ABSTRACT
The first position is taken by those who see the history of ma5culinity as a not-so-subtle attempt to infiltrate women's history and blunt its polemical edge. The appropriate response was given as long ago as 1975 by Natalie Zeman Davis. Addressing a feminist audience, she rem.arked:
men, that we should not be working only on the subjected sex any mare than
to understand a system of sodal relations as a whole - class in the first instance,
times; the female is a female all her life and can never forget her sex'. 4 This
ested in moving towards a gendered of men have seized upon anything that looks like an explicit ideology of masculinity. Hence the renewed
ideology of masculinity, if ever there was one. It was elaborated, reiter-
ated, contested and adapted - by preachers, schoolmasters and novelists.
