officials were
required to uncover their head. Outside the building, they had to
put a hat on, and when greeting someone, the hat had to be lifted.59
Finally, in the fall of 1925, the Turkish Hat Law was passed, which
outlawed all headgear besides the Western hat for all men in the coun-
try.60 The new body practices coming along were of special signifi-
cance. In the Islamicate Ottoman context, taking off one’s headgear
was not a common ritual, and even regarded as impolite. This was still
valid after the abolishment of turbans and other established headgear
in favor of the Fez.61
The so-called Hat Honor can be regarded as a ritual of mascu-
linity. Raising one’s hat was practiced among men, according to
European rules of conduct.62 A man named Bü lent Bey, who is cited
in a travel account that was published in 1959, described a perfor-
mance of these new body techniques coming along with the Hat Law.
He recounted that shops were “crammed with their headgear all with
brims or peaks.”63 His memories also mention the practice of taking
off the hat. Apparently, wearing the hat went along with unfamiliar
outward appearance, learning new movements of the body and inter-
nalizing new codes of behavior. This sometimes carnivalesque situa-
tion of transition during the first months of the introduction of the
new law in 1925 shows the way gendered appearance is learned and
then internalized. Bü lent Bey expressed the uncertainty of identity,
which came along with the new hat, describing the situation as far-
cical and funny: “You did not feel sure of yourself and did not know
how to hold the thing. Many held it by the brim to take it off. It was
exciting of course. You had a good look at yourself in every shop win-
dow you passed.” He also described extensive practice of walking in
the streets and raising hats.64
Alongside such positive attitudes toward the Hat Reform, resistance
against the hat and its implications also began to spread. Beginning
in September 1925, protests against the hat and its legal basis broke
out in some parts of the eastern Anatolian provinces.65 A change in
the dress code and rules of conduct could only be attained through
military force.66 Again there was a warship behind the appearance
of hats; this time, however, it was not regarded as an external threat
but as an internal defender of national sovereignty. In Rize, a town
on the Black Sea coast, where protests had been especially severe, the
warship Hamidiyye appeared on the shore, firing at villages that were
located along the coast in late November 1925. The population of
Rize linked the issue of the hat to that of taxation and military ser-
vice by chanting: “We will not wear the hat, we will pay no taxes, we
232 KATJA JANA
will not serve in the military.” Threatened by the warship, the lines
changed into: “Do not fire Hamidiyye, do not fire, we will wear hats,
we will pay taxes, we will serve in the military.”67
This short poem encapsulates the hat’s significance for the late
Ottoman and Turkish nation-building projects. The hat was part of
the modernization of technologies of power. In the early republican
endeavor to “civilize” the country and thereby produce modern citi-
zens, the hat played a crucial role. On the one hand, it referred to
bodily practices and discipline; it was not sufficient to just wear the
hat; it came with a set of rules on conduct and behavior. On the other
hand, the state enforced wearing the hat. These two elements were
intertwined, as shown in the poem: military service is enforced by
measures taken against the protests against the Hat Law, which in
return produced modern disciplined subjects. The poem thus links
different technologies of coercion and violence as well as nation-
building and the military through bodily practices.
The initiators of the Hat Law no longer regarded the hat as a sym-
bol of an imperial threat, a view conditioned by the status of the
Turkish state in international society.68 If the state’s sovereignty cor-
relates with the perceived masculinity of its hegemonic male citizens,
masculinity was to be reformulated after the establishment of the
Turkish Republic. Through the achievement of national sovereignty
after the Turkish War of Independence in 1923, the hat was no longer
a symbol of effeminacy and could be used to construct a republican
hegemonic masculinity. In this process, Turkish nationalism con-
structed hierarchies along shifting lines. One predominant binary in
the republican modernization discourse was the dichotomy between
the secular and the religious fanatic. The issue of proper headgear
was an important site for the playing out of this conflict. State propa-
ganda regarded all critics of the Turkish Hat Law as religious fanatics,
and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk utilized the law to eliminate all his real,
prospective, or alleged opponents.
An illustration published by the daily Cumhuriyet during the
implementation of the Hat Law reveals how the religious versus
secular dichotomy was fought over around the issue of headgear
and what this means for the interrelation of national identity and
masculinity in the given case. Cumhuriyet published the image
on November 26, 1925, one day after the government had issued
the Hat Law. It is placed next to an article, which reports on the
suppression of an insurrection against the Hat Law in Erzurum in
Northeastern Turkey.69 The picture depicts the opponents in this
conflict: A Turkish soldier who steps on the mouth of a defeated
dragon lying on the ground.70 The soldier carries a rifle and is

standing straight and upright, wearing a uniform, boots, and a mil-
itary cap. He represents the modern civilized body. The dragon, by
contrast, is crawling on the ground, a mythological figure, sym-
bolizing chaos and evil. He stands for those who oppose the Hat
Law and symbolizes the Orientalized Other of Turkish national-
ism. In Ottoman mythology, the dragon itself embodies power,
namely the power of the king or emperor. Whether intended or
not, the drawing depicts the defeat of monarchical power in favor
of the people, in this case embodied by the militarized male cit-
izen. More specifically, the Turkish soldier is set in opposition to
the religious reactionary or fanatic who opposes the Hat Law. The
adjoined article talks about fanatics and fanaticism in Erzurum,
which the military repressed with success. Despite its potential dan-
ger, the dragon is kept at bay by the soldier without difficulty. This
arrangement displays the power relation between the masculinity
embodied by the soldier and other types of masculinities who were
marginalized in the nation-building process. The soldier embodies
the Turkish nation as it was desired by the early republican regime,
a civilized, modernized and disciplined body. It is also rational-
ized, as it is expressed through his functional dress, the military
uniform. The depiction of the modern Turkish subject as a soldier
in weapons underlines the parallels between nationalist and milita-
ristic constructions of masculinity. Citizenship and male agency are
contingent on obligatory military service for men who are regarded
as members of the Turkish nation.71 The dragon, by contrast, is
located outside of a rationalized order of society. He is part of the
mystical realm, expressed in the article through notions of religious
bigotry, fanaticism, and superstition.
The dragon stands for everything abject or unwanted in the mod-
ern subject.72 In the Turkish nationalist discourse, these attributes are
ascribed to all opponents to the Hat Law. Beyond this purely binary
interpretation, relations of power and domination remain ambiva-
lent in the cartoon. Even though the common soldier, whose social
position is relatively clear, dominates the dragon, the dragon itself
embodies a heterogeneous group of oppositional individuals from
different social strata.73 While the soldier represents working-class
or lower-middle-class position, the dragon, even though deprived of
humanity, may as well embody a member or whole groups of the elite.
The illustration depicts the early republican elites’ effort to margin-
alize every other possible version of identification and modernization
besides its own narrow definition.74
234 KATJA JANA
The different groups that the dragon stood for were also depicted
in a drawing that was published on the front page of Cumhuriyet on
September 7, 1925.75 The accompanying article reported a declining
number of turbans worn in Istanbul and estimated that due to the Hat
Law the number of Turbans worn by men had fallen from 200,000
to 1,200. The illustration showed a variety of headgear: from Sufis’76
Sikke in its different varieties to Muslim religious scholars’ turban to
the Tanzimat Ottoman bureaucrats’ red Fez.
The Republican example ultimately shows how Partha Chatterjee’s
differentiation between the thematic and the problematic comes into
play in Turkish nationalism. While the hat is used on the level of the
“problematic” in an anticolonialist attitude to repudiate colonialist
assumptions of Turkish backwardness, its introduction is legitimized
by accusing those who refuse to wear it to be uncivilized and back-
ward in the same colonialist manner.
Conclusion
The transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state
and its position in the colonial world order provided the historical
conditions for the making of modern masculinities in my case study.
In this period, nationalisms played a crucial role in the redefinition of
gendered identities and vice versa. Nationalists’ aim to overcome colo-
nialist attributions such as belatedness and effeminization was closely
related to the preservation or achievement of national sovereignty. To
gain insights into the relationship between masculinity and nation-
building, I have compared the measures related to the Hat Law in
1925 to the examples of politics of dress in the Ottoman period.
The debate over headgear in Lesbos referred to power struggles
between state and local elites. It is an early example of governmen-
tal measures carried out by the state without the military, revealing
some insights into the connections between the modernization of
Ottoman state institutions and Ottoman identity. Masculinity and
national identity are negotiated on the same level through the par-
adigm of Westernization and the perceived threat of emasculation
through a loss of national sovereignty. In this context, Western impe-
rial domination was countered by the Fez. The struggles about iden-
tity and power indicated by the documents on heads of households
being admonished for letting their children wear hats were part of a
redefinition of elite Ottoman Muslim identity after the Young Turk
Revolution. Now Westernization and national sovereignty were knit
together in a different way. Some members of the Ottoman elite saw
the Westernization of identity as a precondition for the preservation

of national independence. Embodying these ideas, a new type of heg-
emonic masculinity emerged. Although the men that adhered to this
notion of manhood were part of the ruling elite, their ideas were not
hegemonic at that time.
Concerning the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the Turkish
Hat Law and its consequences constituted an attempt to redefine and
construct Turkish national identity throughout all strata of society.
It echoed earlier measures from the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries with some new inflections in the exercise of power that
were brought about by the founding of the Turkish nation-state. The
enforcement of these technologies of power was achieved in consider-
able part through the redefinition of Turkish masculinity as modern
and civilized and the marginalization of those masculinities that were
regarded as outmoded and uncivilized.
Notes
* The author would like to thank Ellinor Morack, Malte Fuhrmann, P. G.
Macioti, Karina Mü ller-Wienbergen, Rebekka Habermas, and the editors
of this volume for their constructive suggestions on this article.
1. The Kabalak is a cloth helmet padded with cork, worn by the Ottoman
army in World War I, also known as Enveriye, after Enver Paşa.
2. Red conical felt hat.
3. Cylindrical cap called made of curly lambskin.
4. The negotiations between the members of the Entente following the
armistice of Mudros resulted in the Treaty of Sèvres, signed on August
10, 1920. This divided and distributed the Ottoman territories among
Britain (mandates in Palestine, southern Syria, and Mesopotamia), France
(mandates in Syria and Lebanon), Greece (Eastern Thrace and the area
around Izmir), and Italy (Southwestern Asia Minor). An independent
Ottoman territory remained in Northern Asia Minor.
5. Ayine, November 1,1922, 1.
6. The West itself as construct can be seen as being produced during such
process of Westernization. The Ottoman Empire and Turkey actively par-
ticipated in this construction of the West.
7. I refer to the conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity by Raewyn
Connell. Connell defines masculinity not only in contrast to femininity
but also in relation to other subordinated or hegemonic masculinities.
He situates masculinity in a contested field of power, one part of which is
the gender order. The author argues against an idea of fixed gender roles,
or the “male sex role” model, which reduces masculinity to specific char-
acteristics that are inherited or aspired to by all men in favor of a concept
of multiple masculinities, which are historically and socially produced.
Hegemonic masculinity should be understood as enacted practice, not
236 KATJA JANA
just as a set of role expectations. See R. W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd

ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
8. This phrase came up in the mid-nineteenth century. Originally a com-
ment by Tsar Nicolas I. of Russia on Sultan Abdü lmecid’s health, it
came to embody the state of Ottoman politics. See Selim Deringil, The
Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the
Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: Tauris, 1998), 3. George Mosse
has elaborated on the history of the interrelationship between the idea
of a “healthy” nation and a modern ideal of masculinity in nineteenth-
century Europe. See George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation
of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 851, 852.
For an overview of possible applications of this concept in historical
scholarship, see John Tosh, “Hegemonic Masculinity and the History of
Gender,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History,
ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2004), 41–56.
10. Christopher Breward, “Manliness, Modernity and the Shaping of Male
Clothing,” in Body Dressing: Dress, Body, Culture, ed. Joanne Entwistle
and Elisabeth Wilson (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 165.
11. Ibid., 166.
12. Ibid., 175, 176.
13. See Arus Yumul, “Bitmemiş bir Proje olarak Beden,” Toplum ve Bilim
no. 84 (2000): 37–50; Arus Yumul, “Fashioning the Turkish Body
Politic,” in Turkey’s Engagement with Modernity: Conflict and Change
in the Twentieth Century, ed. Kerem Öktem, Celia Kerslake, and Philip
Robins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 349–369.
14. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A
Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: Zed Books, 1986.); Mrinalini Sinha,
Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate
Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century, Studies in Imperialism
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
15. Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working out Egypt : Effendi Masculinity and
Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870–1940 (Durham: Duke
16. Ibid., 335.
17. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 38.
18. According to Partha Chatterjee, nationalism became the manifestation
of the bourgeois-rationalist conception of knowledge that emerged dur-
ing the post-Enlightenment period. This kind of knowledge was the
foundation of a supposedly universal framework of thought perpetuating
colonial domination. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial
World, 11.
19. Edward William Said, Orientalism (repr. 1978; London: Penguin Books,
2003).
20. On this problem, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Feminist Longings and
Postcolonial Conditions,” in Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity
in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1998), 3–32; Deniz Kandioyoti, “Some Awkward
Questions on Women and Modernity in Turkey,” in Remaking Women,
270–288.
21. In her study on dress and the establishment of a mass fashion system in
the Ottoman Empire, Charlotte Jirousek argues that headgear had been
a major marker of gender identity before the introduction of Western-
style clothes, as the cut of women’s and men’s clothes resembled each
other. Charlotte Jirousek, “The Transition to Mass Fashion System Dress
in the Later Ottoman Empire,” in Consumption Studies and the History of
the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922: An Introduction, ed. Donald Quataert
(New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 210–212.
22. I owe this quote to Houchang Chehabi, who took it from Karl Klinghardt’s
study from 1924. See Karl Klinghardt, Angora—Konstantinopel:
Ringende Gewalten (Frankfurt: Frankfurter Societäts-Dr., 1924), 94;
Houchang Chehabi, “Dress Codes for Men in Turkey and Iran,” in
Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza
Shah, ed. Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zü rcher (London: Tauris, 2004),
209–237.
23. See Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal:
McGill, 1964), 403, 404.
24. The national sovereignty of the Turkish state came along with the abo-
lition of the capitulations as a sign of inequality in international society.
The capitulations had originally been voluntary concessions granted to
other sovereigns that acquired treaty status with the changing balance of
power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Anglo-Ottoman
Commercial Convention of 1838, for instance, set major conditions for
the economic positioning of the Ottoman Empire in the world econ-
omy by ending all local monopolies and protectionist trade practices.
In addition, subjects of those states that were granted capitulations
remained under their laws while staying on Ottoman territory. A grow-
ing number of Ottoman Christians also acquired subject status of these
foreign powers, thereby falling under the capitulation of that power. In
addition, what enabled that redefinition is the relative homogenization
of Turkish society past the previous decades in terms of ethnicity and
religion through social engineering, including genocide, forced assim-
ilation, and deportations. On these various developments, see Donald
Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 19; Soner Çağaptay, Islam, Secularism and
Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk? (London: Routledge,
2006); Hamit Bozarslan, “Kurds and the Turkish State,” in Cambridge
History of Modern Turkey, ed. Reşat Kasaba (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press 2008), 333–356.
25. If not indicated otherwise, all translations from Ottoman and modern
Turkish sources are my own. Mustafa Kemal Atat ü rk, Atatürk’ün Söylev
ve Demeçleri, 1906–1938 (Ankara: Atat ü rk Araştırma Merkezi, 2006),
220–226; Mustafa Kemal Atat ü rk, Nutuk, 1920–1927 (Istanbul: Milli
Eğitim bası mevi, 1970), 896.
238 KATJA JANA
26. See Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London:
Hurst, 1996).
27. Informal Colonialism can be characterized as the force toward states
to open their markets for products of the superior state and the guar-
antee of foreign property. Therefore, economic and strategic interests
were enforced by other measures than that of a colonial state. Jü rgen
Osterhammel, Kolonialismus: Geschichte—Formen—Folgen (Mü nchen:
Beck, 2009), 23–26.
28. Parla and Davison quote and refer to Article 22 of the Covenant of the
League of Nations, which established the mandates in the Arab territories
of the Ottoman Empire. Andrew Davison and Taha Parla, Corporatist
Ideology in Kemalist Turkey: Progress or Order? (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 2004), 69.
29. Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman
Empire, 1720–1829,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29,
no. 3 (August 1997): 403. This code was introduced for all men, with the
exception of those of religious ranks. In contrast to the Westernization of
men’s clothes, existing regulations for women’s dress were reinforced by
Mahmud II. See Cihan Aktaş, Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Kılık Kıyafet ve
İktidar (İstanbul: Nehir Yay ı nlar ı, 1989), 63.
30. Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire,
1720–1829,” 403, 412; Patricia L. Baker, “The Fez in Turkey: A Symbol
of Modernization,” Costume 20, no.1 (January 1986): 72–85; Quataert,
The Ottoman Empire, 65.
31. See Christopher Breward, “Manliness, Modernity and the Shaping of
Male Clothing,” in Body Dressing: Dress, Body, Culture, ed. Joanne
Entwistle and Elisabeth Wilson (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 165–181.
32. See Şerif Mardin, “Superwesternization in the Ottoman Empire in the last
Quarter of the 19th Century,” in Turkey: Geography and Social Perspectives,
ed. Peter Benedict and Erol Tümertekin (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 403.
33. Serif Mardin regards the Bihruz Bey, a character in the novel Araba Sevdasi
(Love for Carriages) by Recaizade Ekrem, as the archetype of the super-
westernized dandy. See Mardin, “Superwesternization in the Ottoman
Empire in the last Quarter of the 19th Century,” 406, 407.
34. The decree also authorized a notion of citizenship as a central category
of European political economy and constituent of nation-states. See Joel
Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 44; Halil İnalcık,“Application of
the Tanzimat and Its Social Effects,” Archivum Ottomanicum 5 (1973):
97–128.
35. Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 66.
36. On these developments, see Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman
Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962).
37. See Murat Birdal, The Political Economy of Ottoman Public Debt:
Insolvency and European Financial Control in the Late Nineteenth
Century (London: Tauris, 2010); Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the
Modern Middle East, 44–70.
38. See Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (BOA) I..HUS/27/1312M-102;

Y..A . . . RES. 71/27; BOA İ..DH.. 979/77308.
39. The island of Lesbos was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1462 to
1912.
40. Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi DH.MKT 11/17.
41. M. Safa Saraçoğlu, “Some Aspects of Ottoman Governmentality at the
Local Level: The Judicio-Administrative Sphere of the Vidin County in
the 1860s and 1870s,” Ab Imperio no. 2 (2008): 19–22.
42. See Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 109.
43. Members of the councils were elected by and among the local notables
in a complicated procedure. See Saraçoğlu, “Some Aspects of Ottoman
Governmentality,” 19–22.
44. Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, 44.
45. İdris Bostan, Ege Adaları’nın Idari, mali ve Sosyal Yapısı (Ankara: Stratejik
Araştırma ve Etüdler Milli Komitesi, 2003); Ayşe Nükhet Ad ıyeke and
Nuri Ad ıyeke, “Recent Discoveries in Turkish Archives: Kadi Registers
of Midilli,” Turcica: Revue Ėtudes Turques 38 (2006): 355–362.
46. Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 109.
47. Klaus Kreiser, Atatürk: Eine Biographie (Munich: Beck, 2008), 111, 239;
Orhan Koloğlu, Islamda Başlık (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi,
1978), 60, 63; Selami Kılıç, “Şapka Meselesi Ve Kılık Kıyafet Inkılab,”
Atatürk Yolu 4, no. 16 (November 1995): 531, 532; Kılıçzade Hakkı, Son
Cevap (İstanbul: Yeni Osmanlı Matbaa ve Kütübhanesi, 1331 [1915]), 49;
Şükrü Hanioğlu, “Garbcılar: Their Attitudes toward Religion and Their
Impact on the Official Ideology of the Turkish Republic,” Studia Islamica
86, no. 2 (1997): 133–158.
48. The boycott started within protest against the annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina by Habsburg Emperor Josef II on October 5, 1908. See
Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the
Ottoman Empire, 1881–1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration
(New York: New York University Press, 1983); Y. Doğan Çetinkaya, 1908
Osmanlı Boykotu: Bir Toplumsal Hareketin Analizi (İstanbul: İletişim,
2004).
49. On the relation of the creation of new spaces like Promenades and the
development of legal equality for Ottoman subjects, see Nikēphoros
Diamanturos, ed., Spatial Conceptions of the Nation: Modernizing
Geographies in Greece and Turkey (London: Academic Studies, 2010).
50. BOA DH.EUM.THR. 35/66
51. BOA DH.EUM. THR. 35/54.
52. BOA DH.EUM. THR. 35/54.
53. See Erik J. Zü rcher, “Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish
Nationalists: Identity Politics, 1908–1938,” in Ottoman Past and Today’s
Turkey, ed. Kemal H. Karpat (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 151–179; Fatma
Müge Göçek, Social Constructions of Nationalism in the Middle East
(New York: State University of New York Press, 2002).
54. The incidents suggest that hats were contested at that time, while
“national” headgear was not. Important in this respect is that I could
not find any cases in which the public display of the Kalpak or other local
240 KATJA JANA
headgear chosen to represent national identity caused interference on the

part of the state. The incident on Büy ü kada might also tell us something
about the relations between the different ethnic and religious groups.
The attendance of a Christian school by Muslim children is remarkable
in regard to religious as well as national identity. It seems that the respec-
tive masculinities were, in such cases, transgressing the nationalist frame
and subscribing to some kind of Western universality constructed by
education.
55. Tüccarzade İbrahim Hilmi [Çığıraçan], Avrupalılaşmak [Becoming
European], ed. Osman Kafadar and Far Öztürk (Ankara: Gündoğan
Yayınları, 1997); Tuǵǵār-Zāda Ibrāhīm Ḥilmī, Awropalylašmaq
(Konstantinopel: Kitābḫana-i-islām wa-ʿaskarī, 1916), 15.
56. See Başak Ocak, Bir Yayıncının Portresi, Tüccarzâde İbrahim Hilmi
Çığıraçan (İstanbul: Müteferrika, 2003); Osman Kafadar and Faruk
Öztürk, “Nesillerinin Unuttuğu Bir Aydın Tüccarzade Hilmi ve
’Avrupalılaşmak,” Tarih ve Toplum, no. 161 (May 1997): 261–266. For
other Ottoman authors who dealt with the Westernization theme, see
Tarık Zafer Tunaya, Türkiye’nin Siyasî Hayatında Batılılaşma Hareketleri
(İstanbul: İstanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2010).
57. İbrahim Hilmi [Çığıraçan], Avrupalılaşmak, 76, 77.
58. Regarding the shift of authority from father to husband in late Ottoman
discourse, see Nü khet Sirman, “Gender Construction and Nationalist
Discourse: Dethroning the Father in the Early Turkish Novel,” in
Gender and Identity Construction: Women in Central Asia, the Caucasus
and Turkey, ed. Feride Acar and Ayşe Güneş Ayata (Leiden: Brill, 1999),
162–176.
59. Resmi Ceride, September 5, 1341 [1925], 446.
60. Resmi Ceride, November 28, 1341 [1925], 691.
61. Ignaz Goldziher, “Die Entblößung Des Hauptes,” Der Islam 6, no. 4
(1915). For a survey on different aspects of sartorial practices in the
Ottoman Empire, see Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann, eds.,
Ottoman Costumes: From Textile to Identity (Istanbul: Eren 2004).
62. See Penelope J. Corfield, “Dress for Deference and Dissent: Hats and the
Decline of the Hat Honour,” Costume 23 (1998): 71.
63. Barbro Karabuda, Goodbye to the Fez: A Portrait of Modern Turkey
(London: Dobson, 1959), 48.
64. Ibid., 49.
65. See Mete Tunçay, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nde Tek Parti Yönetiminin
Kurulması (Istanbul: Tarih Vakf ı, 2005); Erg ü n Aybars, İstiklâl
Mahkemeleri (Ankara: Bilgi Yay ı nevi, 1975).
66. For a social history of the early republican politics of dress, see Hale
Yı lmaz, Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations
in Early Republican Turkey, 1923–1945 (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2013).
67. The origin of this poem might as well be in a later period in reference
to the events surrounding the Hat Law, but it nevertheless impressively
depicts the implications of the Hat Law, which are valid even today. See
http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/pazar/4106046_p.asp, accessed November
4, 2008, or http://www.marksist.org/tarihte-bugun/2438-25-kasim-
1925-atma-hamidiye-atma-sapka-da-giyeceguz-vergi-de-vereceguz-,
accessed June 29, 2013. In a different version of this rhyme, instead of
military service, the growing of wheat is mentioned, as farmers in this
area used to grow maize and now were forced by the government to grow
wheat instead.
68. See Houchang Chehabi, “Dress Codes for Men in Turkey and Iran,” in
Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza
Shah, ed. Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zü rcher (London: Tauris, 2004),
225.
69. The few existing reports on these events mention demonstrations with up
to three thousand people asking for permission to wear local headgear.
The government in reaction to the protests was sending the military and
employed martial law. Several of the protesters were killed when the mil-
itary opened fire on a demonstration, but reported numbers vary from
three to 23 persons being killed. Other people were sentenced to death
by a military court in consequence of the events. According to an arti-
cle in the newspaper Cumhuriyet, five people were sentenced to death.
Cumhuriyet 26 Teşrin-i sani 1341 [November 26, 1925] and Cumhuriyet
27 Teşrin-i sani 1341 [November 27, 1925].
70. This motive can be related to dragon-slaying legends in the Turco-Persian
mythology, which is however beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, it
is sufficient to say that many of these legends refer to the recognition of
the legitimacy of the ruler, who kills a dragon in order to consolidate his
questioned authority or rule. See P. O. Skjærvø, Dj. Khaleghi-Motlagh,
and J. R. Russell “AŽDAHĀ,” in Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan
Yarshater, vol. 3 (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 2000), 191–205.
71. Next to the religious reactionary, another declared enemy in the cov-
erage of the protests against the Hat Law is the deserter: “This is not
the Republic of some pilgrims, Muslim preachers and fanatic deserters.”
Cumhuriyet 26 Teşrin-i sani 1341 [November 26, 1926]. On the close
relationship between the military and citizenship in the Turkish nation-
state, see Ayşe Gü l Alt ı nay, The Myth of the Military Nation: Militarism,
Gender, and Education in Turkey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006).
72. See Yumul, “Bitmemiş Bir Proje olarak Beden,” 37–50.
73. In a recent publication on the Turkish Hat Law, Camilla T. Nereid chal-
lenges this oft-repeated dichotomy of progress and reaction. Instead of
following the Kemalist paradigm, which grants legitimacy to only one
version of modernization, she follows a model of multiple modernities
and traces five different versions of it. Camilla T. Nereid, “Kemalism on
the Catwalk: The Turkish Hat Law of 1925,” Journal of Social History
44, no. 3 (2011): 707–728.
74. A similar illustration is the one of Nureddin Paşa, who provoked a debate
on the Hat Law in the Turkish Parliament shortly before it was agreed
upon. The creature represented in the image is a snake. In this case, a
differentiation between dragon and snake can be neglected because here
the symbolic meaning is the same. The Persian origin of the Turkish
242 KATJA JANA
word ejder can mean dragon as well as snake. See Skjærvø, Khaleghi-
Motlagh, and Russell, “AŽDAHĀ,” 191,192; Cumhuriyet 2 Kanun-i
evvel 1341 [December 2, 1925], 1. Nurredin Paşa, wearing a Kalpak,
a symbol of Turkish Nationalism, especially during the Turkish War of
Independence, is depicted in the wide-open mouth of a snake. He could
either be interpreted as a tooth of the snake of reaction himself, or as a
victim of reactionism, swallowed by it and lost to the nationalist cause.
75. Cumhuriyet, September 2, 1341 [1925], 1.
76. A member of an Islamic mystical order or fraternity.
C H A P T E R 1 2
“Youth of Awo-Omama Will Boycott

