Book Review

A new book from Howard P. Chudacoff is always a delight, because few scholars range over so many cultural obsessions, from social mobility and age consciousness to bachelorhood. Sweeping from seventeenth-century America to the millennium, Chudacoff locates the heyday of bachelorhood between 1890 and 1930 and speculates about a contemporary resurgence. He uncovers an overlooked social category and analyzes a paradox of American individualism. The self-reliant bachelor embodied that ideal more than anyone, yet his nonconformity to marriage cast him as a threat to society.

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Chudacoff argues that bachelors were (and are) a subculture that sometimes acted as (or was deemed) a counterculture. Bachelors sometimes rebelled openly, both from broader cultures of masculinity and from society at large. By claiming spaces, building institutions, and ultimately creating a distinct life-style, bachelors set themselves apart in more than just marital status. Bachelor subcultures evolved, the author explains, during an era when young men gained more control over their adult careers and could shape and be shaped by city life. Charting the rise of bachelorhood in an impressive statistical chapter, his baseline is the 1890 census, when a record 41.7 percent of males older than fifteen were single. Chudacoff weighs demographic, economic, and cultural explanations for the surge that lasted until the Great Depression and the postwar marriage boom.

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