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The Religious Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America: The Male Mediumship of John Shoebridge Williams

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Bret E. Carroll
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Extract

After John Shoebridge Williams became a Spiritualist medium in February 1852, establishing what he believed to be contact with the spirit of his deceased daughter, Eliza, and access to the wisdom of the spirit world, the sixty-one-year-old man came to the startling realization that he was assuming the features of a woman. At least, this is what he thought as he recorded the events of March 15, 1852, in his spiritual Journal:

When walking the streets of Cincinnati Eliza said to me, “You know, Dear Father, that of late years, your breasts have been partly developed like a females [sic]. This was from my influence. You were well prepared to receive me into your bosom, and already do our souls unite in substance so as to become one.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Winter 1997 , pp. 27 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1997

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References

Notes

The author would like to thank his colleagues in the Dallas Social History Group for their constructive criticism and suggestions.

1. John Shoebridge Williams, Manuscripts on Spiritualism, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, vol. 1, book 1, 49. Subsequent references to the Williams Journal will use the abbreviation “JSW” and three numbers separated by colons to refer to volume, book, and page number (e.g., 1:1:49).

2. The term “masculinity” is used advisedly here, for the term was not widely used until the end of the nineteenth Century and had a definition different from the term “manliness,” which was the more commonly used word through much of the Century. I use “masculinity” largely to avoid overuse of the term “manhood.” The changing definitions of these terms are discussed at length in Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 85–95.Google Scholar

3. It is necessary to identify Williams's race, class, and region since definitions of gender and spirituality have historically varied across these lines. As Mary Ann Clawson has observed, class and race combine with male gender as “interwoven threads of a Single masculine identity.” See Clawson, Mary Ann, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 246.Google Scholar See also Hackett, David G., “Gender and Religion in American Culture, 1870-1930,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 5, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 127-57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 1–44.Google Scholar

4. Donald Yacovone has seen this pattern in the behavior of antebellum America's radical abolitionists. See Yacovone, Donald, “Abolitionists and the ‘Language of Fraternal Love,’ ” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 85–95.Google Scholar

5. Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 7.Google Scholar

6. On mediumship, its culturally “feminine” nature, and its connection with the religious empowerment of women, see Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Owen, Alex, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Moore, R. Laurence, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 102-29.Google Scholar

7. The relational nature of masculinity has been noted by Kimmel, Michael S., “The Contemporary ‘Crisis of Masculinity’ in Historical Perspective,” in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies, ed. Brod, Harry (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 153 Google Scholar; Rotundo, E. Anthony, “Body and Soul: Changing Ideals of American Middle-Class Manhood, 1770-1920,” Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983): 24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde, “Constructions of Masculinity in Friendship and Marriage,” in Meanings for Manhood, ed. Carnes, and Griffen, , 79.Google Scholar

8. I borrow the phrase “feminized profession” from a recent study of male librarians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Male librarians, like male mediums, felt a strong need to assert their male identity. See Passet, Joanne E., “Men in a Feminized Profession: The Male Librarian, 1887-1921,” Libraries and Culture 28 (Fall 1993): 385–402 Google Scholar, esp. 391. Clyde Griffen has correctly suggested that a more integrated understanding of gender in American history requires that scholars of masculinity move beyond all-male cultural settings to an analysis of those points at which men's and women's experiences overlapped. See Griffen, Clyde, “Reconstructing Masculinity from the Evangelical Revival to the Waning of Progressivism: A Speculative Synthesis,” in Meanings for Manhood, ed. Carnes, and Griffen, , 184.Google Scholar

A few scholars have described nineteenth-century attempts to masculinize American religious life. Criticizing the thesis that American religion was “feminized” during the nineteenth Century, for example, Terry Bilhartz has argued that evangelicals consciously adopted “masculine” strategies in an attempt to attract males to church membership. See Bilhartz, Terry, “Sex and the Second Great Awakening: The Feminization of American Religion Reconsidered,” in Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History, ed. VanderMeer, Philip R. and Swierenga, Robert P. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 117-35.Google Scholar A more recent attempt to argue for a remasculinization of American religion in the early nineteenth Century is Johnson, Paul E. and Wilentz, Sean, The Kingdom of Matthias (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar

