Reviewed by Konstantin Dierks | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 607 words from this article are provided below; about 551 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Konstantin Dierks | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Making Manhood: Growing up Male in Colonial New England. By Anne S. Lombard. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. x, 299. $45.00.)

Reviewed by Konstantin Dierks , Indiana University, Bloomington

Masculinity studies have been increasing exponentially in the last few years, and it comes as no surprise that historians of colonial New England have taken a lead in this field as they have in many others. While we still know comparatively little about men's history in many parts of colonial North America or the early modern Atlantic world overall, Anne Lombard's Making Manhood is the newest of several monographs addressing masculinity in colonial New England. Lombard joins what could be called "second-wave" men's history, following on a "first wave" that structured its narratives around relations between men and women.¹ Lombard largely leaves women out of the picture, however, and concentrates instead on male homosociality. In this, she follows a spate of recent work in which one of the key themes is the socialization of young men by older men, albeit in times and places beyond colonial New England.² The shared conceptual premise of these books is that men's lives and masculine ideologies should not be reduced to the assertion of male power over women. Furthermore, although power may certainly be a component and consequence of all social relations, it is not always the explicit purpose behind them. Hence, to reduce social relations to the exercise of power is to overstate the role of power in society and to understate the complexity of social life. Lombard therefore looks to examine other fraught aspects of men's lives. How did one make the transition from boyhood to manhood in colonial New England? How did one become a man? This was no easy task, according to Lombard, and it was not accomplished simply by oppressing girls and women.

The socially and psychologically complex socialization of boys into men constitutes the heart and the bulk of Lombard's book. Chapter 1 details infancy and boyhood, chapters 2 and 3 dwell on youth, and chapter 4 concerns marriage and adulthood. Notably, Lombard finds that males of all ages spent most of their time, not with their peers, but with other males in a range of age groups. Colonial New England seems rather premodern in this respect, awaiting a transition to modernity and a valorization of male peer friendship that Lombard attributes to the nineteenth century. Socialization was meant to imbue males with sufficient rational self-control—spurning female company and sexual desire, for example—so that at the appropriate time of life they could achieve economic independence, defined as the property and income necessary to support a household. This was the pinnacle of manhood, and these masculine ideals of rational self-control, economic independence, and responsible fatherhood endured from the late seventeenth century through the late eighteenth century, according to Lombard. Such continuity in masculine ideals was significant because the eighteenth century was replete with demographic, economic, social, and political transformations that certainly pressured men in their lives and theoretically could have either heightened or diminished the resonance of various possible masculine ideals. Yet with respect to fatherhood, uses of violence (discussed in chapter 5), and political rhetoric (chapter 6), Lombard ultimately detects more historical continuity than change in the period from 1676 to 1776. Plenty of scholarship suggests that honor culture legitimated male violence in other regions, but not at any time in New England. Similarly, other studies show patriarchal language disappearing from political discourse elsewhere in the colonies during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, but it remained resonant in New England.

. . .

There are about 551 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.