ABSTRACT
And - here we come to the second part of my title - history has been a vital resource in charting that course. For what historians have done is
central have disappeared-notably the martial honour which, as my colleague
Robin Headlam Wells has shmvn, permeates Shakespeare's plays.4 Con-
versely, critical aspects of today's masculinity are of recent origin. Take for
school, I felt acutely the need for this kind of perspective. I'm glad to say
culture of aU-male middle-class institutions as seen through the medium of
understanding the historical dynamic of women's oppression, they must investigate the nature of men's stake in that oppression: gender was a power structure which must be as a system embracing both sexes.7 That approach had a growing following among feminist historians during the 1980s, and it was carried over into the journal Gender & History, founded by Leonore Davidoff in 1989.8
Where were the men in all this? Most male historians were hostile or at best indifferent, and they continued to work without regard to the gender of their subjects. But on the fringes of academia there was a small group associated with the 'men's movement'. During the last ten years that phrase has come to denote a backlash feminism and women's rights, based on the recovery of an exclusive and supposedly 'authentic' masculinity. (Robert Bly is the best-known guru.) But back in the 1980s that backlash had not yet taken shape. The men's movement was a loose association of men's groups who supported feminism both materially and in print - in magazines like Achilles fieeJ.9 One facet of that support was a merciless autocritique of conventional masculinity, echoing the grounds of feminist attack in what to some seemed a self-indulgent guilt trip. But the appraisal of masculinity also reflected a more inward-looking preoccupation with the sources of oppression among men. The priority given to bread-winning and to public life was blamed for suppressing men's nurturing side. Upholding patriarchy was attacked as a burden which disfigured men's natures, even as it ground women down. 10 A comparable perspective was applied to institutionalized homophobia. Long before Queer Theory directed a deconstructionist gaze at heterosexuality, gay historians showed how the rigid division between straight and gay not only oppressed gay men but censored intimacy between straight men. Gay and pro-feminist male historians worked closely together, and were sometimes -- like Jeffrey Weeks for example - the same people, committed to an inclusive emancipatory
intimate relationships would increasingly be sublimated. Neither of these
exemplars had children, by the way. Equally, believers in a pre-industrial or pre-Enlightenment golden age also tend to be selective; for instance,
to a new agenda. Today liberationist politics are much less evident in writing on the
history of masculinity. The subject has become academically respectable. Of course it still has the ability to provoke. Suggest to a traditional political
dering of history - to show how many historical situations cannot be fully understood without articulating the masculinity of the participants. Thus when Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall contextualized their pathbreaking book Family Fortunes in 1987, they acknowledged the influence of the women's liberation movement, yet the chief impact of their work has
been on the academic study of class formation during the period of the Industrial Revolution. 19 As masculinity has become more accepted as a historical problematic, the historians who study it have become immersed in
with a critical interest in contemporary issues of gender?