9. Robert L. Griswold has argued that divorced middle-class men of the Victorian period felt a particularly strong pressure to modify their understanding of masculinity in ways that blurred gender distinctions. See Griswold, Robert L., “Divorce and the Legal Redefinition of Manhood,” in Meanings for Manhood, ed. Carnes, and Griffen, , 96–110.Google Scholar

10. My understanding of the many models of masculinity discussed in this and the following paragraphs has been shaped by Kimmel, Michael S., Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), esp. 13–42 Google Scholar; Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. 2-7; E. Anthony Rotundo, “Body and Soul”; Rotundo, E. Anthony, “American Fatherhood: A Historical Perspective,” American Behavioral Scientist 29 (September/October 1985): 7–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 186-88; Pleck, Elizabeth H. and Pleck, Joseph, The American Man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 7–20 Google Scholar; Pleck, Joseph, “American Fathering in Historical Perspective,” in Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity, ed. Kimmel, Michael S. (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1987), 83–97 Google Scholar; Griswold, Robert L., Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 10–33 Google Scholar; and Demos, John, “The Changing Faces of Fatherhood,” in Fast, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 41–67.Google Scholar

11. JSW, 2:2:189.

12. A number of historians of early American religious life have portrayed the posture of regeneration as essentially “feminine” in nature, emphasizing the importance attached to passivity and humility as prerequisites of salvation. See Greven, Philip, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 124-25Google Scholar; and Masson, Margaret, “The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching, 1690-1730,” Signs 2 (Winter 1976): 304-15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Given the Christian model of pious behavior and traditional expectations that even men would defer to the religious authority of their ministers, however, it is misleading to consider the posture of religious Submission as purely “feminine.” According to E. Anthony Rotundo, the qualities of Submission and acquiescence, both religious and social, were important to eighteenth-century constructions of manhood (American Manhood, 13).

13. See Kimmel, Michael S., “Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832-1920,” Michigan Quarterly Review 33 (Winter 1994): 16.Google Scholar

14. See Fliegelman, Jay, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Smith, Daniel Scott, “Parental Power and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (August 1973): 419-28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Henretta, James, The Evolution of American Society, 1700-1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Co., 1973)Google Scholar; and Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 27.Google Scholar

15. See Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and, for an application to Spiritualist mediumship, Carroll, Bret E., Spiritualist Religion in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming), chap. 2.Google Scholar

16. On Williams's involvement in these projects, see his retrospective letters of June 11 and July 13, 1870, to Lyman Copeland Draper in the Draper and WHS Correspondence, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

17. See Rotundo, , American Manhood, 3–5, 18-25Google Scholar; Rotundo, “Body and Soul,” 25-26; and Kimmel, “Consuming Manhood,” 8ff.

18. Ryan, Mary P., Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 232.Google Scholar

19. JSW, 3:1:115, 214. On the “cult of domesticity” and the notion of “separate spheres,” see Kimmel, , Manhood in America, 50–59 Google Scholar; Cott, Nancy, Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Welter, Barbara, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the “feminization” of American culture and religion, see Douglas, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar; and Welter, Barbara, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860,” in Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, ed. Hartman, Mary S. and Banner, Lois (New York: Octagon Books, 1976), 137-57.Google Scholar On the “feminization” and “domestication” of middle-class male behavior, see Griswold, “Divorce and the Legal Redefinition of Victorian Manhood”; and Marsh, Margaret, “Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity,” American Quarterly 40 (June 1988): 165-86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 186-88; JSW, 1:3:11.

21. Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture; Bushnell, Horace, Christian Nurture, intro. by Weigle, Luther A. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), 202.Google Scholar

22. Reynolds, David S., “The Feminization Controversy: Sexual Stereotypes and the Paradoxes of Piety in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly 53 (March 1980): 96–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quotation on 106. The liberal ministers described by Douglas and Reynolds may be interpreted as androgynous figures.

23. Griffen himself, citing the work of Suzanne Lebsock, points to men's takeover of the leadership of a number of women's causes in Virginia as evidence of their anxiety (Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 188). Similarly, Ann Douglas's “feminization” thesis argues that the male liberal ministers of the North emphasized the “feminine” nature of religious life in an effort to maintain their control over their increasingly female flocks, while Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood, 172-73Google Scholar, has argued that men associated with the revival and reform movements of the antebellum period responded to the “feminine” label attached to their religious work by employing the military language of “Christian warfare” and the image of the “Christian soldier.”

