Manhood in America: A Cultural History.

In 1953 Simone de Beauvoir said, "A man would never get the notion of writing a book on the particular situation of the human male." Bad prediction. Michael Kimmel has written five volumes on men's lives including his latest Manhood in America.

This book seeks to provide a cultural history of American manhood from 1776 to the present. Drawing on a variety of sources, including novels and popular fiction, film and television, political pamphlets, and more conventional political and economic history, Kimmel examines and categorizes paradigms of masculinity that he sees in American popular culture.

According to Kimmel, at the turn of the nineteenth century, American manhood was rooted in land ownership (the Genteel Patriarch) or in the self possession of the independent artisan, shopkeeper, or farmer (the Heroic Artisan). Then the Industrial Revolution came along and American men were forced to define themselves in a volatile marketplace. The Self-Made Man (a neologism coined by Henry Clay in a speech to the U.S. Senate in 1832) became the new paradigm for American masculinity. The self-made man is "ambitious and anxious, creatively resourceful and chronically restive, the builder of culture and among the casualties of his own handiwork."

Manhood in America chronicles how the self-made man sought to secure his sense of himself in the years before the Civil War (chapters 1 and 2); how he confronted new challenges in an increasingly industrialized, urban, and crowded society from the end of the Civil War to the first decades of the twentieth century; how he turned to leisure activities like sports and strove to develop all-male preserves to boost his self-image (chapters 3, 4 and 5); how he made it through the Depression and two world wars (chapters 6 and 7); and how he moved to postwar suburbia and now deals with pressures like feminism, a downsizing economy, and conflicting conceptions of what it means to be "a man."

The book is replete with interesting quotations which reflect the biases of various definers of "manhood." A sampling:

Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests - in one word so anti-poetic - as the life of a man in the United States.

- Alexis de Toqueville (1832)

The curse of our age is its femininity, its lack not of barbarism, but of virility.

- Orestes Brownson (1884)

Under ideal circumstances, the father should be an understanding, tolerant but virile and decisive male. The mother should have gentleness, patience, and passivity usually associated with womanhood. Any mixture, such as an effeminate father and an aggressive masculine mother is likely to be disconcerting to the child and accentuate homosexual tendencies.

- Dr. George W. Henry (1937)

Women have in men's minds, such a low place on the social ladder of this country that it's useless to define yourself in terms of a woman. What men need is men's approval.

- David Mamet (1993)

The author proposes a new definition of manhood that he labels "democratic manhood." This definition includes what it has traditionally meant to be "a man" (physical strength, a sense of purpose, controlled aggression, self-reliance, and dependability) coupled with newer masculine virtues (compassion, nurturing, and egalitarianism). It aims to produce a "stronger more relevant template for manhood in America." If I were constructing a "manhood template" I would propose that manhood is a high level abstraction that can be usefully defined by various people in various circumstances for various purposes. What would your template look like?

All reviews by Martin H. Levinson, Ph.D. Forest Hills, New York