Their Girls”: Men, Marriage, and
Ethno-Cultural Nationalism in
Southern Nigeria, 1920–1956
Saheed Aderinto
The title of this chapter is the headline of a news report in the January
8, 1948, issue of the Nigerian Spokesman, one of the newspapers
published by Nnamdi Azikiwe, a foremost nationalist and one of the
founding fathers of independent Nigeria.1 The newspaper reported
about a resolution an assemblage of young unmarried men had passed
in December 1947 about bride price in Awo-Omama, a community
in southeastern Nigeria. According to these men, bride price had
“soared to the Olympian summits, inaccessible to most youths with-
out difficulties and strains.” The youth, under the auspices of the
Awo-Omama Patriotic Union (Lagos Branch) accused their elders
and chiefs of “profiteering and traffic in conjugal” affairs and “burn-
ing the candle at both ends by sucking marriageable youths dry.”2
They resolved not to marry women from their town unless the elders
reduced bride price to £15 and £25 for educated and uneducated
girls, respectively. They also threatened to ostracize members who
contravened this resolution.3 A similar organization, the Ngwa Youth
Association, after a two-day convention held in Aba (also in south-
eastern Nigeria), in 1953, directed its members not to pay more than
£25 for a bride, regardless of the educational status of the girl. So
heated was the atmosphere at the convention that one of the elders
demanded that “the temper of the youth be controlled by elderly and
244 SAHEED ADERINTO
more experienced brains.”4 Thus, conflict over bride price, a socio-

cultural obligation and prerequisite for traditional marriage, was
emblematic of intergenerational and social-class crisis in post–World
War II Nigeria.
The published text of the youth’s resolution fitted adequately into
the prevailing culture of negotiating choice in the wake of economic
and political exploitation by powerful people and institutions. Indeed,
the word “boycott” was generally used in the 1940s and 1950s to extol
economic nationalism. It denoted a rejection of European merchandise
for Nigerian-made ones, because foreign goods were usually expen-
sive and exploitative. Hence the term, popularized by leading cultural
nationalist Mbonu Ojike (nicknamed, the “King of Boycottables”),
carried a significant tone of subordination in changing and unequal
power relations.5 The youth literally reduced or equated marrying a
wife to “purchasing a merchandise.” But beyond the relationship of
marriage to economic choice, the youth were also reinforcing cul-
tural nationalism, by making intra-ethnic marriage their first choice
in a multiethnic colonial state of Nigeria. Yet the story of exorbitant
bride price was not unique to Awo-Omama or Ngwa: individuals and
groups across southern Nigeria persistently lamented the impact of
high bride price on gender and generational relations. By the late
1920s or earlier, bride price was among the highest expenses incurred
by unmarried young men in southern Nigeria. Indeed, one of the
deliberations at the 1937 conference of Yoruba chiefs was the need to
impose a uniform bride price across the towns and communities in
southwestern Nigeria.6 By 1954, the problem had become so serious
that the government of Eastern Region set up a committee to “inves-
tigate the social effects of the payment of bride price” and to “make
recommendations for the removal of any anomaly or hardship.”7
This chapter is about the representation of the bride price contro-
versy in a number of southern Nigerian daily newspapers—includ-
ing the Eastern Nigeria Guardian, Nigerian Spokesman, Southern
Nigeria Defender, and West African Pilot —between 1920 and 1956,
when the Eastern Region House of Assembly enacted a law limiting
bride price to £35. It examines how young unmarried men (predom-
inantly wage earners) used the print media to express the relation-
ship between marriage and ethno-cultural nationalism and to contest
the exorbitant bride price imposed on them by their community.8 I
demonstrate how the junior men constructed a subordinate status
for themselves as they negotiated the hegemonic masculine power of
the senior men (the chiefs and patriarchs) who moderated marriage
relations and served as cultural gatekeepers. I then link this struggle
“YOUTH OF AWOOMAMA WILL BOYCOTT THEIR GIRLS” 245
between hegemonic and subordinate men to the theme of cultural

nationalism. As young men presented their perspectives over mar-
riage payment, they advertently and inadvertently unveiled a host of
sociocultural and economic matters that connect powerfully to the
broader social change under British imperialism. Hence, the debate
over bride price cannot be understood in isolation from the politi-
cal, economic, and gender history of a rapidly modernizing colonial
society.
Revisiting Men, Wage Labor, and Nationalism

in Africanist Literature: The Blind Spots
This chapter sits at the intersection of literature on marriage, gen-
der and masculinity, nation and nationalism, and labor history of
Africa.9 Historians of Africa have documented the transformation of
marriage as part of the wider sociocultural and economic impact of
colonialism.10 The core idea running through this large and grow-
ing body of work is that the entrenchment of colonialism led to the
monetization of the society and the rise of urban centers, mining and
military camps, and plantation—the epicenters of imperial economic
power. Bride price, a symbolic payment made by a man to the family
of his prospective bride, which used to be made with agricultural pro-
duce and farm labor in precolonial times, was substituted with cash
under colonial rule. Thus, marriage payment became “monetized” or
“commoditized.” Rural communities imposed new financial obliga-
tions on young men who were expected to work in the cities, mines,
or on plantations to raise money for bride price and other marriage-
related expenses. The exorbitant marriage payment was just one of
the numerous aspects of what some scholars such as Brett Shadle have
called “marriage crises” in Africa.11 New colonial laws, such as those
on divorce, empowered women, giving them the opportunity to leave
unhappy marriages; the improvement of communication and trans-
portation networks also increased women’s presence in the city and
decreased the grip that rural patriarchy exerted on them.12 Using an
array of sources, including court records, scholars have shown that
disputes over marriage were emblematic of larger tensions over con-
traction of or unequal access to political and economic resources,
which manifested themselves in conflict across and within genera-
tions, gender, social class, and even ethnicity.
This chapter does not counter the established historical fact that
marriage underwent significant transformations that varied from one
part of Africa to another. I will not revisit the well-known ambivalent
246 SAHEED ADERINTO
situation it created as people responded in accordance with how it

affected them. Rather, I want to open up new perspectives for inves-
tigating the impact of colonialism on African masculinities and on
generational relations by retrieving the voices of young Nigerian
men from the pages of newspapers. To be sure, existing scholarship
has relied almost exclusively on colonial archival documents, courts
records, and oral history. The credibility of these sources is not
questionable. However, by deploying newspapers, a useful genre of
sources for researching marriage politics that historians have grossly
overlooked, this chapter offers the following methodological and the-
oretical perspectives in order to shed light on the masculinized poli-
tics of marriage and ethno-cultural nationalism in Africa.
First, the representation of men and marriage in southern Nigerian
newspapers took the debate over conjugal affairs from its conventional
domains—in the inner chambers of the colonial courts, in the cor-
respondence among colonial officers, in private family and town hall
gatherings—to a much bigger public arena, providing young unmar-
ried men literate in English the opportunity to criticize their subordi-
nate situation—sometimes using pseudonyms in order to escape the
sanctions or the punishment their actions could cause. In fact, the
newspaper was a significant site through which youth masculinities
were performed, produced, and reproduced. Second, the print media
as a space for holding public debate not only gave young men the
opportunity to exchange information about marriage across ethnicity
and space, but also allowed them to create what I call an “imagined
community of victims of marriage racketeering.” To underestimate
the impact of the print media on youth’s consciousness about mar-
riage is to downplay the role that self-consciousness and self-fashion-
ing played in the everyday lives of colonial subjects in Africa. Third,
when young men wrote about exorbitant bride price, they invoked
the language of victimhood. This language of subordination pitched
them consistently against the hegemonic power or influence of the
rural elders, mostly men, accused of exploiting “hardworking” young
men, and preventing them from fulfilling cultural obligation and rite
of passage from a young person to an adult.
This third perspective demands rereading the term “masculinity”
in colonial Africa. Africanists have acknowledged the relevance of
R. W. Connell’s celebrated work Masculinities in reconceptualizing
men’s role, identity, and status.13 They have yielded to her admoni-
tion by recognizing that “not all men have the same amount or type
of power, the same opportunities, and, consequently, the same life
trajectories.”14 In addition, they have complicated her work by noting
that diverse forms of masculinities existed within the ranks of the

colonialists (hegemonic men) who maintained imperialism as a male-
centered edifice, and the African men they colonized.15 Local and
foreign ideals of gender roles, modernity, work place and bodily hab-
its, and sociocultural obligation produced complex outcomes for how
men saw themselves and were treated at various stages of their lives
and under shifting circumstances. Indeed, colonialism not only pro-
duced new forms of African masculinities through the entrenchment
of wage labor and missionary education, it also transformed the pre-
existing ones, creating new sets of often contradictory standards for
achieving and maintaining masculine roles.16
Drawing insight from Connell’s seminal work, the politics of mar-
riage payment in southern Nigeria allows us to identify two types of
masculinities, namely the hegemonic men, that is the rural patriarch
who imposed bride price, and the subordinate, that is young men
who worked in the cities, mines, and on plantations to acquire the
resources to fulfill marriage rites and obligations. Yet, this typology
needs to be deployed with caution. The subordinate status of a young
unmarried man was situational and relational—that is within the
context of bride price payment and his status as an unmarried, young
male. The same young man would exhibit hegemonic masculinity if
he supervised other men at work or mentored new “boys” who had
just moved to the city or joined the numerous ethnic associations
that provided self-help and mechanism of acculturation in multieth-
nic urban space. He would not be a subordinate man if he fulfilled
other cultural obligations—such as paying communities dues, help-
ing to educate his kinsmen, or serving as an English interpreter in
his community. This same logic applied to the hegemonic men, the
rural patriarchs, who exerted power over the young men. In main-
stream colonial paternalism, he was a “boy” regardless of his age and
legitimate cultural status—such as being a priest, chief, or custodian
of his community’s heritage—because he was an African in need of
European fatherhood, couched in the vocabulary of civilization.
Our discussion of the fluid meaning of hegemonic and subordi-
nate masculinities leads to that of nation and nationalism. One can-
not agree less with scholars of African nationalism and politics that
the rise of urban centers, mines, and military bases as well as the
expansion of educational facilities created “de-tribalized” men and
women who lived in a multicultural colonial society.17 If the British
colonizers’ main goal for creating urban centers was economic and
political, the unforeseen consequences manifested in the fusion of cul-
tures from diverse backgrounds. In theory, the detribalized men were
248 SAHEED ADERINTO
expected to jettison ethnocentrism for the ideology of a culturally

and politically united colonial state. They were expected to embrace
European culture and take pride in the idea of a united Nigeria,
and not emotionally invest in their ethnicity to the detriment of the
emerging nation-state. Indeed, the term “tribalism” in mainstream
colonial culture resonated with the stereotypes of “primitivity,” “ret-
rogression,” and all manifestations that contravened what colonial
civilization stood for or was expected to obliterate. For instance, the
numerous political cartoons and satire produced by Akinola Lasekan
and published in the 1940s and 1950s in the West African Pilot, the
best-selling nationalist newspaper in colonial Nigeria, provide the
most graphic insight into how the educated elites believed Nigerians
across ethnic groups should be thinking about their status as “eth-
nic/tribal” and “national/detribalized” bodies. However, scholars
rarely acknowledge the fact that as the colonial state emerged as a
melting pot of cultures, so did the expansion of space or avenues for
exclusionary intra-cultural interaction that contravened the ideals of
a “tribaless” society. Indeed, scholars who have written on “ethnic,”
otherwise called “tribal,” unions rarely acknowledge that the agenda
of these associations promoted “ethnic nationalism,” which disre-
garded the idea of a united nation-state that the leading nationalists
men advocated for during the 1940s and 1950s.18
What is more, historians have paid limited attention to the rela-
tionship between social class and masculinized nationalism. Indeed,
the idea of a united multicultural colonial state was largely the pro-
ject of hegemonic or “big” men, that is, educated, upper-class, male
nationalists, most of whom doubled as frontline professionals and
public intellectuals. Most single, lower-class men who felt the neg-
ative impact of marriage payments among other economic avarice
of colonialism were mostly concerned about fulfilling cultural and
financial expectations within their immediate communities and eth-
nic alliances than embracing the idea of a united colonial state, which
at best was far removed from their daily struggles. If the elites exhib-
ited political nationalism in their anticolonial activities and sought
independence from Britain as the solution to the problem of impe-
rial exploitation, the unmarried young men exalted ethno-cultural
nationalism and directed their grievances at their own kinsmen, call-
ing for a fair system that reduced the hardship of meeting the financial
requirements for marriage. Ethno-cultural nationalism manifested in
several shades—from the choice of residential neighborhood to dress
and socialization. Arguably, it was in the selection of spouse that it
was most visible. Marriage, as a process through which family was
formed, was central to the preservation of sociocultural identities that

guaranteed protection. The unmarried southern Nigerian men who
registered their grievances about marriage payment on the pages of
the newspapers were not concerned about development in other com-
munities and cultures. As the titles of their articles clearly demon-
strate (see notes and references), they decried the cost of marriage in
their ethnic groups, because they cared more about their ethnicity
than what obtained in other communities.
I am not suggesting that all young unmarried did not believe in
the idea of a “detribalized” Nigeria. There were several exceptions.
It would also be naive to conclude that all the upper-class, educated
elites believed in a united colonial state, where ethnic boundaries
collapsed to give way for a borderless culture mix. Indeed, several
well-respected nationalists among whom were doctors and lawyers
extolled the supremacy of their ethnic group over others. Herbert
Macaulay, the so-called father of Nigerian nationalism, was both a
cultural nationalist and a firm believer in a united Nigerian state.19
Thus, nationalism did not parade as a uniform ideology shared by all.
Rather individuals and groups at different stages of their lives and
under a range of situation exhibited a variety of nationalisms (eco-
nomic, political, ideological, and ethno-cultural, among others) to
satisfy their self-fashioning and the obligations imposed on them by
the groupings they belonged to. As men’s social status changed at
different stages of their lives, so also was their perspective toward
their position within diverse space. Thus, a young urban man who
criticized his elders for exploitation could later in life become a highly
educated and influential leader pushing for a society, where the inter-
est of the larger national state superseded the ethnic.
Contextualizing the Marriage Crises: Wage