24. “A. J. Davis at Dodworth's Hall,” Spiritual Telegraph 7 (May 29, 1858): 47; Davis, Andrew Jackson, The Magic Stoff: An Autobiography (New York: J. S. Brown and Co., 1857), 263.Google Scholar

25. Spear, John Murray, The Educator: Being Suggestions, Theoretical and Practical, Designed to Promote Man-Culture and Integral Reform with a View to the Ultimate Establishment of a Divine Social State on Earth, ed. Newton, A. E. (Boston: Office of Practical Spiritualists, 1857), 130 Google Scholar; JSW, 3:3:84.

26. Spear, , The Educator, 63 Google Scholar; Williams, John Shoebridge, Bible Proof of Spirit Intercourse, 23 Google Scholar, in Three Pamphlets Bound Together (Cincinnati: U. P. James, 1857).

27. The effect of Spiritualist and Swedenborgian theology on gender distinctions has been noted in Owen, , The Darkened Room, 14.Google Scholar

28. That a daughter might serve as a moral guide for her father (as well as a wife for her husband or a mother for her son) has been noted by Riley, Glenda Gates, “The Subtle Subversion: Changes in the Traditionalist Image of the American Woman,” The Historian 32 (February 1970); 216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Noting an increased affection between fathers and daughters in the nineteenth Century, Peter N. Stearns has suggested that, while this development might reflect a healthy expansion of male affection, it might also be the result of men's desire to associate femaleness with childlike qualities. See Stearns, Peter N., Be a Man! Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 57.Google Scholar

29. Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 8.Google Scholar

30. JSW, 2:1:81, 1:1:93, 2:4:133.

31. JSW, 1:2:69, 3:1:50, 2:3:113, 2:1:11, 1:1:21, 1:4:237, 3:2:13; Williams, , Bible Proof of Spirit Intercourse, 23.Google Scholar

32. Similarly, Susan Juster's analysis of conversion narratives of female and male evangelicals of the early nineteenth Century has led her to postulate an “androgynous model of the conversion experience.” See Juster, Susan, “ ‘In A Different Voice’: Male and Female Narratives of Religious Conversion in Post-Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly 41 (March 1989): 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33. JSW, 1:1:60; Spear, , The Educator, 163.Google Scholar

34. On father-daughter incest, see Griswold, , Fatherhood in America, 255-57.Google Scholar

35. JSW, 3:1:214, 1:4:56. Describing the nurturing connection between the “true mother” and the child, educator Horace Mann wrote in 1853 that “Her consciousness embraces and interpenetrates its consciousness.” Mann, Horace, The Powers and Duties of Women, 84 Google Scholar, quoted in Kaestle, Carl F., Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 86.Google Scholar

36. Carnes, Mark C., Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 121.Google Scholar Similarly, Barker-Benfield has suggested that men in nineteenth-century America desired both autonomy and authority and, therefore, harbored an ambivalent attitude toward the order and discipline imposed upon them by the female figure. See Barker-Benfield, , The Horrors ofthe Half-Knoum Life, 8–9, 48-49.Google Scholar Kimmel discusses male resistance to “feminization” and “domestication” in Manhood in America, 59-70.

37. JSW, 3:2:168, 2:4:160, 3:1:32.

38. On this point, see Braude, , Radical Spirits, 56–57 Google Scholar; and Carroll, The Ministry of Angels, chap. 2.

39. “B.,” “Spiritualism Not Sectarian,” Spiritual Telegraph 5 (March 7, 1857): 357; Hallock, Robert, The Child and the Man (New York: Ellinwood and Hills, 1856).Google Scholar

40. Williams, John Shoebridge, An Address to the Officers and Citizens of the United States, Recommending a Manifestation in Favor of the Bible (Baltimore: Sherwood and Co., 1854), 17 Google Scholar; JSW, 2:4:127, 3:2:53.

