Literature of the U.S. Men's Movements

Abstract

n the early 1970s Nicole Hollander created a cartoon in which a woman notes that on a certain date men began to express their feelings and women have regretted it ever since. Certainly in the late 1980s and 1990s men have written extensively about the experience of being a man in the United States. It remains to be seen how much regret this literature has produced or will produce. Obviously, the picture created by Hollander's cartoon is an oversimplification. In the United States during the 1980s and 1990s, a flood of writings about men and masculinity by both men and women were published. Such writings now appear in every academic field, and they display a wide range of political perspectives. This review essay offers a concise mapping of some of this terrain. It explores both academic and men's movement writings, past and present. The reason these two are linked is that the men's movement, which is actually several distinct movements, is responsible for the creation and maintenance of much of what is called men's studies. Even today most academic writing owes its inspiration to one or more of the men's movements that began outside of academia. Early reactions to the contemporary women's movement of the 1960s were negative and derisive. Conservative men were among the first to attack feminist ideas and writings. George Gilder's Sexual Suicide, published in 1973 and reissued in 1986 as Men and Marriage, expresses a conservative standpoint that reverberates in political discourse today. According to this perspective, men are biologically different from women in ways that make the gender roles that men and women have and need very different. Men are basically barbarians who can be civilized into the family provider and protector role if societal institutions are sufficiently aggressive in supporting women in keeping their men. Any movement that challenges these traditional roles, such as feminism, gay liberation, or sexual liberation, is to be resisted. In this literature, defense of the traditional family is equated with defense of civilization. The most recent and perhaps most influential writing in this conservative tradition is David Blankenhorn's Fatherless