ABSTRACT
Men’s voluntary associations have been discussed in depth by only a few scholars, but their work certainly forms a fine precedent. Men’s history begins when we redefine our usual notion of historical significance and when we shift our usual frame of reference. Men also were boys, lovers, husbands, and fathers; but historians have given even less attention to these private roles. Men’s drinking habits became noteworthy during the Prohibition controversy. Because Franklin Roosevelt overcame polio and Randolph Churchill succumbed to syphilis, historians briefly shifted their gaze from politics to bodies. Men, apparently, find their primary sense of self apart from boyhood, family, recreation, and love. The histories that men have written about themselves, then, contain the same bias as the histories they have written about one another. The three-dimensional man — private, semipublic, and public — is flattened into a masculine stereotype, an image who poses like the Marlboro man on a billboard beside the highway.