41. JSW, 2:3:186, 2:4:133-34, 2:4:131, 3:1:132.

42. Sunderland, LaRoy, Book of Human Nature (New York: Stearns and Co., 1853), 107-8, 299, 314Google Scholar; Edmonds, John W. and Dexter, George T., Spiritualism, 2 vols. (New York: Partridge and Brittan, 1853-1855), 1:314-15, 318-19Google Scholar; Davis, , The Magic Staff, 327, 346-47, 366, 370.Google Scholar

43. JSW, 1:1:113, 2:1:80, 2:2:129, 2:4:16. Williams's experience resembles what Barker-Benfield has called the male fantasy of complete autonomy, that is, “the fantasy of total self-sufficiency, which ideally was experienced away from all other people.” See Barker-Benfield, , The Horrors of the Half-Known Life, 310 Google Scholar n. 3. At the same time, however, Williams desire for “internal” friends suggests that he felt the need for others in achieving spiritual renewal. In his simultaneous desire for both withdrawal and social engagement as instruments of regeneration, he blended religious postures that Susan Juster has labeled “male” and “female”; while men had to “overcome their alienating self-sufficiency through interaction with others if they hope to reach God,” women had to “disengage themselves from overdependence on friends and family” (Juster, “ ‘In a Different Voice’ ” 51). Given her belief in an ultimately androgynous model of religious experience in early nineteenth-century America, it is surprising that Juster treats these postures as mutually exclusive.

44. JSW, 2:1:103, 3:2:242, 3:1:132, 3:2:246.

45. JSW, 1:4:151.

46. On the nineteenth-century cultural connection between womanhood and teaching, see Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic; Sugg, Redding S., Motherteacher: The Feminization of American Education (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978)Google Scholar; Wishy, Bernard W., The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kuhn, Anne Louise, The Mother's Role in Childhood Education: New England Concepts, 1830-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947).Google Scholar

47. JSW, 1:4:163, 2:3:97-98, 1:4:216, 2:1:127. Susan Juster has argued that evangelical men, unlike women, typically found spiritual motivation in a fear of being left behind as those close to them attained salvation, that they “seem to have been reacting against the prospect of losing ground in a competitive race to God” (“ ‘In a Different Voice,’ ” 54).

48. Carnes notes that men in fraternal orders felt a similar need to sidestep maternal religious nurture in favor of patriarchal guidance. See Carnes, , Secret Ritual and Manhood, 121.Google Scholar In asserting his dominance over a spiritual wife toward whom he was at the same time submissive, Williams resembled a nineteenth-century male psychological type labeled by David Pugh as the “patriarchal child.” See Pugh, David, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 83ff.Google Scholar

49. JSW, 2:3:36, 98-99; 2:1:150, 159.

50. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood, esp. 39-65, 76-79, 107-27; Clawson, , Constructing Brotherhood, 45–52, 163-64, 172-77Google Scholar; Williams, , The Patriarchal Order; or True Brotherhood (Cincinnati: Longley Brothers, 1855).Google Scholar Women constituted a large majority of most churches. See Blauvelt, Martha T., “Women and Revivalism,” in Women and Religion in America: The Nineteenth Century, 2 vols., ed. Ruether, Rosemary Radford and Keller, Rosemary (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 1:5 Google Scholar; Shiels, Richard D., “The Feminization of American Congregationalism, 1730-1835,” American Quarterly 33 (Spring 1981): 46–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryan, , Cradle of the Middle Class, 79–81 Google Scholar; and Bilhartz, “Sex and the Second Great Awakening.” Bilhartz joins Carnes in suggesting that most American men rejected androgynous spirituality and feminized religion, making up the minority of church membership; he argues that men were attracted to the churches only when ministers employed aggressive (“masculine”) revival methods that women and most male Spiritualists found distasteful.

It should be noted that even the assertively masculine fraternal lodge had androgynous qualities. In Secret Ritual and Manhood, 116-23, Carnes points out that lodges were invested by their members with maternal qualities.

51. JSW, 3:3:36d, 3:3:37, 3:2:30b, 3:1:132-39 (the lower-case letters in these citations indicate reference to a letter inserted between pages in the diary; thus, 3:3:36d refers to the fourth page of a letter inserted between pages 36 and 37 of volume 3, book 3).

52. See Davis, Andrew Jackson, “The New Motive Power,” Spiritual Telegraph 3 (June 10, 1854): 23 Google Scholar; Robinson, J. H., “Trying the Spirits,” Spiritual Telegraph 3 (July 8, 1854): 39 Google Scholar; Capron, Eliab Wilkinson, Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1855), 220.Google Scholar

53. See Edmonds, John W. and Dexter, George T., Spiritualism, 1:70 Google Scholar; Britten, Emma Hardinge, Modern American Spiritualism (New York, 1870), 99 Google Scholar; and “Hon. John Worth Edmonds,” Shekinah 1 (July 1852): 325.

