ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the efforts to rescue and retrieve masculinity during a pivotal moment of historical transition during which masculinity was widely perceived as being in crisis and in radical need of such restoration. It describes the ways in which a secure sense of masculinity was gradually destabilized in the first few decades of the nineteenth century and some of the mechanisms that men employed to reground their eroding sense of manhood. The chapter explores the rediscovery of the male body at the turn of the century as a gendered testing ground, a site of demonstration of masculinity, especially in consumerist fantasies of physical prowess. Many believed that feminization of American culture was synonymous with feminization of American boyhood, the result of the predominance of women in lives of young boys as mothers left alone at home with their young sons, and as teachers in both elementary and Sunday schools.
