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By Root 1963 0

1800s, held at Trinity College in Hartford, received proposals for 250 papers. The level of interest and sophistication of those papers was “absolutely unimaginable” ten years ago, said the organizers of the conference. The nineteenth-century female writers “were dealing with the large social and political problems of the time, such as slavery, industrial capitalism and, after the Civil War, the color line,” said Joan D. Hedrick, a Trinity College history professor whose biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe won a Pulitzer Prize last year. “Women didn’t have a vote during this period—the only way they could represent themselves was through their writing.” But these writers were ignored as male deconstructionists and their feminist followers wiped out, in the postmodern canon, what professor Paul Lauter termed “the idea of sentiment, the idea of tears, the idea of being moved by literature, the idea of being political.”

And now women are bringing back those larger issues and concerns with life, beyond the dead abstractions, into politics, and not just letters. And so, today, women are no longer a “dark continent” in literature or any academic discipline, though some feminist scholars continue to debate “victim history.” In a review of The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity by the eminent historian George L. Mosse (The New Republic, June 10, 1996), Roy Porter says:

What remains hidden from history today is the male. Not that the accomplishments of men have been neglected. Historical research has always centered on men’s lives—tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman…The very term “men” could automatically serve a double function, referring equally to males or humans…when those who strutted on the historical stage were almost invariably male. Being a man—performing in the theater of works, politics, power—was simply assumed to be natural; and when allegedly male traits such as fighting were occasionally questioned by pacifists or protesters, the dead white European males dominating the academy and the airwaves were deft at belittling such criticisms as hysterical or utopian, on the grounds that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do…. It was the women’s movement, not surprisingly, which first put maleness under cross-examination….

But the books so far that take on the masculine mystique and the so-called “men’s studies” and “men’s movement” have too often been literal copies in reverse of “women’s lib”—and thus, by definition, inauthentic. Or a revisionist desperate embrace of the outmoded, stunted, brutal youth-arrested machismo that still in America seems to define masculinity. Robert Bly in his poetry may exhort men to tears, but in those forest camps he led them to tribal chest-thumping, breast-beating exercises in caveman male impersonation, banging those drums in their fake-lion loincloths. The gun-obsessed militiamen have threatened the very foundation of society with that obsolete masculinity. We feminists have become so obsessed with the liberating force of our own authenticity, breaking through that obsolete feminine mystique, embracing the new possibilities of our own personhood, that we have lately regarded men mainly as they oppressed us—bosses, husbands, lovers, police—or failed to carry their share of the housework, child care, the relationship, the feelings we now demanded of them, even as we learned the professional skills and political power games and started to carry the earning responsibilities once expected only of men. Those straight-line corporate and professional careers still structured in terms of the lives of the men of the past whose wives took care of the details of life, we now know, pose real, sometimes insuperable, problems for women today. What we haven’t noticed is the crisis, the mounting desperation of the men still defined in terms of those no longer reliable, downsized, outshifted, disappearing lifetime corporate and professional careers. Because we know men have all that power (dead white men did!), we just don’t take seriously (and they don