54. On the physical male culture of the latter half of the Century, see Rotundo, “Body and Soul,” 26-33; Rotundo, , American Manhood, 222-24Google Scholar; and Kimmel, “Consuming Manhood.” If Rotundo is correct in his contention that male concern with the body was a postbellum and not an antebellum phenomenon, and that “body-anxiety of ante-bellum men did not become a dominant theme of their letters and diaries, nor did it find expression in the ideals of the era” (“Body and Soul,” 32), Williams may be regarded as a harbinger of emerging cultural themes.

The example of Williams Supports the contention of symbolic anthropology that the physical body might serve as a symbol for the social body See Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970)Google Scholar; Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; and, for an application to Victorian America, Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity,” American Journal of Sociology 84 Supplement (1978): 212-47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. JSW, 1:1:49-50, 1:4:215, 1:4:152, 2:1:168; Williams, Address, i. Similarly fraternal initiation rituals used the word “bosom” when referring to the collective membership in whose Company the initiate found solace. See Carnes, , Secret Ritual and Manhood, 121-22.Google Scholar Moral nurture and breast-feeding were commonly compared during the nineteenth Century. For an example, see Kuhn, Mothers' Role, 57.

56. Marc E. Mishkind, Judith Rodin, Lisa R. Silberstein, and Ruth H. Striegel-Moore have argued that attempts to emphasize physical differences between the sexes “may be a reaction against sexual equality, an expression of a wish to preserve some semblance of traditional male-female differences.” See “The Embodiment of Masculinity: Cultural, Psychological, and Behavioral Dimensions,” in Changing Men, ed. Kimmel, 47.

57. JSW, 1:4:151, 153.

58. Ibid., 3:1:113, 114; 3:2:189, 190, 191; Williams, , Address, i, ii.Google Scholar

59. Kimmel, “Consuming Manhood,” 8.

60. Kimmel has noted that “beards and moustaches experienced a cultural revival” beginning in the 1840's and 1850's and continuing into the late nineteenth Century (Kimmel, “Consuming Manhood,” 20). See also Kimmel, , Manhood in America, 60.Google Scholar For a British parallel, see Robinson, Dwight, “Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842-1972,” American Journal of Sociology 81 (March 1976): 1133-41.Google Scholar Carnes has suggested a connection between fraternalism and the wearing of beards in Secret Ritual and Manhood, 17. A recent psychological study by Addison, William E., “Beardedness as a Factor in Perceived Masculinity,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 68 (June 1989): 921-22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggests that the beard is still considered a mark of masculinity.

61. For a brief discussion of emergent middle-class definitions of “masculinity” in the late nineteenth Century, see Bederman, , Manliness and Civilization, 16–20.Google Scholar

62. JSW, 4:1:195; Williams to Lyman Copeland Draper, April 5, 1871, and May 29, 1871, Draper Correspondence, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

63. On this point, see Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 184. Kimmel, “The Contemporary ‘Crisis’ of Masculinity in Historical Perspective,” 143-53, has identified three analytical categories of male response to feminism and perceived feminization in the nineteenth Century: “antifeminist backlash,” “promale backlash,” and an embrace of feminism. Williams's behavior involves elements of all three but, of course (like that of other American males), defies categorization.

64. Susan Juster has made a similar point in “ ‘In a Different Voice,’ ” 57.

65. Scott, Joan, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1053-75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Hackett, “Gender and Religion in American Culture.” Susan Juster's “ ‘In a Different Voice,’ ” a study of the differences between male and female conversion narratives in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America, is a good example of the Utility of gender categories for the study of American religious history.

66. On the intrapsychic dimension of masculine self-identity and the problem of the feminine within, see Tosh, John, “What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History Workshop Journal 38 (Fall 1994): 194-96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

67. On this point, see Griffen, “Reconstructing Masculinity,” 187; and Nancy F. Cott, “On Men's History and Women's History,” in Meanings for Manhood, ed. Carnes and Griffen, 207-8.

68. Stearns, , Be a Man!, 95.Google Scholar