Labor and the Making of New Masculinities
It is impossible to understand the masculinized politics of mar-
riage payment exhibited on the pages of Nigerian newspapers with-
out acknowledging that one of the enduring legacies of colonialism
was the emergence of new working-class men, whose identities were
shaped by the kinds of work they did, the income they made, where
they lived, and the social expectations imposed on them by individu-
als and institutions that wielded enormous power. As a male-centered
edifice, colonialism erected structures that placed men at the cen-
ter of state-making. By the late 1940s, tens of thousands of the new
African men were to be found in the new sites of imperial power such
250 SAHEED ADERINTO
as the mines, the military camps, and the cities.20 Mine, military, and
railway workers were predominantly unskilled and semiskilled labor.
Much of Nigeria’s skilled workers were to be found in government
offices working as book-keepers, secretaries, clerks, interpreters, or
teachers. By 1960, the year of Nigeria’s independence from Britain,
there were half a million registered wage employees in a country with
a population of over 50 million.21 Although many men sought jobs
in the government establishments, the largest percentage worked in
informal sectors of the economy as artisans and traders. Men, not
women, monopolized the urban sector of “domestic-helpers” pop-
ularly called “houseboys” who performed such chores as cooking,
child-care, and gardening. Indeed, the house-helper job was one of
the most popular city jobs, attracting a stream of unskilled laborers
from the villages. They were generally well paid, lived free-of-charge
in their masters’ (usually European and African elites and expatriates)
home, and enjoyed most of the splendors of quality life found in high-
class segregated neighborhoods and recreation facilities.
Historians have documented why men across generation and
class sought wage labor by abandoning agricultural work, trekking
hundreds of miles from their villages to the cities and mines.22 For
instance, the acute land shortage in eastern Nigeria inhibited reliance
on subsistent farming.23 Men were attracted to the colonial army both
in war and peacetime, not just because its wages were better than most
offered in many low-cadre employment, but because it provided the
opportunity to exhibit valor and muscular masculinity. Some people
embarked on permanent and seasonal migration to acquire money
to pay taxes and other levies imposed by the government and their
communities. In addition, the new consumerist cultures, which took
strong root as Nigeria was firmly integrated into the world-capitalist
system, also fueled the need for cash. Access to cash was important
for negotiating new social and political relations: men who had cash
stood a better chance of vying and wining important chieftaincy
titles, accumulating and maintaining large political patronage, and
playing important roles in their communities. The attractiveness of
the city complemented its reputation as a major employer of labor.
Not only did the city present men with the opportunity to experi-
ment with new social and sexual relations, which the village would
frown against, it also boasted of modern amenities such as electricity,
pipe water, and educational institutions rarely found in the country-
side.24 However, several unmarried men went to work in the city and
mines for bride price. A 1950 survey revealed that many of the Igbo
men in Lagos aged 15 to 34 came “in search of the high bridewealth
[bride price] demanded in their home communities.”25 Carolyn

Brown, in a detailed study of labor and masculinity in Nigerian coal
mines, has noted that most young, unmarried men risked the unsafe
environment of the mines, “to earn income to pay bride price.”26
Kenneth Little has also argued that the search for bride price pulled
most young men to the city.27 According to the Eastern Nigerian
government’s “Report of the Committee on Bride Price,” which was
released in 1955, men enlisted in the Nigerian army during World
War I because the military was paying marriage allowance. After the
war, the demobilized soldiers returned home with so much cash that
“men with daughters of marriageable age were dazzled by the money
they were offering and often made their daughters marry them, irre-
spective of the fact that they had already been betrothed to others and
in complete disregard of the girls’ wishes.”28
Workers’ compensation varied widely, mirroring the wide economic
inequality across social class and generation. The government’s annual
minimum wage in the 1940s was £36. Most semiskilled employees
working with high school diplomas or certificates as book-keepers
and clerks earned around £ 48 per annum. The highest-paid Nigerian
workers belonged to the minority group of highly educated elites,
including doctors, lawyers, and newspaper editors. During the 1940s,
an African magistrate’s maximum annual income was around £720,
a stark contrast to the £ 48 earned by most middle-class Nigerians
working with a high school diploma.29
The epileptic character of the colonial economy that manifested
strongly during such periods as the Great Depression and the world
wars, and poor working conditions, prevented men from fully max-
imizing the gains of working away from home. Thus, between the
1930s and the 1950s, workers embarked on strikes to demand better
working condition.30 Unemployment was strife. At least twenty thou-
sand unemployed people registered with the government labor office
in Lagos during the early 1920s, and these numbers increased during
the depression decade.31 High cost of living worsened the financial
status of most young men, preventing them from fulfilling mone-
tary obligations to their families and communities. Between 1939
and 1942, the cost of living in Lagos jumped from around 50 to
70 percent.32 In summary, wage labor did not automatically create
wealthy colonial subjects; in fact, very few people accumulated wealth
through it. Rather, it provided access to regular pay checks, which
helped people to meet basic daily needs such as food and shelter, but
was inadequate to generate wealth or satisfy high financial demands
such as marriage payment, without sacrifice, long years of labor, and
252 SAHEED ADERINTO
distress. In addition, wage inequality meant that some men would be

able to afford bride price, while several others would not.
Marriage, the Print Media, and

Ethno-Cultural Nationalism
As previously mentioned, when men criticized their elders in the
newspapers for imposing exorbitant bride price, they extolled cul-
tural nationalism by privileging intra-ethnic marriage over intereth-
nic marriage. Their writings provide clear insights into the advantages
of an intra-ethnic marriage conducted in the village, not in the city.
First, it enjoyed cultural legitimacy because newlywed couples would
not have to negotiate the cultural, linguistic, and sometimes reli-
gious barriers evident in interethnic marriages.33 A man who married
within his community stood a better chance of competing favorably
for chieftaincy titles or traditional offices. Intra-community marriage
alliances helped strengthen bond between clans and lineages. More
so, it maintained existing conflict among communities since inter-
ethnic marriage could revive old disputes and create problems for the
new family. Bert, a newspaper contributor and an advocate of intra-
ethnic marriage, believed that interethnic marriage was not only an
aberration, but that people usually entered into it under coercion. He
thought that interethnic marriages ended up in a disaster: “If a Nupe
man marries a Diobu girl and expects to be happy with her,” Bert
wrote, “he is mistaken, because such marriage has always been, not
for love, but for the errors committed through questionable habits.
Moreover, what does a Diobu girl care about the welfare of a Nupe
man? A stranger is a stranger, no matter whatever amount of con-
fidence is reposed in him or her . . . Who but a fool would expect a
happy home from such marriage?” He advised men not to risk inter-
ethnic marriage.34
But not all newspaper commentators shared Bert’s view about the
danger of an interethnic marriage. An editorial that was published on
August 24, 1946, in the Eastern Nigeria Guardian, lamented: “We
see nothing against people marrying outside their towns.”35 Another
writer who self-identified as “Bee-Bee-Jay” not only extolled inter-
ethnic marriage, but viewed popular preference for intra-ethnic mar-
riage as an obstacle to a united Nigeria free of ethnic discrimination.
“I was shocked to think,” he wrote, “that despite the various sermons
on mental emancipation, tribal discrimination and all that call for a
united Nigeria, there are still some who cannot see the good that is
in other tribes.” Bee-Bee-Jay then went on to criticize the assumption
that interethnic marriage was susceptible to failure: “Unhappiness,

therefore is not to be attributed to inter-tribal marriages.”36 There
was a social-class dimension to marriage across ethnicity. Little has
shown in his African Women in Towns, that members of the upper
class were more likely to marry across ethnic groups than working-
class Nigerians. Although Little did not detail why interethnic mar-
riage was common among the elites, one could suggest that the
lower-class men preferred intra-ethnic marriage because it enhanced
protection against socioeconomic problems.37
Second, marriage conducted abroad, especially in the city (even when
both the bride and groom came from the same ethnic group) posed
some problems for male authority. Some men’s general assumption
was that village girls were better behaved than their city counterparts
who were exposed to excessive Westernization and its consequences
such as “bad” mannerism (drinking and smoking) and exotic fashion
such as wearing sexually provocative and body-revealing dresses and
charred hair.38 Village girls, several writers believed, were much easier
to control than their city counterparts. They were the real African
woman, equipped with all the skills to run a good African home. A
writer who simply identified himself as TY was explicit in his pref-
erence for a bride from his community. After enumerating how he
changed jobs five times within a year to raise his £50 bride price, he
concluded that “a village girl is not like a Lagos girl. She would not
leave the house just because of a disagreement. She will wash your
clothes, cook good food. You won’t miss the village life.”39
City girls, in the men’s writings about love and romance in the
Nigerian newspapers, were best for enjoying fast, social life in a tran-
sient relationship. What is more, city girls were likely to be educated
and in favor of female socioeconomic independence, which was widely
promoted in the growing advice manuals in the newspapers during
the 1940s and 1950s.40 Gleaning from the debate over marriage and
female independence in the newspapers, the idea of women’s finan-
cial independence was not popular—even though some men wanted a
educated, working-class girl as a wife. The contrast between “sophisti-
cated” city girls and “primitive” village girls is well represented in early
African written literature. In the People of the City (1954), the first
Nigerian novel in English language to gain global recognition, Cyprian
Ekwensi described the contrast between Lagos and village girls as well
as the dilemma faced by bachelors like the 26-year-old newspaper crime
reporter Amusa Sango, the novel’s main character who struggles with
parental pressure to marry: “Of women Sango could have had his pick,
from the silk-clad ones who wore lipstick in the European manners and
254 SAHEED ADERINTO
smelled of scents in the warm air to the more ample, less sophisticated
ones in the big-sleeved velvet blouses that feminized a woman.”41 Yet,
not all village girls were uneducated. Indeed, many had primary and
secondary school diplomas and participated in love letter writing—a
significant aspect of colonial literary culture that defined the idea of
modern romantic passion.42 It would appear that the longer women
stayed single in the city, the more morally corrupt they would be, in the
men’s framing of moral respectability.
The third element of the relationship of marriage and ethno-
cultural nationalism was the difference between native/traditional
marriage and the English/church marriage, introduced through
colonialism. The crisis of marriage payment took the dimension it
assumed partly because middle- and lower-class men tended to prefer
native marriage over English ceremonies. Both men and women were
aware of the advantages of English marriage, which some thought was
less expensive because it did not have to be conducted in the village.
Men could circumvent cultural obligations of marriage if they mar-
ried in the city before the magistrate or in the church. But English
marriage, otherwise called “Ordinance or white marriage,” was not
as culturally legitimate as the traditional ceremony. While traditional
marriage enhanced patriarchy, English marriage was more favorable to
women, not only because it criminalized polygamy, but also because
it gave women enormous power in matters of inheritance, divorce,
and socioeconomic mobility.43 Writing in support of what he called
a “moderately refined” bride price, one Ligbor contrasted European
and native marriage in terms of opportunities and liabilities accruing
to husbands and wives if divorce happened: “Girls who insist upon
the European forms of marriage should have no dowry or bride price
paid on their behalf, but rather they should bring something to their
husband’s house as dowry, so that when the evils of that one sided law
of alimony arise, the man can have only one loss to suffer.”44
The debate over the advantages and disadvantages of native/tra-
ditional and English marriage predates the 1930s. Between the late
nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the subject of English
marriage created complex politics, predominantly among the educated
elites who were also Christian converts in colonial Lagos.45 However,
in the 1940s and 1950s, the debate over native versus English marriage
in the newspapers was grafted into the politics of marriage payment
among lower-class and semi-educated men who consistently weighted
their options.46 Like the debate over inter and intra-ethnic marriage,
preference for or against English or native marriage had a class dimen-
sion. It would appear that English marriage was more popular among
members of the upper class, who sought to use it to gain access to colo-
nial privilege. One editorial titled “Imported Marriage” plainly estab-
lished the prevailing idea that European marriage was strictly an elitist
preference: “It is to our way of thinking ridiculous to maintain that the
imported [English] form of marriage is the only one fit for decent peo-
ple as some of our girls seem to hold.” It went on to exaggerate the level
of acceptance of African marriage: “As a matter of fact we are definitely
of the opinion that for every 100 Africans it is difficult to have one who
would find the European form of marriage suitable.47
Bride price was determined not so much by the age of a girl, fam-
ily background, or beauty, but by her literacy level and the “general
prosperity of the people”—that is the level of development of her
community.48 Generally, the bride price for educated girls (mostly
with primary or secondary school diploma) was higher than the
one for uneducated brides.49 The reason for this is not far-fetched.
Some parents saw bride price as a compensation for investing in the
education of their daughters.50 In Owerri, in the mid-1950s, men
paid about £100 for uneducated girls, £200 for girls holding pri-
mary school diploma/certificate; and £300 for those who acquired
post–primary school certificate in teaching, nursing, and midwifery.51
The bride price for uneducated and educated girls in post–World War
II southern Nigeria generally ranged between £18 and £300.52 The
advantages of marrying an educated girl were legion. Not only did it
fulfill the agenda of men who wanted to raise “modern” families pat-
terned along European culture, educated girls also stood the chance
of securing the highly regarded clerical jobs and contributing to fam-
ily’s income. As popular as the classification of girls into “educated”
and “uneducated” for the purpose of bride price was, some contribu-
tors believed that “civilized humanity cannot but be rudely shocked
at the suggestions of classifying girls as though they were specimens
in a laboratory!”53 Other critics thought that bride price should not
be used to recoup educational investment. “The fact that certain par-
ents spend a lot on the education of their children is conceded, but
this fact we contend, is no justification for parents expecting to get
heavy dowries [bride-price] from prospective husbands”( the Eastern
Nigeria Guardian editorialized on June 13, 1940).54
The Print Media and the Moral Economy of

