Читать книгу A Republic of Men - Mark E. Kann - Страница 15

The American founders encompassed several generations of thinkers, speakers, writers, ministers, activists, soldiers, and statesmen who conceived and contributed to the struggle for independence and the creation of the Republic. They included local and national political elites who opposed the old regime and constructed new ones. Though a diverse lot, the founders shared an enduring and sometimes obsessive fear that disorderly men would generate chaos in society, endanger hard-won liberty, and imperil the Republic. They hoped to fend off democratic disorders by stabilizing gender relations and by promoting hegemonic norms to stigmatize disorderly men and reward stable men.

First, the founders stabilized gender relations by depoliticizing opposition between men and women and by reinforcing the ideal of the traditional patriarch. They mostly restricted gender turbulence to the cultural sphere and thereby fostered fraternal politics. They regularly discussed and debated men’s liberty, equality, citizenship, and leadership without mentioning women; they often heaped honors on patriotic men who fought the Revolution without giving much recognition to patriotic women who participated in it. When the war ended, “Women disappeared from the public eye.”⁵⁶ Thereafter, the founders framed a new republic without considering women’s place in it or experiencing much pressure to question women’s exclusion from it. They could perpetuate women’s subordination because republican and liberal ideology invited them to do so, male misogyny and uncertainty gave them an incentive to do so, and their political priorities urged them to do so.

Republican ideology equated absolute kingship with absolute corruption. Republican thinkers were much less critical of family patriarchs, whose power was ostensibly limited by law and softened by affection. As such, their criticism of monarchy did not necessarily apply to domestic patriarchy. Liberal ideology widened the chasm between politics and family life by separating public and paternal power. It made the language of liberty and equality appropriate for the public sphere but allowed a traditional idiom of natural hierarchy to persist in the domestic sphere. The founders took advantage of these ideological openings to defy political tyranny and depoliticize men’s authority in their families. Revolutionaries fought against monarchy, not family patriarchy. Legislators disputed aristocratic laws, not patriarchal laws. Governors forfeited royal prerogative over men, but fathers and husbands maintained patriarchal prerogative over women’s bodies, behavior, and property. The result was that misogynists remained free to vent patriarchal rage against women, and ambivalent males were cued to resolve uncertainties about manhood in favor of the traditional patriarch, who retained the coercive authority “to intimidate, not to accommodate” women.⁵⁷

Simultaneously, the founders’ political priorities urged them to keep women off the public agenda. Most founders feared that disorderly men threatened to destroy liberty by unleashing the twin evils of mob anarchy and demagogic tyranny. Accordingly, they focused much of their intellectual and political energy on encouraging men to defend liberty and show great restraint when exercising it. The founders would have had to compromise their focus on male mobilization and quiescence to debate women’s rights or deal with prejudices regarding public women. Politicizing gender certainly would have meant deepening male discontents, while admitting women to political discourse would have invited the sexual improprieties and political corruption often associated with the “public woman.”⁵⁸ The founders focused on restoring order among men; they relied on still powerful family patriarchs to subdue disorderly women.

Historical possibilities for democratizing family life did not translate into enhanced prospects for political equality. Women were mostly eliminated from political discourse and politics—but they were not forgotten. Some founders sensed that women’s exclusion fortified fraternal unity among otherwise disorderly males. Carole Pateman explains that men’s monopoly of citizenship and leadership provided them “a common interest as men” in sharing power over women. Meanwhile, most founders believed that men were more apt to defend liberty and exercise it with self-restraint when courting, betrothed, or wed to respectable women. Noah Webster calculated that a man’s best defense against “a dissipated life” was a fondness for “ladies of character.”⁵⁹ In sum, the founders appealed to men’s patriarchal interests and fraternal instincts by reaffirming their coercive power over women, reinforcing women’s exclusion from politics, and recruiting virtuous women to encourage men’s good behavior.

Second, the founders enlisted Christian morality, republican virtue, liberal self-interest, and public education along with women’s benign influence in the cause of taming men’s passions, encouraging male responsibility, ensuring their orderly conduct, and promoting mass compliance to legitimate authority. They also framed innovative political institutions to neutralize men’s passions and cushion the consequences of their disorderly conduct. And like most elites, the founders sought to establish hegemony and secure stability by soliciting men’s consent and quiescence.

Historically, Antonio Gramsci observes, elites not only “request” consent but “educate it.” They establish hegemony by raising “the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level.” They use cultural norms to perform “a positive educative function” by promoting ways of thinking, speaking, and acting conducive to mass compliance; and they operate coercive institutions to discharge “a negative educative function” by penalizing subversive ideas, words, and deeds. Hegemony is “protected by the armor of coercion.” Elites’ attempt to establish hegemony is not always a self-conscious, systematic effort to make culture function as an instrument of mass subordination. Raymond Williams suggests that hegemony is more of “a lived, social process” in which elites organize the various and shifting “meanings and values” that saturate people’s lives. Hegemony is never static because it is continually “renewed, recreated, defended, and modified,” as well as “resisted, limited, altered, challenged.”⁶⁰

R. W. Connell adds that the struggle for hegemony often involves the culture of manhood. Male elites promote a “hegemonic masculinity” that deploys norms of manhood to justify dominant authority and encourage mass deference to it. Elites also foster “conservative” or “complicit masculinities” that urge men to accept and benefit from dominant male norms and institutions; and they identify, stigmatize, and punish “subordinated” or “marginal masculinities” that potentially undermine political stability. Unlike ideologies that appeal to men’s minds, hegemonic masculinity taps into the deepest recesses of men’s psychosexual, social, and political identities. Many scholars believe that one of men’s strongest motives has involved male rivalry. Men have found it exhilarating to be elevated above other men; and they have felt degraded when treated “as a boy and not a man.”⁶¹ By controlling the criteria for male elevation and degradation, elites who join hegemony to manhood significantly strengthen their ability to secure men’s consent and quiescence.

That is what American founders did. They promoted hegemonic masculinity as part of their effort to restrain disorderly male passions, temper men’s democratic desires, restore fraternal order, and reconstitute political authority. They advanced a coherent conception and language of manhood based on the consensual norms that enjoined males to establish independence, start families, and govern dependents to achieve manhood and procreate new generations. They stigmatized, sanctioned, and reformed disorderly men, whose marginal masculinity associated them with dependency, effeminacy, immaturity, and sterility. They rewarded the complicit masculinity of men who conformed to consensual norms by recognizing their social merit and citizenship. And they promised immortal fame along with social status and political authority to extraordinary men who, like themselves, procreated a new nation and glorious future for humankind.

The founders also appropriated aspects of America’s contested ideals of manhood to stabilize and fine-tune the male pecking order of the new republic. For example, they attacked the self-interested manhood of males who failed to settle into family life, but they generally applauded the self-interested manhood of married men who worked to protect and provision their families. Moreover, they emphasized the ideal of republican manhood when defining citizenship but drew more heavily on images of aristocratic manhood and traditional patriarchy to legitimize the political authority and prerogative of national leaders. The founders rarely debated the alternative ideals of manhood, but they habitually relied on them to educate the consent of the governed.

Judith Sargent Murray’s call for every American “to play the man for his country” conveyed two implicit but unmistakable messages. First, greater sexual equality may have been conceivable for the home, but men were to be the sole arbiters of the nation’s political fate. Second, all men may have been born free and equal, but each male had to measure up to standards of manhood to earn citizenship or merit leadership status. Murray’s language was not unusual. Indeed, it was a representative sample of the “grammar of manhood” that the founders used to promote hegemonic norms of manhood, secure men’s consent, define citizenship, and legitimize political authority.