The New Men's History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power: Some Remedies from Early American Gender History

Abstract

Historians with feminist commitments have expressed reservations about men's history and men's studies. This unease has existed more or less from the first appearance of men's history as a specialised area of inquiry, and shows no signs of abating. The first part of this article explores the sources of this unease. It discusses several guiding premises of men's history and shows that they tend to lead to the occlusion of men's gendered power over women. Nonetheless, the scrutiny of the gender of men is the logical outgrowth of several decades of theoretical and empirical work on gender–witness the many historians of women and gender who have recently turned their attention to the systematic study of manliness and masculinity. With the help of examples drawn from the scholarship on the history of the British colonies in America and the early United States, the second part of this article enumerates several strategies for successfully highlighting men's gendered power in histories of manliness and masculinity.