Marriage Payment
Young men used the following methods to mobilize against exorbi-
tant bride price: they selectively deployed certain aspects of African/
256 SAHEED ADERINTO
native marriage culture that they believed was “good” while criticiz-
ing those that were viewed as “bad”; educated their kinsmen in the
village about their travails in the city; debunked the popular assump-
tion that wage earners had a lot of disposable income; blackmailed
their elders for monetizing marriage and associating marriage with
slavery; highlighted the impact of exorbitant marriage payment on
the individual, the community, and the nation as a whole. Let us take
a closer look at these methods of mobilization against bride price,
one at a time.
When men criticized their communities for imposing high bride
price on them, they occasionally compared and contrasted European
culture with African culture and contended that payment of bride
price was not a requirement for marriage in Europe, the continent
that served as a template for development in Africa. They tried to
redefine the conditions for marriage by recommending that “mar-
riage must be solely prompted by genuine love which is far from
being a material object that can be purchased with money” and that
the wish of the prospective bride and groom must supersede that of
their parents.55 This proposal attempted to individualize marriage by
removing the extended family from interfering in conjugal matter in
contravention of existing norms that treated marriage not solely a
relation between two individuals but families, clans, and communi-
ties. The ideas of “individualizing” marriage or attempting to limit
parental involvement resonated powerfully with other components
of colonial culture and everyday life, which I have termed “selective
modernity”—the notion that Nigeria can trail the path of advanced
European states by selectively appropriating “positive” practices of
social advancement and doing away with those constructed as “neg-
ative.”56 Selective modernity was riddled with inconsistencies, not
because those who espoused it did not know what they wanted, but
because both African and Euro-American culture presented contrast-
ing benefits and demerits that Nigerians manipulated for different
purposes and in changing context.
Hence, a young man like Timileyin of Ijebu who preferred intra-
ethnic over interethnic and English marriage in an article that was
published in the Southern Nigeria Defender on March 12, 1942,
utilized the language of modernity by associating bride price with
“backward” elements of African culture that had to be eradicated in
the interest of “civilization” and “modernity.” He asked the British
government to intervene in the marriage crisis in his community by
directing the chiefs to stop collecting bride price or return to the
precolonial practice of paying it with agricultural product and labor.
Perhaps no other writing that I have seen demonstrates more effec-

tively how selective modernity reflected in the politics of marriage
than the opening paragraph of another article in the Eastern Nigeria
Guardian, which read more like a thesis statement: “Traditional cus-
toms are always coveted and much has been the controversy which
has taken place in many places at any attempt to change them. History
itself has it on record that custom must be respected but not without
exception. Ethically, if the existence of a certain custom is not repug-
nant to the progress and the wellbeing of a community it would not
justify any attempt to eradicate the same merely for the pleasure of
doing so. At the same time, commonsense permits that if the reten-
tion of a custom threatens the progress of any people, that custom
should be scrapped.”57 But as complex as the debate over “progres-
sive/modern” or “primitive/retrogressive” was, it is apparent that
most men wanted bride price to be reduced, not completely removed.
They understood the importance of bride price as that component
of traditional marriage that legitimized men’s status as husband.
Another writer named Obi clearly explained the impact of the non-
payment of bride price on gender relations in marriage: “A woman
whose husband has paid no dowry [bride price] for her, usually takes
undue advantage over him. She teases or abuses him on the slightest
pretext. ‘You regard yourself a man, what have you spent on me?’ she
would ask. These and similar remarks are common.”58
When men wrote about the problem of marriage, they also attempted
to educate their community about their ordeal in the city. They tried
to repudiate the notion that urban dwellers, miners, and soldiers made
a lot of money. Hence they saw communication as one tool to press-
ing home their demand for reduction of bride price. “Everyone who
understands the true position of the economic life would support the
spirit of his article,” wrote Ndibe, who agreed with another contrib-
utor named Obiako that the bride price for educated and uneducated
girls in Awka needed to be reduced.59 The youths’ narratives in the
newspapers include the harsh conditions under which they worked in
the city, the kinds of work they did, and everyday life of the working
class, all of which made fulfilling marriage rites difficult. Chris Olisa
provided a very textual writing about the toils of young men in the
city by chronicling their experience at different stages of life as they
struggled to meet societal expectation in a colonial society character-
ized by unpredictable economic circumstances: “After sending a boy
to a college he comes out to find his living. Naturally, he is not worth
a farthing because whilst in the college his parents were responsible for
his fees and clothing. Now it happens that by the time he has finished
258 SAHEED ADERINTO
his studies, something inevitable befalls his parents and he could not
therefore, pursue his studies. The young man comes out of the college
to look for a means of livelihood. Whilst on this venture, he falls in
love with a girl, who is fully matured. He has now succeeded in get-
ting an employment and after making provision for a few odd things
essential to life, he wants to marry his fully developed girlfriend. After
complying with the necessary formalities, he is asked to pay a dowry
aggregate to his year’s emolument before taking his girl as a wife.”60
Other writers like A. L John, who wrote about marriage payment in
Mbaise, was more confrontational in his rendition of how he thought
his community wanted him to spend his hard-earned money: “Would
it not be criminal folly to ask the young man to use-up all his eight
years saving just to marry a wife?”61
Men realized that opposition to high bride price required the
deployment of vocabularies capable of eliciting public opinion against
their elders and community. The colonial culture of the English rhe-
toric developed partly because the print media was respected as a site
through which people could hold public debate, demonstrate their
mastery over language, while generating large volume of interesting
information that increased readership and sale of the newspapers.62
Critics consistently associated high marriage payment with slavery,
one of the most emotionally charged words in a modernizing soci-
ety that credited European “civilization” for helping to end the hei-
nous trade in humans. They claimed to be speaking for the “hapless”
young village girls who were “sold” into sexual slavery. “Every right
thinking person will agree with me that it is purely slave trade,” J.
W. I. Wubani, an opponent of high bride price, argued.63 Another
writer, Chas H. Olisa, submitted: “To my mind, the dowry system is
an indirect form of slavery.”64 To A. L John, bride price was a “shame-
ful act of indirect slave dealing.”65 Such admonitions as the one by
Ndibe of Awka, who argued that parents should “discover the intrin-
sic value of their daughters. They are not simply chattels for making
money,” or another that claimed, “Our women folk are thereby lit-
erally placed in the public auction for the highest bidder,” were all
meant to associate marriage with capitalism and unequal socioeco-
nomic relations between junior and senior men.66 Yet another writer
made a moral case for marriage by drawing a relationship between
humans and inanimate objects of trade: “The suggestion of grading
[pricing] human beings for purpose of the holy institution of matri-
mony appears to us to be very scandalous for it lowers the status and
dignity of man and removes all full stops separating human beings
from mere and immobile commercial commodities.”67
The problem of the “commercialization of marriage” went beyond

monetizing bride price; it also extended to the success of marriage
and the value of the wives being “bought” with meager wages.
Payment of bride price and compliance with all traditional rites and
expectations did not guarantee a successful marriage. The headline
of a front-page article in the Southern Nigeria Defender spoke to
the large number of failed marriages in the era of exorbitant bride
price: “Marriage at Ibadan Costs Almost £ 40 and Yet no Safety.”68
Marriages failed because of numerous factors ranging from infidelity
to incompatibility.69 But men attempted to link marriage instability
to payment of high bride price. They argued that it deprived new
husbands of the resources needed to live a decent life after marriage.
One Obi, among other writers, attributed domestic conflict to high
bride price: “Many men use their hands, sticks or canes freely on their
wives for the smallest offence. Such men, no doubt think that this is
one way of getting their dowry [bride price] worth. They think of the
dowry and become pugnacious. They regard themselves as lords over
their wives, and therefore, flog them to their satisfaction.”70 Another
writer from Port Harcourt who self-identified as Uzo, criticized the
elders of Imuma for giving out “untrained girls who put their under-
wear on top of their gowns and can’t correctly serve kola to any visitor
nor say good morning.”71
Beyond associating high bride price with slavery, men did high-
light other negative consequences of inflated marriage payment on the
individual, their community, and the city where they lived. Indeed,
the more they were able to relate the problem beyond the narrow cri-
ses of a poor, working-class bachelor to that of the larger community
and the colonial state, the more they invited debate from like-minded
men or secure their sympathy. Some men were forced to practice
interethnic marriage by “look[ing] for a thing where it is cheap” to
use the words of Ben who wrote about his hometown Nkwerre. For
him, the best means of preventing a community and their culture
from extinction was intra-community marriage. Without referencing
his sources, Ben went on to state the impact of late marriage on pro-
creation: “Before young men could save enough money for marriage,
they grew so old that even if they succeed in marrying, their issues
[children] are either weak or unprogressive.”72 “Do you want increase
of population? Are we not to marry our products?” another man,
named Uzo, queried.73
But the most obvious implication of high bride price, which most
of the writers pontificated, was the elongation of bachelorhood. When
men could not marry within a culturally acceptable period of time,
260 SAHEED ADERINTO
they developed, in several writers’ conviction, “disgust for marriage”

and remained in perpetual bachelorhood, squandering their money
and time on prostitutes and transient relationships. The situation was
described as a vicious cycle. High bride price created a pool of unmar-
ried girls who migrated to the city to become prostitutes after waiting
endlessly for qualified suitors.74 “Today, when we look around,” one
contributor wrote, “we notice prostitutes in great multitude swarm-
ing into cities from various villages. This is one result of the high
bride price permeating the Iboland. Many young girls have found
marriage in their towns unaccomplished.” 75
Conclusion
The central focus of this chapter was the representation of the poli-
tics of bride price payment in several southern Nigerian newspapers
within the context of relations between subordinate and hegemonic
men on the one hand and ethnic nationalism on the other. Young
unmarried men turned newspapers into a site for performing sub-
ordinate masculinity by decrying the impact of high bride price on
their ability to fulfill the conditions needed for marriage and rite of
passage to adulthood. However, they also expressed strong notions of
ethnic nationalism by promoting intra-ethnic and intra-community
marriage in a multicultural colonial state of Nigeria. Thus, one of
the main contributions of this chapter to African research on gender,
masculinity, and nationalism is its use of newspapers to map out the
contest among men of different social class and generation, and its
relations to the significant theme of ethno-nationalism.
However, discussion about bride price in the newspapers is replete
with numerous inconsistencies. These inconsistencies should be
expected. Marriage expenses varied from one part of southern Nigeria
to another. Most men preferred intra-ethnic marriage, yet they ques-
tioned the legitimacy of cultural obligations that had so much of an
impact on their financial stability. The contradiction in the men’s
agenda cannot be divorced from the broader problem of colonial
modernity. During the first half of the twentieth century, Nigerians
selectively deplored the discourse of Western and African civilization
in opposition and contradictory manner to satisfy their shifting posi-
tions on core issues, like marriage that affected them.
Nigerian masculinity studies is a viable area of scholarly research.
Although some interesting works have appeared in recent years, there
are still a lot of blind spots. For instance, we still do not know much
about what it takes to be an ethnic man vis-à-vis a male member of
the nation. Information about the transformation of ethnic mascu-

linity under colonialism is replete with several literary and historical
works.76 But scholars need to pull these studies together to create
strong narratives about the intersections of ethnic masculinity and
the idea of nationality. In other words, how does the transformation
of the ethnic construction of masculinity under colonialism influence
people’s understanding of their role and status as members of the
nation? When and how does ethnic masculinity manifest itself in the
discourses of nationality and nation-building? As I have highlighted
above, the colonial man was not just an ethnic man, but a colonial
subject or member of a nation-state that was comprised of several dis-
similar ethnic groups.
In terms of periodization, much of the present work focuses on the
colonial period. We need works that historicize the reconfiguration
of the intersection of masculinity and nationalism since the demise
of colonial rule in 1960. Did new forms of masculinities emerge
after independence? What kinds of political and social conditions or
changes pave the way for the rise or consolidation of new forms of
masculinity? For instance, the rise of strong men through military
dictatorship in postcolonial Nigeria introduced a new form of male
authority, guided by a different set of ideologies about public order
and obligation or loyalty toward the nation-state. Military national-
ism also needs to be placed in proper historical perspective within
the context of what is takes to be a man and a soldier from a partic-
ular ethnic group or community. It is a well-known fact that mili-
tary masculinity worsened interethnic relation. But the dynamics of
ethno-military nationalism need urgent attention. For example, what
can military masculinity teach us about postcolonial gender relations
and about the exercise and distribution of political authority? What
is more, significant political and economic processes since indepen-
dence have influenced virtually all areas of Nigerian life. We still
need historical research on how new information technology, con-
traction of socioeconomic opportunities, the new diaspora, popular
and expressive culture, expansion of educational institutions, among
other developments since independence rule, have transformed mas-
culinity and intergenerational relations.
Notes
1. “Youths of Awo-Omama Will Boycott Their Girls: Want Bride Price Be
Reduced,” Nigerian Spokesman, January 8, 1948. See the following arti-
cles, news, and editorials in the Eastern Nigeria Guardian: Ositadimma,
262 SAHEED ADERINTO
“This Dowry Question,” May 14, 1940; A. A. Anyaegbuna, “The Dowry

