Men and Masculinities in History

Men and Masculinities in History

Introduction:

History is the tool that brings past in our knowledge. The study of past events and behavior of human is known as history. But due to the biased nature of human based on sex creates a distinction which is women’s history that came to notion when this oppressed and marginalized group started thinking about their ways of liberation and achieving social, political and economic dignity.

Today, women want to achieve equality with men in all spheres. They no longer want patriarchal dominance that restrained women’s capability and intelligence for a long period. It is said that the past creates the present, and so the future. So if women really want to upgrade their dignity that they have been holding for the time being, they must have the knowledge of their past.Elton wrote in 1967 that,

‘...historical study is not the study of the past but the study of the present traces of the past’

Looking for women’s role, their contribution from hunting gathering society to civilization, during peace and war, in anxieties and depression in history, it seemed to the feminists and others that women were absent from the history. The history that was available only comprised doings of men and masculinity. However, soon it appeared before the readers and spectators that only men from a certain criteria were present in the history. In this paper, I am going to discuss why there is no history of men as men in spite of their occupying major and mostly full portion in history and influencing to create a separate history for women.

Women’s history

Women’s history emerged with an aim to make history more comprehensive and accurate. To fill the gaps made by male orientation in history, women’s history appeared. Women’s history challenges the procedure of history and exposes the wide characters of women in time.  

Men in the past were more powerful and they were the public character. Their education, their skill, their warfare, their inventions held the supreme position in history. Lives of women, their restrictions or their challenges were hardly topic of representation and discussion. They were the private group who were always locked up in private. Documentation of male were more important and of survival categorical than those of women. Therefore, historians offered a biased and male dominant image in the history.

Women’s history indicates something broader and bigger than simply getting acceptance in history. To change social construction and behavior with the process of documentation is also a concern.

Women although defined by sex, are more than a biologically category; they exist socially and encompass females of different ages, in different family positions, in different classes, nations, communities; they live by different rules and customs, in environments shaped by beliefs and opinions that follow the structures of power. Most importantly for the historian, because of the ongoing process of social structuring, as Philip Abrams (1982: x) called it, women live and act in time (Tilly 1987).

Gender history

Gender history is the history that considers both male and female as equivalent participants of the history and emphasizes on the roles and experiences of both male and female. It claims only study of women with under no consideration on men is not as useful as using both men and women in keeping consideration. We must understand the relationship between men and women if we want to understand female experience and identity.

….gender is a constitutive element of social relationship based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power (Scott 2010 p 1067).

Gender history even highlights the remaining gaps in our understandings of women. For instance, while most historical studies of early modern or eighteenth-century English masculinity expose the diversity of male identities - or masculinities - there are very few published studies of English femininity in these periods.

History of men

History has always been biased by men and male attributes. But when women’s history reached the core concern of the historians, it appeared that even men were excluded from history in some way. What led the thinkers opine so?

Men were recognized by their some specific characteristics and also got highlighted in history for those hyper masculinities. Some of the male attributes are strength, bravery, intelligence, deft, anger etc. where do we find the moral values? Values like modesty, truthfulness, politeness. A boy can be polite but what history tells us that a man can hardly be polite. He gains everything with his roughness and toughness. Strength can be achieved along with morality. But historians put the strong men on the frontline and men with morality faded away somehow.

The weak have always been victimized by strong ones. How often historian shouted out those bullies and struggles? Women were always seen to be oppressed but if there is struggle in being private then there is also struggle of being in public.

It is significant, then, that the anxieties about masculinity produced by a changing gender order have usually been couched in terms of a critique of culture and not political economy. The emphases within the ‘men and masculinities’ field on critiquing cultural norms of masculinity as the problem to be addressed, and on engaging individual men as the primary agents and sites of change, have unwittingly buttressed this neo-liberal ideological turn. Even as the Gender and Development (GAD) framework sought to resist and insist on women’s material subordination, the effort to include men within the framework has worked in the opposite direction (White, 2000).

Downplaying the critique of the political economy suited the architects of the new political economy. So it should come as no surprise that the male responsibility paradigm, an early instance of the ‘men and masculinities’ field being put to work, should be ushered on to the world stage by the then president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn. In his speech to the 1995 Beijing Conference, he called on participants to focus on:
Not just the liberation of women, but also the liberation of men – in their thinking, attitudes, and willingness to take a fairer share of the responsibilities and workloads that women carry on their shoulders. To bring about real improvement in the quality of women’s lives, men must change. And action must begin at home. (1995: 3, cited in Bedford, 2007)