Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics. By Mark E. Kann. (New York: New York University Press, 1998. x, 238 pp. Cloth, $55.00, isbn 0-8147-4713-2. Paper, $18.50, isbn 0-8147-4714-0.)

The political scientist Mark E. Kann herein joins those scholars who have examined the gendered language employed during the founding era. He is the first to focus on definitions of manhood; others either have concentrated on the conceptualization of womanhood or have looked at familial images. 1

Kann explores what he terms "a grammar of manhood" that both "drew on hegemonic norms of manhood to encourage disorderly men to conform to a standard of manly conduct" and "articulated consensual criteria for sorting out the ranks of men . . . and legitimizing leadership authority in the new republic." Locating this grammar of manhood in the writings of those he calls "the founders" (essentially, any American who wrote about politics during the last four decades of the eighteenth century), Kann supports his arguments with quotations not only from such men as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin but also from Mercy Otis Warren and Judith Sargent Murray. Regardless of sex (and nearly regardless of political affiliation, although he does acknowledge some differences of opinion), Kann identifies a broad consensus about the roles of men in the Republic. . . .

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