Question,” May 18, 1940; Ndibe, “The Bride Price (2),” May 22, 1940;
Ndibe, “The Bride Price (1),” May 23, 1940; Chas H. Olisa, “Dowry
System in Iboland,” May 28, 1940; Eric M. Awubitte, “Bride Price in
Kalabari,” May 30, 1940; Bert, “Forced Marriage,” June 4, 1940; Bee-
Bee-Jay, “Forced Marriage,” June 8, 1940; P. Anozie Ehim, “Dowry
System in Iboland,” June 11, 1940; Bert, “Forced Marriage,” June
12, 1940; P. Anozie Ehim, “Dowry System in Iboland (2),” June 12,
1940; Editorial, “That Bride Price,” June 13, 1940; Agwunobi, “That
Bride Price,” June 13, 1940; Bert, “The Word Dowry,” June 17, 1940;
D. S. G., “Kalabari Marriage Custom,” June 17, 1940; A. E., “Bride
Price at Awka,” July 19, 1940; A. S. Naibi, “This Marriage Question,”
July 24, 1940; Chuks, “The Marriage Problem (1),” August 9, 1940;
Chuks, “The Marriage Problem (2),”August 10, 1940; Chuks Okeya,
“The Marriage Problem (1),” September 17, 1940; Chuks Okeya, “The
Marriage Problem (2),” September 18, 1940; Lord, “This Marriage
Problem,” January 15, 1941; “This Marriage Problem,” January 21,
1941; Editorial, “Kalabari: Dowry Problem,” February 2, 1941; “Wife
or Dowry (1)?” March 24, 1941; “Wife or Dowry (2)?” March 25, 1941;
R. O. Ikuru, “Marriage System in Andoni,” April 22, 1941; “Dowry,”
May 6, 1941; W. Chiedozi, “Dowry System in Owerri,” June 3, 1941;
Chris, “Dowry System in Owerri,” December 12, 1941; Chris, “Dowry
System in Owerri,” December 13, 1941; A Citizen, “Kalabari Marriage
Law and Custom,” January 1, 1942; Editorial, “Marriage Law and
Custom,” January 7, 1942; “Dowry and Native Marriage,” January
26, 1942; Ligbor, “Dowry and Native Marriages,” February 9, 1942;
Ezemurum Obi, “Dowry and Native Marriages,” February 9, 1942;
“Marriage in Ihube,” March 12, 1942; “Queer Marriage Laws,” May
20, 1942; “Bride Price is Very Excessive,” March 17, 1943; Editorial,
“Bride-Price in Nkwerre,” March 18, 1943; “Girls for Sale,” July 20,
1943; Ivy, “Exorbitant Dowry,” August 9, 1943; Editorial: “Imported
Marriage,” August 10, 1943; “Soldier Serving in India Says Marriage
System in Iboland Needs Reformation,” October 5, 1944; Obuoforibo,
“Man Traces Marriage Dowry to the Times of Biblical Adam and Eve,”
January 20, 1945; Editorial, Marriage Expenses,” November 23, 1944;
Yoguguom Akwa, “Bride Price in Awka,” July 1, 1946; Oguo Ukadi,
“Bride-Price at Awka,” August 21, 1946; Editorial, “Bride Price at
Awka,” August 24, 1946; S. N. Okoroji, “Marriage in Owerri,” October
23, 1947; Miss Nnatughaobi, “Exorbitant Bride Price,” January 3,
1948; J. W. I. Wubani, “Exorbitant Bride Price in Ngwa Clan,” January
20, 1948; Hyacinth O. Akujobi, “Owerri and High Bride Price,” June
25, 1948; Nwannaemeka Okoli, “Bride Price at Awka,” September 1,
1948; Uzo, “Marriage in Imuma,” October 8, 1949; “Bride Price in
Ahoada,” August 22, 1950; “Bride Price in Awka,” October 8, 1952;
“Bride Price Scandal,” November 6, 1952; “Onicha Council Tackles
Marital Problems,” February 28, 1953; “Bride Price in Egiland,” August
8, 1960. See the following articles, editorials, and news from the West
African Pilot : “This Dowry Problem,” July 29, 1938; “Our Marriage
Custom,” January 13, 1939; “Onitsha Dowry Reduced,” February

20, 1939; “The Dowry System (1),” February 21, 1939; “The Dowry
System (2),” February 22, 1939; “Forced Marriage,” February 3, 1942.
See the following news, editorials, and articles in the Southern Nigeria
Defender : “Is the Dowry Necessary?” July 28, 1944; “Dowry System Is
Necessary,” August 8, 1944; “This Dowry System,” December 1, 1944;
“Native Marriage and Dowry,” February 14, 1946; “Dowry in Native
Marriage,” March 11, 1946; “Dowry in Native Marriage,” March 26,
1946; “Dowry in Native Marriage,” March 29, 1946; “Parents and their
Daughters,” June 27, 1946; “Why Raise Bride Price?” March 27, 1947;
“Dowry Problem in Ijebuland,” September 23, 1948; “Bride Price Rises
to £130 in Ijebu Ode,” October 11, 1951; “Brides for Sale,” October
12, 1951; “Exorbitant Bride Price,” September 11, 1952; “High Bride
Price,” October 14, 1952; “Bride Price in East,” October 7, 1954; “Bride
Price in Nigeria,” December 1, 1954.
2. “Youths of Awo-Omama Will Boycott Their Girls.”
3. Ibid.
4. “Don’t Marry Above £ 25: Ngwa Decides,” Eastern Nigeria Guardian,
January 3, 1953.
5. For more on Ojike, see among others, Gloria Chuku, “Mbonu Ojike: An
African Nationalist and Pan-Africanist,” in The Igbo Intellectual Tradition:
Creative Conflict in African and African Diasporic Thought, ed. Gloria
Chuku (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 89–118; Raphael Chijioke
Njoku, African Cultural Values: Igbo Political Leadership in Colonial
Nigeria, 1900–1966 (New York: Routledge, 2005), 103–137.
6. N. A. Fadipe, The Sociology of the Yoruba (Ibadan: Ibadan University
Press, 1970), 91.
7. Eastern Region of Nigeria: Report of the Committee on Bride Price
(Enugu: Government Printer, 1955), 1.
8. For more about the Nigerian newspaper press, see Increase H. E.
Coker, Landmarks of the Nigerian Press: An Outline of the Origins and
Development of the Newspaper Press in Nigeria, 1859 to 1965 (Lagos: Daily
Times Press, 1968).
9. On these aspects of Nigerian history, see, for example, David Smock,
Conflict and Control in an African Trade Union: Study of the Nigerian
Coal Miners’ Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969);
S. O. Osoba, “Phenomenon of Labour Migration in the Era of British
Colonial Rule: A Neglected Aspect of Nigeria’s Social History,” Journal
of the Historical Society of Nigeria 4, no. 4 (1969): 515–538; Bill Freund,
Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines (Essex: Longman, 1981);
Lisa A. Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in
Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).
10. David Parkin and David Nyamwaya, eds., Transformations of African
Marriage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Diana
Jeater, Marriage, Perversion and Power: The Construction of Moral
Discourse in Southern Rhodesia, 1894–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993);
Jean Allman, “Rounding up Spinsters: Gender Chaos and Unmarried
Women in Colonial Asante,” Journal of African History 37, no. 2 (1996):
264 SAHEED ADERINTO
195–214; Judith Byfield, “Women, Marriage, Divorce and the Emerging

Colonial State in Abeokuta (Nigeria) 1892–1904,” Canadian Journal
of African Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 32–51; Tabitha Kanogo, African
Womanhood in Colonial Kenya, 1900–1950 (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2005); Brett L. Shadle, “Girl Cases”: Marriage and Colonialism
in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890–1970 (Portsmouth: Heinemann. 2006); Jean
Allman and Victoria Tashjian, “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History
of Colonial Asante (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000); Elizabeth
Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of
Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1992); “‘The
Woman in Question’: Marriage and Identity in the Colonial Courts of
Northern Ghana, 1907–1954,” in Women in African Colonial Histories,
ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2002), 116–143.
11. Shadle, “Girl Cases.”
12. Kenneth Little, African Women in Towns: An Aspect of Africa’s Social
Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); P. L.
Bonner, Desirable or Undesirable Sotho Women? Liquor, Prostitution and
the Migration of Sotho Women to the Rand, 1920–1945 (Johannesburg:
University of Witwatersrand, African Studies Institute, 1988); Veijo
Notkola and Harri Siiskonen, Fertility, Mortality, and Migration in Sub-
Saharan Africa: The Case of Ovamboland in North Namibia, 1925–1990
(New York: Martin’s Press, 2000); Hamilton Sipho Simelane, “The State,
Chiefs and the Control of Female Migration in Colonial Swaziland,
1930s–50s,” Journal of African History 45, no. 1 (2004): 103–124; David
B. Coplan, “You Have Left Me Wandering About: Basotho Women and
the Culture of Mobility,” in “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration
of Gender in Africa, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson and Sheryl A. McCurdy
(Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2001), 188–211.
13. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Lisa
Lindsay and Stephan F. Miescher, eds., Men and Masculinities in Modern
Africa (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003); Lahoucine Ouzgane and
Robert Morrell, eds., African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the
Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005); Benedict Carton, Blood From Your Children: The Colonial Origins
of Generational Conflict in South Africa (Charlottesville: University
of Virginia Press, 2000); Stephan F. Miescher, Making Men in Ghana
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Robert Morrell, “Of
Boys and Men: Masculinity and Gender in Southern Africa,” Journal of
Southern African Studies 24, no. 4 (1998): 605–630; Robert Morrell,
From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinity in Colonial Natal, 1880–1920
(Pretoria:Africa: UNISA Press, 2001); Robert Morrell, ed., Changing
Men in Southern Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press,
2001); Thembisa Waetjen, Workers and Warriors: Masculinity and the
Struggle for Nation in Southern Africa (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2004).
14. Robert Morrell and Lahoucine Ouzgane, “African Masculinities: An
Introduction,” in Ouzgane and Morrell, African Masculinities, 4.
15. Nwando Achebe, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Nwando Achebe, “‘And
She Became a Man’: King Ahebi Ugbabe in the History of Enugu-Ezike,
Northern Igboland, 1880–1948,” in Men and Masculinities in Modern
Africa, 52–68.
16. Stephan F. Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana
17. James S. Coleman, Nigeria: A Background to Nationalism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1958); James S. Coleman, Nationalism
and Development in Africa: Selected Essays, ed. Richard Sklar (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994); Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in
Colonial Africa (London: Muller Limited, 1956).
18. See, for example, Austin Ahanotu, “The Role of Ethnic Unions in the
Development of Southern Nigeria: 1916–66,” in Studies in Southern
Nigerian History, ed. Boniface I. Obichere (London: Frank Cass, 1982),
155–174; J. D. Barkan, M. L. McNulty, and M. A. O. Ayeni, “Hometown
Voluntary Associations, Local Development, and the Emergence of Civil
Society in Western Nigeria,” Journal of Modern African Studies 29, no. 3
(1991): 457–480; L. Trager, “The Hometown and Local Development:
Creativity in the use of Hometown Linkages in Contemporary Nigeria,”
Journal of Nigerian Public Administration and Management 1, no. 2
(1992): 21–32.
19. Tekena N. Tamuno, Herbert Macaulay, Nigerian Patriot (London:
Heinemann, 1976).
20. See, for instance, Carolyn A. Brown, “A ‘Man’ in the Village is a ‘Boy’
in the Workplace: Colonial Racism, Worker Militance, and Igbo Notions
of Masculinity in the Nigerian Coal Industry, 1930–1945,” in Men and
Masculinities in Modern Africa, 157–158.
21. P. C. Lloyd, Africa in Social Change (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books,
1967), 120.
22. W. M. Freund, “Labor Migration to the Northern Tin Mines, 1903–
1945,” Journal of African History 22, no. 1 (1981): 73–84; S. O. Osoba,
“The Phenomenon of Labour Migration in the Era of British Colonial
Rule: A Neglected Aspect of Nigeria’s Social History,” Journal of the
Historical Society of Nigeria 4, no. 4 (1969): 515–538; Leonard Plotnicov,
Strangers to the City: Urban Man in Jos, Nigeria (Pittsburg: University
of Pittsburg Press, 1967); Dan Aronson, The City is Our Farm: Seven
Migrant Ijebu Yoruba Families (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1978); Abner
Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa: A Study of Hausa Migrants
in Yoruba Towns (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969);
C. N. Ubah, Colonial Army and Society in Northern Nigeria (Kaduna:
Baraka Press, 1998); Sam Ukpabi, The Origins of the Nigerian Army:
A History of West African Frontier Force, 1897–1914 (Zaria, Nigeria:
Gaskiya, 1987).
23. Brown, “A ‘Man’ in the Village is a ‘Boy’ in the Workplace,” 159.
24. Ayodeji Olukoju, Infrastructure Development and Urban Facilites in
Lagos, 1861–2000 (Ibadan: IFR A, 2003).
25. Lloyd, Africa in Social Change, 123.
266 SAHEED ADERINTO
26. Brown, “A ‘Man’ in the Village is a ‘Boy’ in the Workplace,” 162.

