Gender in American History

American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia

American Revolution

Contributors: Bret E. Carroll

Edited by: Bret E. Carroll

Book Title: American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia

Chapter Title: "American Revolution"

Pub. Date: 2004

Access Date: December 3, 2017

Publishing Company: SAGE Publications, Inc.

City: Thousand Oaks

Print ISBN: 9780761925408

Online ISBN: 9781412956369

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412956369.n11

Print pages: 28-29

©2004 SAGE Publications, Inc.. All Rights Reserved.

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The American Revolution (1775–83) was a crucial moment in the history of American masculinity. It not only severed the political relationship between the American colonies and Great Britain, but it also grounded the new nation in a set of principles that became fundamental to American understandings of manhood. Yet the Revolution's impact on constructions of masculinity was complex, both reinforcing and challenging the patriarchal social and political relations that had arrived with the earliest European colonists.

The notions of manhood that informed the Revolution were grounded primarily in a social and political ideology called republicanism and had long historic roots. The ancient Greeks and Romans, to whom American patriots looked for inspiration, had defined political participation and the rights of democratic citizenship as the purview of free men. The expansion of the early Roman republic into the Roman Empire, the American revolutionaries believed, had undermined its citizens' manliness as its republican government decayed under the influence of imperial luxury and corruption.

Revolutionary republicanism also drew on the thinking of the Whigs, political activists in eighteenth-century England. Living in an expanding British Empire, the Whigs argued that the growth of monarchical power, at the expense of the elected representatives of the House of Commons, endangered both their rights as property-owning men and their ability to act manfully and virtuously in the political realm—meaning independently of corrupting outside influence, and on the basis of moral principle rather than narrow self-interest. Whigs portrayed their concerns in sharply gendered terms: theirs was a heroic and manly defense of liberty (envisioned as a virtuous white female) against a tyrannical hypermasculine power and a seductively female corruption.

American political leaders increasingly interpreted their own position in the empire in terms of this ideology, particularly after a newly expanded British Empire began to tax the colonies for revenue after its 1763 victory over France in the Seven Years' War. Having previously been taxed only by their own elected assemblies, which defended their rights in the absence of representation in the House of Commons, many colonists opposed British taxation measures as efforts to reduce them to “slavery”—the opposite of independent manhood. The 1765 Stamp Act sparked a resistance movement led by groups whose names, such as the Sons of Liberty, suggested their perception of their activities as acts of manly heroism. They dramatized and put into action their movement and its attendant notion of manhood in the kinds of public spaces and activities—particularly taverns and street demonstrations—that were associated primarily with men.

Such events as the Boston Massacre (1770); the British government's response to the Boston Tea Party (1773); and the outbreak of hostilities (1775) prompted growing charges that King George III was a tyrannical patriarch whose unchecked authority and corrupt government had to be cast off. In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine called the king the “pretended … FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE,” and, in the first of his “Crisis” papers (1776), denounced him as “a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man” (Fast, 25, 52). Many colonists further questioned the manhood of George III by noting his relative youth and inexperience—having assumed the crown in 1760 at age twenty, he was charged with lacking the maturity to govern effectively and being easily swayed by his advisers. Thomas Jefferson made George III the primary target of American grievances in the Declaration of Independence, and he praised colonial assemblies for “opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people” (Koch and Peden, 23).

The rhetoric of patriot leaders suggested that they understood the Revolution as largely a

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man's war; men did the bulk of the fighting, wrote the political rationale for separation from Great Britain, devised new state and national governments, and assumed political offices, while women supported boycotts of British tea and cloth and served primarily as nurses, cooks, and laundresses. (Patriot men also boycotted tea, calling tea drinking an effete luxury more suitable to the British Empire than to sturdy republican farmers and craftsmen in the colonies.) The political philosophy of the resulting republic—grounded in a longstanding European belief in a natural social and political hierarchical order—similarly identified equality and the rights of citizenship with manhood, whiteness, and property ownership. It defined white men of property alone as capable of independent self-governance, while women, African Americans, Native Americans, and those without property were defined as unmanly and dependent. When Abigail Adams wrote her husband John, asking him to “remember the ladies” as the new nation defined its political system, he spoke for most patriot leaders in responding that extending political rights beyond white men of property opened the door to chaos. The Revolution thus affirmed the fundamentally patriarchal relations characteristic of contemporary Western society.

The close association of virtuous republican citizenship with white property-owning American manhood was also visible in the artistic and cultural productions of the Revolutionary period. John Trumbull's 1792 painting General George Washington at the Battle of Trenton, for instance, depicted Washington—now president and widely perceived as an iconic embodiment of American manhood—in a pose of heroic generalship. Royall Tyler's play The Contrast (1787) juxtaposed the virtuous and heroic American republican, named Colonel Manly, with his servant Jonathan and the foppish British rake Billy Dimple.

Yet the Revolution also had a radical potential to undermine Revolutionary leaders' patriarchal elitism and their restrictions on manly citizenship. Men without property who had participated in the Revolution sought and received suffrage rights in many of the new states on the grounds that they had proven their manhood by fighting in the war. Women's wartime activities, meanwhile—including participation in anti-British economic boycotts, running of family farms and businesses in men's absence, and camp services— made them increasingly aware of their identities as citizens and blurred the contemporary line between male and female roles. The Revolutionary rejection of tyrannical governance—called by scholar Jay Fliegelman an “American Revolution against patriarchal authority”—prompted a new model of domestic relations that emphasized greater egalitarianism and affection and led to a rise in the divorce rate, as women increasingly sought liberation from unhappy marriages. The Revolutionary rhetoric of independence and equality stigmatized all forms of dependence and “slavery,” and, in the decades that followed, stimulated a growing democratization of citizenship and economic opportunity. By the 1830s, men of an emerging industrial working class began to resist “wage slavery” and to assert a “democratic manhood” that challenged older notions of social and political hierarchy. Beginning later in the nineteenth century, women, African Americans, and members of other groups in American society drew on the ideology of the Revolution to resist oppression and assert their rights, challenging the traditional association of citizenship with whiteness and manhood. Despite these challenges, the Revolution's association of manhood with personal independence, self-governance, and resistance to authority has remained integral to American constructions of masculinity.

Bret E.Carroll http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412956369.n11 Related Entries

Art

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Citizenship Democratic Manhood Divorce Marriage Patriarchy Politics Property Republicanism Seduction Tales Sons of Liberty Suffragism War Washington, George Whiteness

Bibliography Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1967. Fast, Howard. The Selected Work of Tom Paine and Citizen Tom Paine. New York: Random House, 1945. Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Koch, Adrienne, and WilliamPeden, eds. The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Random House, 1972. Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Knopf, 1996. Further Reading Bloch, Ruth H.“The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America.”Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society13no. 1(1987)37–58http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/494385 Kann, Mark E.The Gendering of American Politics: Founding Mothers, Founding Fathers, and Political Patriarchy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999.

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