American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era.

American Manhood provides perhaps the best indication that men's history is at last emerging from its troubled and protracted adolescence, a ten-year stretch that has yielded, despite repeated calls for more and better research, only a handful of solid new monographs. Compared to the towering achievements of women's history during this period, the products of men's history have seemed puny and dull, the flashes of brilliance all the more remarkable for their rarity. But American Manhood is a substantial achievement, a book that promises to invigorate the entire enterprise.

Rotundo has shown not only that the thoughts and experiences of men are indispensable for an understanding of gender--a self-evident but sometimes controversial proposition--but he has provided an impressive demonstration of how others can take on the task. American Manhood is reminiscent of Carl Degler's At Odds (1980)--and this is praise of the highest order. In short, Rotundo has provided an overarching interpretive model with which future scholars must contend; synthesized and summarized much of the relevant literature; opened up a host of new topics for consideration; and invested his past with real people, their words culled mostly from the 19th-century letters and diaries with which he is uniquely familiar.

American Manhood, to be sure, at times totters upon a far thinner monographical foundation than At Odds, and consequently Rotundo's conclusions occasionally lack Degler's complexity and depth. A few observations betray by their banality the newness of men's history, as when Rotundo writes: "feminine beauty lured men willingly away from the familiar pleasure and security of male culture" or, "in the classroom, boys liked to pull pranks that would attract the girls' attention". And the title of the book itself exhibits traces of adolescent bravado: American Manhood is mostly about the Northern middle classes. But in a pioneering work of such scope, these cavils are paltry indeed.

As opposed to the "essentialists" who are lining up behind Robert Bly's Iron John, Rotundo weighs in mightily with those who believe that gender is socially constructed. "Masculine" thoughts and behaviors are products of identifiable (and alterable) social and cultural processes. Rotundo outlines a "communal" type of manhood of the colonial era, in which aggressive and acquisitive desires were checked by family and neighbors, but his story really begins in the Revolutionary era, when a new cultural complex gave rise to a "self-made" conception of manhood. Rotundo perceives not one masculine culture but several, which evolved, like the men themselves, according to a developmental paradigm.

First came a "boy culture," characterized by rough games, mischievous romps in the woods, and a fondness for dirt that drove mothers to distraction. "Boy culture" enabled boys to let off steam and prepared them for the rough and tumble world of business and politics in mid-19th century America. Boys graduated into a "youth culture" of debating societies and clubs where they learned reasoning skills and discovered how to express aggression and competition in socially acceptable ways.

These macho posturings seem superficial, but "boy culture" and "youth culture" possessed considerable emotional depth. Wrestling matches and fisticuffs engendered close friendships that commonly took on romantic overtones. Much as juvenile competitions offered preparation for the adult workplace, intimate relationships among teenage boys "offered a rehearsal for marriage". Other scholars have posited a male equivalent of the "female world of love and ritual" described by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, but Rotundo has done most to develop the idea.

Eventually young men turned to women, driven by sexual desire and perhaps by a longing for home-cooked meals and adult status. Having been acculturated to regard women as profoundly different from themselves, young men invested marriage with contradictory expectations that could rarely be realized. For many, marriage fell far short of the companionate ideal.

Work, too, imposed a special strain. The belief that "self-made" manhood was attained through success in business or politics left all men psychologically vulnerable. Rotundo shows how many simply gave up by becoming "male neurasthenics," frankly acknowledging their need for "feminine" nurturance and idleness.

During much of the 19th century, male aggression was tolerated as "a necessary evil"--useful but fundamentally immoral. By the close of the 19th century, however, proponents of a macho style endorsed "animal instincts," martial bearing, and competitive sports as good in and of themselves. As G. Stanley Hall wrote, the teenage male who was "a perfect gentleman" had "something the matter with him". During this period "manly passion" became "ennobled", and Rotundo contends that this variant of manhood has persisted well into our own time, hobbling men and women alike.

But why did men create a cultural complex so at odds with their emotional needs? Rotundo's answer is implicitly functionalist. Antebellum society was undergoing powerful economic and social changes, and males "happened upon" a cultural process that ensured that they would fit their new roles as adults. But if boys and male teenagers knew little about the world they would occupy as adult men, how could they create a cultural system that would so neatly accord with the needs of society? For that matter, did the individualistic and aggressive ethos of "self-made" manhood prepare young men for their "functional" roles as clerks, drummers, and professionals in the increasingly bureaucratized world of the late 19th century?

My hunch is that the functionalism of boy and youth culture and of "self-made manhood" was chiefly expressive. It provided an antidote to the rational workings of the emerging urban-industrial order. Boys played rough games because they perceived them to be antithethical to what adulthood was all about. Young men hugged each other partly because they sensed that such forms of expression were forbidden among adults. And turn-of-the-century blowhards enshrined "strenuous manhood" because their workaday lives were so sedentary. Having indulged these harmless (i.e., playful) subversions, they could more readily attend to the sober demands of the workplace.

These are subtle and difficult issues. It is some measure of his achievement that Rotundo brings them to mind and suggests ways that they can be addressed in the future. With American Manhood, men's history has at last come of age.

Mark C. Carnes Barnard College, Columbia University