27. Little, West African Urbanization, 7–23. In addition, the life history of
four migrant men in the northern city of Jos documented by Leonard
Plotnicov demonstrated that all the men married women from their eth-
nic groups. Plotnicov, Strangers to the City.
28. Eastern Region of Nigeria, 5.
29. “Salary of African Magistrates,” Daily Service, October 28, 1944.
30. Wale Oyemakinde, “The Nigerian General Strike of 1945,” Journal of the
Historical Society of Nigeria 7, no. 4 (1975): 693–710.
31. NAI, CSO 26/38322/S.193, “The Organization of the Unemployed
Men and Women of Nigeria to the Chief Secretary to the Government,”
June 7, 1946.
32. Saheed Aderinto, When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality,
Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2015), chapter 1.
33. “Youth Faces Old Time Conservatism,” West African Pilot, September
19, 1945.
34. Bert, “Forced Marriage.”
35. Editorial, “Bride Price at Awka,” August 24, 1946.
36. Bee-Bee-Jay, “Forced Marriage.”
37. Little, African Women in Towns, 130–132.
38. From the West African: “Moral Control,” April 13, 1939; “Undesirable
Women,” December 6, 1939; “Unstable Women,” July 5, 1939; “Female
Drunkard,” October 15, 1945; “Drunkenness among Women,” May
28, 1942; “Our Girls and Ballroom Etiquette,” November 23, 1945;
“Our Girls and Ballroom Etiquette,” November 29, 1945; “Our Ladies
at the Cinema,” October 16, 1945; “Nigeria Wants Night Club Reform”;
“Police Raids for Night Clubs,” April 3, 1948.
39. TY, “City Love and Marriage,” Nigerian Spokesman, June 11, 1944.
40. Saheed Aderinto, “Modernizing Love: Gender, Romantic Passion, and
Youth Literary Culture in Colonial Nigeria,” Africa: The Journal of the
International African Institute 85, no. 3 (2015).
41. Cyprian Ekwensi, People of the City (London: Andre Dakers, 1954), 7;
Buchi Emecheta, The Bride Price: A Novel (New York: George Braziller,
1976).
42. Aderinto, “Modernizing Love.”
43. For more on this aspect, see Kristin Mann, Marrying Well: Marriage,
Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
44. Ligbor, “Dowry and Native Marriages.”
45. Mann, Marrying Well.
46. See the following articles in the West African Pilot : “Polygamous Marriage
is Good for Africans, Says ‘Osademis,’” July 28, 1943; “Polygamous
Marriage is Good for the African Temperament,” July 31, 1943; “Oged
Macaulay’s Invitation to Debate Polygamy is Heard,” August 11, 1943;
“Polygamy is the Central Factor in African Life: Says Europeans,” August
16, 1943.
47. Editorial, “Imported Marriage.”
48. Chris, “Dowry System in Owerri,” December 13, 1941.

49. A. E., “Bride Price at Awka.”
50. Eastern Region of Nigeria: Report of the Committee on Bride Price , 7.
51. Ibid., 7.
52. Ibid., 1–10.
53. “Bride Price Scandal,” November 6, 1952.
54. Editorial, “The Bride Price.”
55. Wubani, “Exorbitant Bride Price in Ngwa Clan”; Akujobi, “Owerri and
High Bride Price.”
56. For more on selective modernity, see Aderinto, When Sex Threatened the
State, chapter 1.
57. Editorial, “Marriage in Ihube,” March 12, 1942.
58. Obi, “Dowry and Native Marriages.”
59. Ndibe, “The Bride Price (1).” D. S. G. “Kalabari Marriage Custom.”
60. Olisa, “Dowry System in Iboland.”
61. John, “Bride Price in Mbaise.”
62. Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial
West Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013), 2.
63. Wubani, “Exorbitant Bride Price in Ngwa Clan.”
64. Olisa, “Dowry System in Iboland.”
65. A. L John, “Bride Price in Mbaise,” West African Pilot, September 1,
1953.
66. Akujobi, “Owerri and High Bride Price”; Ndibe, “The Bride Price (2).”
67. “Bride Price Scandal,” November 6, 1952.
68. “Marriage at Ibadan Costs Almost £ 40 and Yet No Safety,” Southern
Nigeria Defender, June 23, 1949.
69. “Man Kills Six People including his Suspected Unfaithful Wife,” Southern
Nigeria Defender, April 30, 1951; “Divorce in Ngwa,” Eastern Nigeria
Guardian, May 20, 1945.
70. Obi, “Dowry and Native Marriages.”
71. Uzo, “Marriage in Imuma.”
72. Ben, “Bride-Price is Very High,” Eastern Nigeria Guardian, March 17,
1943.
73. Uzo, “Marriage in Imuma.”
74. “Our Girls Become Prostitutes,” Southern Nigeria Defender, April 27,
1946; Marriage and Prostitution,” Southern Nigeria Defender, May 30,
1946.
75. Okoli, “Bride Price at Awka.”
76. See, for instance, Leonard Ndubueze Mbah, Emergent Masculinities: The
Gendered Struggle for Power in Southeastern Nigeria 1850–1920 (PhD
diss., Michigan State University, 2013); Andrea A. Cornwall, “To Be a
Man Is More Than a Day’s Work: Shifting Ideals of Masculinity in Ado-
Odo, Southwestern Nigeria,” in Lindsay and Miescher, eds. Men and
Masculinities, 230–248; Brown, “A ‘Man’ in the Village is a ‘Boy’ in the
Workplace”; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann,
1958); Egodi Uchendu, ed., Masculinities in Contemporary Africa
(Dakar: CODESRIA, 2008).
C on tr ibu t or s
Pablo Dominguez Andersen works as an online journalist and digi-

tal content strategist in Berlin, Germany. He holds a PhD in modern
history from the Humboldt University of Berlin and has published
numerous essays on the history of film and popular culture, the pol-
itics of gender and sexuality, and the history of migration, racism,
and identity politics in Germany and beyond. His most recent arti-
cle, “The Hollywood Beach Party Genre and the Exotification of
Youthful White Masculinity in Early 1960s America” has appeared in
Men and Masculinities.
Saheed Aderinto is assistant professor of history at Western Carolina
University. He is the author of When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit
Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1958
(2015) and editor of Children and Childhood in Colonial Nigerian
Histories (2015), among other books. His articles have appeared in
leading Africanist and specialist journals, including the Canadian
Journal of African Studies ; Africa: The Journal of the International
African Institute; Journal of the History of Sexuality ; Journal of Social
History ; Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History ; Journal of the
History of Childhood and Youth; and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s
Studies.
Andreas Beer is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Konstanz.
He received his PhD in American Studies from Rostock University in
2014. His dissertation “Southward the Course of Empire Took its Way:
A Transnational Analysis of Representations of the U.S. Filibusters
in Nicaragua, 1855–1857” examines transnational entanglements
between the United States and Central America in the nineteenth
century. Andreas Beer is the coeditor of Fugitive Knowledges: The
Preservation and Loss of Knowledges in Cultural Contact Zones (2015)
and is currently working on a project that revolves around authentic-
ity in academic discourse and public protest in the Americas.
270 CONTRIBUTORS
Brian D. Behnken is associate professor in the Department of History

and the US Latino/a Studies Program at Iowa State University. His
research and teaching focus on comparative race relations, civil rights,
and American social movements. He is the author of Fighting Their
Own Battles: Mexican Americans, African Americans, and the Struggle
for Civil Rights in Texas (2011) and coeditor of Crossing Boundaries:
Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World
(2013). His current book project is a long history of the Mexican
American community’s relationship with local law enforcement across
the Southwest from the 1830s to the present.
Steve Estes is professor of history at Sonoma State University. He
is the author of I am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights
Movement (2005) and Ask & Tell: Gay & Lesbian Veterans Speak Out
(2007). He lives in San Francisco, California.
Craig Thompson Friend is professor of history and director of
Public History at North Carolina State University. He is the author of
Kentucke’s Frontiers (2010) and Along the Maysville Road: The Early
American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West (2005); coeditor of
Death and the American South (2014), Southern Manhood: Perspectives
on Masculinity in the Old South (2004), and Family Values in the Old
South (2010); and editor of Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on
Manhood in the South since Reconstruction (2009) and The Buzzel
about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land (1999).
Denis Gainty is assistant professor of history at Georgia State
University. His work focuses on tradition, modernity, embodi-
ment, and agency in the nested contexts of modern Japanese, East
Asian, and world history. His first monograph, Martial Arts and the
Body Politic in Meiji Japan (2013), analyzes the corporealization of
national identity in fin de siècle Japan. His current book project on
bluegrass music in Japan investigates theories of tradition and mod-
ern (trans)national identities and enduring notions of essentialized
Japanese mimesis.
Isabel Heinemann is assistant professor of modern history at the
University of Münster. She also chairs the Emmy Noether Research
Group “Family Values and Social Change: The American Family in
the Twentieth Century,” which is funded by the German Research
Foundation. Her main research interests include the history of
National Socialism and National Socialist racism, the cultural history
of the United States in the twentieth Century, gender history, and
the history of science. She is the author of “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches
CONTRIBUTORS 271
Blut”: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpoli-

tische Neuordnung Europas, 2nd ed. (2003) and editor of Inventing
the Modern American Family: Family Values and Social Change in
Twentieth-Century United States (2012).
Maja Horn is associate professor of Spanish and Latin American
Cultures at Barnard College/Columbia University in New York.
Before joining the Barnard faculty in 2006, she was a research asso-
ciate at FLACSO (Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales)
in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where she developed and
taught a performance studies concentration. She specializes in con-
temporary Caribbean cultures with a focus on literature, visual and
performance art, and political culture. She is the author of Masculinity
after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (2014)
and is currently completing a second book on queer Dominican liter-
ature, visual and performance arts.
Katja Jana is a PhD candidate at the University in Göttingen and
a member of the DFG Research Group “Dynamics of Space and
Gender.” Her dissertation focuses on the politics of dress and mascu-
linity in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic.
Anna Loutfi is assistant professor in the Department of Gender
Studies and the Science Studies Program at Central European
University in Budapest, Hungary. She received her PhD in compar-
ative history in 2006. Her dissertation examines nation building
and legal codification in the Austro-Hungarian Empire after 1848,
focusing on the codification of family and gender relations in mod-
ern national legal codes. She has since researched, taught, and written
on the intersections between law, gender, and the modern scientific
disciplines (in particular, evolutionary biology and psychiatry). Her
recent publications include “The Female Reproductive Body as the
New Subject of Law,” an article that she coauthored with Allaine
Cerwonka, which appeared in feminists@law in 2011. She is cur-
rently completing a book manuscript titled Intimacy and the Legal
Imagination.
Claudia Roesch is postdoctoral researcher in the History Department
of the University of Münster. Her research interests are twentieth-cen-
tury German and American history, gender and family history as well
as the history of the social sciences. She is the author of Macho Men and
Modern Women: Mexican Immigration, Social Experts, and Changing
Family Values in the Twentieth-Century United States (2015). Claudia
Roesch is currently working on a project that examines public debates
272 CONTRIBUTORS
on reproduction in the United States and West Germany between

