ABSTRACT
The histories of women, gender and masculinity are relatively fields of study, so it is worth pausing to think about how and why they emerged. Women’s history has existed since the 1970s in Britain. Inspired by second-wave feminism and the new social history, women’s historians sought to rescue women from historical invisibility by studying their social lives and their experiences of oppression. The history of political masculinities promises to shed new light both on politics and also on the nature of masculinity. Georgian masculinities were bound up with a critique of the ruling class, which focused on their personal virtues, or supposed lack thereof. The establishment in the early eighteenth century tended to subscribe to a very formal code of masculine behaviour, epitomised by the courtier. In the mid-eighteenth century, the politician who played the Country role most successfully was William Pitt the Elder.
