A Man’s Sphere? British Politics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Matthew Mccormack

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-58538-7_12

Abstract

Although the study of masculinity is now well established in the discipline of history, its impact has been uneven, and historians of different periods, regions and topics have explored it in different ways. The study of masculinity in British politics from the eighteenth century onwards is a case in point. This chapter surveys work done since the 1990s, when the field was initially preoccupied with ‘separate spheres’ and methodologies associated with the linguistic turn. New cultural histories have since allowed historians to assess the role of masculinity, not just in political representation, but in fields such as the body, the emotions and material culture. This chapter uses examples from modern British politics to make a case for a gendered history of political practice.

Highlights

My PhD thesis began as a political study, exploring the emotive idea of ‘independence’ in the Georgian period
Like many postgraduate students in the 1990s, I was influenced by the linguistic turn’s approach to social description and political traditions,[1] and so I was seeking to explore the role of an important keyword in political life
Citizenship—how the legitimate political subject was defined socially, and how membership of the political nation was experienced—it became clear that the project was really about masculinity: how citizenship was associated with certain sorts of men, and how it excluded women and certain other men.[2]