1945 and 1990.
Martina Salvante is research fellow at the German Historical
Institute in Rome and adjunct lecturer of cultural and social history
at the University of Florence. She earned her PhD in history and civi-
lization at the European University Institute in Fiesole. Her scholarly
interests include fascism and the First World War, gender and mascu-
linity, and disability history.
Simon Wendt is assistant professor of American studies at the
University of Frankfurt in Frankfurt, Germany. His research inter-
ests revolve around African American history, American gender his-
tory, and the transnational dimensions of race and ethnicity. He is
the author of The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the
Struggle for Civil Rights (2007) and coeditor of a number of books,
including Racism in the Modern World: Historical Perspectives on
Cultural Transfer and Adaptation (2011) and Globalizing Lynching
History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International
Perspective (2011). Simon Wendt is currently completing a book man-
uscript on the history of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Inde x
African Americans, 30, 46, 72, 132, Dominican Republic, 13, 193–213
138, 141 Dubois, Paul, 59–60, 64
Algeria, 1
Anderson, Benedict, 4, 74, 151 Egypt, 7–8, 220, 223
Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal, 223, 230, Enlightenment, 11, 59, 64, 67,
232 119–21, 123, 177, 178,
Australia, 6–7, 14 236n18
Enloe, Cynthia, 1, 175
Balibar, Etienne, 4
Beard, George M., 62 Foucault, Michel, 57, 60, 63, 102,
Beasly, Christine, 5–6 172, 191n45
Bederman, Gail, 76, 114–15, Freud, Sigmund, 64, 68n16
214n17
Britain, 235n4, 248, 250, 62–3, 65 Galton, Francis, 58
Buchanan, James, 43 Gellner, Ernest, 174
Germany, 6, 7, 9, 56, 61, 62, 65,
Chatterjee, Partha, 220, 221, 234, 69n36, 70n50, 95, 176
236n18 Gobineau, Arthur de, 120
Chicanos. See Mexican Americans Goethe, Charles M., 157–8, 168n31
Clinton, Bill, 72 Gramsci, Antonio, 96, 173–6
Connell, Raewyn, 3–4, 5–6, 15, Greenberg, Amy, 114–15, 123, 131,
21, 41, 55, 56–7, 66–7, 73–4, 132–3
83, 86, 88n12, 96–8, 108n15,
117, 124, 131–2, 143–4, 145, Hagemann, Karen, 6
150, 154, 164, 172–6, 180, Hanna, Edward J., 156–8
181, 184–6, 188n6, 189n12, Herzog, Dagmar, 96, 102
195, 219, 235n7, 246–7 Heureaux, Ulises, 202
Crouthamel, Jason, 7
Cuba, 114, 117, 120, 121, 127n41, Inazō, Nitobe, 178, 180
208 India, 7–8, 46, 220, 223
Ireland, 7–8
Darwin, Charles, 77, 157, 177, 178, Italy, 10, 69n36, 93–107, 235n4
182, 197
Davis, Jefferson, 25, 27–8, 29–30, 31 Japan, 12, 141, 171–88
Demetriou, Demetrakis, 3, 97, 176 and martial arts, 12, 172, 182–4,
Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor, 191n40
133, 143 Western depictions of, 176–85
274 INDEX
Jefferson, Thomas, 24, 75, 76, 116 def. of, 3, 21, 41, 86, 97, 186
Johnson, Lyndon B., 72 in the Dominican Republic, 13,
193–213
Kimmel, Michael, 3, 73, 89n23, in Egypt, 8, 220
133, 151, 195 and ethnicity, 2, 114, 245–6,
248–9, 253
Lincoln, Abraham, 26 and eugenics, 2, 10, 47, 58–9,
lynching, 138–9, 148n32 63–4, 71–86, 99, 101, 150,
154–9, 162, 165
Manifest Destiny, 42, 114, 125n8, in Europe, 63, 95, 101–2, 107,
131–2, 197 177, 219, 220, 224, 229–30,
masculinity 248, 255–6
in Africa, 3, 14, 63, 217, 243–60 and the family, 9, 10, 12, 22, 26,
African American, 8, 30, 41, 46, 29–30, 40, 42, 44–5, 47, 51,
72, 85, 132, 138, 141, 152 71–86, 98–9, 102–7, 115, 119,
in Asia, 3, 14, 41, 73, 76, 85, 143, 149, 151–4, 158–64, 208,
178, 217 210–11, 229, 230, 245–6, 252
in Australia, 6–7, 14 and fascism, 10, 93–107
and biopolitics, 9, 55–6, 59–61, and fashion, 8, 219, 224, 227,
67–8, 99 237n21
and the body, 6, 7, 9, 27, 29, 31, and fatherhood, 10, 82, 95–107
56, 58–68, 76–7, 89n23, 95, and femininity, 21, 30, 32, 72,
100–2, 104, 115, 118, 119, 98, 115, 116, 152, 154, 186,
130, 141, 155, 158, 161, 173, 193
182–4, 187, 218, 219, 221–2, in Germany (see Germany)
226, 231, 233 as Hegemonic Bloc, 3
in Britain, 63, 65 and homosexuality, 7, 40, 47, 95,
and Catholicism, 8, 41, 51, 106, 123, 131
114, 208 and honor, 6, 22–4, 27, 28, 32,
and citizenship, 6–7, 9, 10, 12, 41, 97, 99, 151–4, 163, 204
25, 26, 27, 29, 48, 51, 56–7, and immigration, 10, 12, 76–7,
60–3, 65–7, 72, 76, 78, 84, 98, 149–66
99, 101–2, 105, 107, 114–15, and imperialism, 2, 6, 10–14, 76,
132, 149–66, 184, 191n44, 193–213, 218–24, 245, 247
193, 220, 222, 232–3 in India (see India)
and class, 2, 6, 8, 40, 42, 45, 52, in Ireland (see Ireland)
62, 71–8, 80–1, 83, 85, 122, and Islam, 220, 227, 231
132, 150, 152–4, 156–7, 159– in Italy (see Italy)
60, 162–6, 179, 206–9, 212, in Japan (see Japan)
224, 226, 230, 233, 244–5, Jewish, 7, 41
248–9, 250–5, 260 in Latin America, 115–16, 193,
and colonialism, 6, 8, 10–11, 196, 199–203, 209
13, 133, 157, 218, 220, 230, and machismo, 94, 117, 153–4
245–9, 254, 261 and marriage, 14, 39–52, 81–6,
complicit, 94, 144, 172, 173, 175 93–4, 105–7, 152, 198, 208,
crisis of, 21, 51, 200 243–61
INDEX 275
and Mestizos, 120–3 in Turkey (Ottoman Empire) (see

and Mexican Americans (see Turkey)
Mexican Americans) in the United States, 9–12, 20,
in Mexico (see Mexico) 25–6, 39–52, 71–86, 113–17,
and military, 9, 11, 22, 28–32, 121–4, 129–45, 149–66
56–68, 98–101, 106, 117–19, and violence, 45, 56, 99, 101,
129–30, 152, 193–203, 130–44
217–18, 224, 227, and war, 6–9, 19–33, 56–8,
232–4, 261 61–8, 99–101, 116–17, 134
and Mormonism, 9, 39–52 Western notions of, 7, 177–8,
and Nationalism, 4–8, 20–1, 27, 180–1
41–2, 60–1, 67, 98–102, Mayer, Tamar, 97
151–4, 187, 204–5, 219–20, Messerschmidt, James, 5, 6, 15,
234–5 55, 56, 66, 74, 117, 124, 173,
and Native Americans, 41, 44, 185–6, 219
141, 76 Mexican Americans, 12, 41, 131,
in Nicaragua (see Nicaragua) 132, 135, 142–5, 150–1, 154,
in Nigeria, 13–14, 242–61 163–6
as performance, 173, 187, 203, Mexico, 11, 114, 129–30, 134–6,
207 139, 151, 153, 154, 157
and postcolonialism, 7, 13, 14, Montoya, Pablo, 129–30
220, 261 Mosse, George, 5, 55, 65, 95–6
and Protestantism, 9, 40, 52, Mussolini, Benito, 95, 100–5
150, 199
and psychiatry, 56, 63–7 Nagel, Joanne, 5, 6, 41, 55, 59,
and race, 2, 9, 12, 19–26, 42, 46, 151, 175
71–83, 95, 115, 131–2, 150, nationalism
155, 177, 198 in Africa, 247–9
and religion, 2, 39–52, 163 and anti-colonialism, 230
and reproduction, 10, 83, 94–5, in Asia, 178
99, 107, 156 in Australia, 6–7
and resistance to West, 12, 13, and the body, 9, 31, 56, 58, 60,
181, 217–35 67, 101, 115, 130, 155, 158,
and sexuality, 2, 5, 10, 19, 40, 182–4, 187, 218, 219, 221–2,
44, 47, 94, 98, 101–2, 123, 226
152 in Britain, 62–3, 248
and slavery, 19, 26, 27, 30, 45, and Catholicism, 114
47–8, 144, 258–9 and citizenship, 6–7, 10, 29,
and sociology, 75, 82 60–3, 67, 84, 98, 150, 152–3,
and sports, 8, 182–6 156, 161–5, 222
Subordinate Masculinity, 41, 42, and class, 8, 42, 71–2, 74–8, 81,
173, 175–6, 235n7, 244–5, 83, 132, 159, 162–6, 224, 226,
247, 260 248–9, 260
and transnationalism, 2–3, 5–6, and colonialism, 6, 8, 13, 218,
8, 10–13, 113–14, 121–4, 220, 230, 261
193–4, 213 def. of, 4
276 INDEX
nationalism—Continued Reagan, Ronald, 72

in the Dominican Republic, 13, Reeser, Todd, 4–5
201, 204–6, 210 Roediger, David, 41
in Egypt, 7–8, 220, 223 Roosevelt, Theodore, 42, 72, 76–8,
and ethnicity, 2, 248 197
and eugenics, 2, 58, 77–86, 99, Ross, Edward E., 73
155–7, 162 Russia, 62, 69n36
and the family, 71, 98, 153 Russo-Turkish War, 225
and fascism, 100–2
and fatherhood, 103 Said, Edward, 221
in Germany, 6 Scott, Joan, 23, 172
and homosexuality, 7, 14 South Africa, 63
and imperialism, 197–9, Spain, 104, 119, 196, 197
212–13
in India, 7–8 Theweleit, Klaus, 5, 101,
in Italy, 98–102 111n49
in Japan, 187 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas,
Jewish, 7 193–4, 197, 199,
and masculinity, 4–8, 20–1, 201–13
27, 41–2, 60–1, 67, 98–102, Turkey, 13, 217–35
151–4, 187, 204–5, 219–20, Twain, Marc, 44
234–5
and Mexican Americans, 162–5 United States
in Nicaragua, 119–21 Civil War, 8, 20–2, 27–9,
in Nigeria, 249 31–3, 40–2, 45–7, 50, 114,
and postcolonialism, 7–8, 221–3, 122–3
247–9 and Dominican Republic, 13,
and race, 26, 74–5, 114–15 193–4, 196–205, 213
and slavery, 20 eugenics in, 47, 77–9,
and sports, 7–8 81–2, 90n37, 150, 154–5,
and transnationalism, 123–4, 157, 162
196–201 and filibusters, 11, 113–14,
in Turkey (Ottoman Empire), 116–24
232–3 and immigration, 10, 12, 40, 73,
in the United States, 74–5, 76–7, 149–50, 156–8, 161,
114–15, 161 165
and women, 1, 15, 98, 152 and imperialism, 11, 12, 13, 76,
Nicaragua, 11, 113–24 122, 194, 197, 199–200, 204,
213
Orientalism, 176–7, 219, 221, 229, and Japan, 12, 177, 180, 181
233 and Latin America, 115–16, 150,
Ottoman Empire. See Turkey 162–3, 199, 202–3
lynchings in, 138–9, 148n32
Parsons, Talcott, 71–3, 84, 86 and Manifest Destiny (see
Popenoe, Paul B., 73, 78, 81–5 Manifest Destiny)
INDEX 277
and Mexican Americans, 132, Villa, Francisco “Pancho,” 154,

142–3, 150 168n22
and Mexican War, 114, 116–17,
134–5 Walker, William, 116–24
and Mexico/Mexicans, 11, 129–30, World War I, 6, 7, 56, 57, 58, 61,
134, 136, 139, 151, 153 63, 65, 78, 99–100, 102, 204,
Mormonism in, 9, 39–52 217, 251
and Nicaragua, 11, 113–14, World War II, 10
117–24 Wyatt-Brown, Bertram, 20, 22–3
slavery in (see slavery)
and Spanish-American War, 123, Young, Brigham, 42–6, 49
197 Yukichi, Fukuzawa, 178

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Global Masculinities

Edited by Michael Kimmel and Judith Kegan Gardiner

Michael Kimmel is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism

Men and Masculinities Around the World: Transforming Men’s Practices

Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages

Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema

The History of Fatherhood in Norway, 1850–2012

Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films

Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World

Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary

Between Hegemony and Marginalization

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-349-56598-6 ISBN 978-1-137-53610-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the

Introduction: Masculinities and the Nation 1

8 “Failure to Provide”: Mexican Immigration,

Notes on Contributors 269

Pablo Dominguez Andersen

At the turn of the twenty-first century, feminist scholar Cynthia

Reconsidering this interrelationship requires a more thorough under-

Marginalized masculinity thus becomes primarily a negative referent

is one of only a handful of scholars who have explicitly addressed such

James Messerschmidt countered that he and Connell had specifically

assistance in Australian nation-building as did heroic soldiers. Yet

would counter British colonialist ideology.22 In Egypt very similar

determined which men were deemed exemplary members of the

processes reveals how marginalized men could retain agency vis-à-vis

in transnational spaces like the southwestern frontier of the United

The transnational implications of nationalist ideologies are also

belonging. Focusing on young men’s grievances over the increase of

incorporating women into research on masculinities and the nation.

(New York: Free Press, 1997), 13–42. On the theoretical development of

Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);

in South Africa (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). See also

“The Crushing of Southern Manhood”:

Craig Thompson Friend

itself—the most fundamental and universal form of gender inequality,

community of martyrs, thereby guaranteeing masculine immortality.

A king once said of a prince struck down:

Confederate heroes gained power and immortality through death,

hegemonic manhood, American men seemingly have never been quite

social prominence, and community authority, and it was the means by

southern honor, patriarchy, and manhood as timeless categories of

Finally, Calhoun turned to what differentiated southern white men

increases the tendency to dignify the family. Each planter in fact is

it—honor, alongside intellect, gallantry, gentleness, and chivalry—as

Where “Boys in Grey” fill martyr graves,

To Rio Grande’s quiet shores,

Manly sacrifice would transform the motherland of the colonial and

a kind of holiday excursion, soon to return crowned with victori-

alarming attitude of our slave population” and “signs of insurrection.”

The horrors of war brought large-scale death and dismemberment,

Physically and psychologically scarred, faced with tremendous loss

Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender & History 20, no. 3 (November

“Where is the Rebel Fatherland?” in Davidson, comp., Cullings from the

33. Joshua Callaway to Dulcinea Callaway, September 6, 1863, in The Civil