Don't know much about history

[mme_hardy]

From an article in The Atlantic:

It wasn’t always thus. According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.

(Note: this is not the main thrust of the article, which I'm enjoying.)

Comments

[thatyourefuse]

... I mean, I know a grand total of heck-all about the Boy Scouts of America specifically and I've used up my free Atlantic articles for the month so can't check the context, but as someone who's read a bit about Baden-Powell and the Scouting movement in the context of early Edwardian empire panic, [citation needed]?

[mme_hardy]

The Wikipedia article leaves me with the impression that the BSA was founded to give men larger opportunities for squabbling.

And this "the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. " is bullshit on either side of the Atlantic.

[howlgirl]

Baden-Powell started scouting in a effort to ensure that future enlisted boys had a basic set of outdoors skills he found lacking during the Boer War. Previous wars had recruited from farms, the Boer War recruited from city slums, and vital skills necessary for survival during war were lacking.

(For the record I'm an Assistant Scout Master, and I think the org does good things, but I'm not blind to it's military origins)

[legionseagle]

Also, the Boer War recruitment showed for the first time just how seriously unfit the vast majority of the working class were, causing national panic about "degeneracy".

[mme_hardy]

As far as I can figure, something like three different Scouting organizations formed in the US on the basis that "That thing Baden-Powell came up with is good but needs an AMERICAN version!" One of the changes the eventual winner, the BSA, came up with was mandatory religion.

[howlgirl]

Because dirt = moral impurity!

[legionseagle]

It's also straight out of Engels The Condition of the Working Classes in England, which I suspect its author might be surprised about.

[mme_hardy]

(dies)

Re: That is a big ole pile

[mme_hardy]

For a long time they were a feeder organization into the Mormons, who split off, presumably for good, a couple of years back over accepting Teh Gays.

Re: That is a big ole pile

[mme_hardy]

Do you think that the reporter or the psychologist made the fatal error of confusing "the 1800s" with "the 18th century"? Because if you shove it back to the 1700s, it's still bullshit, but at least it's pre-industrial bullshit.

Re: That is a big ole pile

[oursin]

I was wondering whether I was bringing a UK-ocentric view of 'huh, that is like over 100 years after the Industrial Revolution', but was pretty sure it had also happened in the US.

[thatyourefuse]

Baden-Powell was pretty much a straight-up empire-builder, an awful human being, and not even particularly competent by the standards of the Boer War-era English officer caste (except when it came to self-publicizing), so there's that. (A lot of the youth organizations subsumed by the early Scouts, while screamingly problematic in THEIR own special individual ways, did have some kind of pacifist bent, but I still wouldn't bet large amounts of money on their congruence with progressive C21 concepts of healthy masculinity.)

I mean, what modern institution ISN'T rooted in godawful imperialist mindsets, one takes things on their current merits, but if you're going to refer back to the original... seriously, my dude?

[oursin]

wouldn't bet large amounts of money on their congruence with progressive C21 concepts of healthy masculinity.)

Not with the whole being entirely in-line with the current Anti-Fap movement anti-wanking ideology...

However, the Woodcraft Folk, still in existence, were a genuinely pacifist, co-ed, cooperative, internationalist etc, response to Scouting

[recessional]

Yeah I wanted a huge fucking citation on THAT one, given that that period was LITERALLY THE ERA OF MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY ETC.

[sovay]

And this "the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. " is bullshit on either side of the Atlantic.

I am sympathetic to arguments that compassion used to be a more widely accepted masculine virtue: it hit me when I realized that pre-Code movies did not just offer their female characters greater sexual agency, but their male characters greater emotional range, and then I got very angry about it. But I agree with everyone else in these comments that casting industrialization as the villain is nope.

[oursin]

That is some weird chronology.
Why, I wonder, do I tend to have blud thikkt with cold when I read '[person in discipline which is not history] who has studied history of [just about anything] [pontificates on Thing]? I can't imagine, can you?

[mme_hardy]

But he has a degree ... in Science!

[oursin]

SCIENCE has form for doing this with history, grumps a historian.

[mme_hardy]

Yeah, IIRC there was another horrid messup last week, wasn't there? A scientist doing history of science without (of course) consulting any actual historians. Details hazy, ask again later.

[mme_hardy]

It seems to me likely that by (throws a D20) 1890 most of men working at home in the US would have been either farmers or sweated labor.

[mme_hardy]

I've seen pictures of entire families sitting around tables making artificial flowers or whatever, but I sure couldn't source them as to date or location.

[oursin]

Yes, home/out-working was women and children in the slums - Booth's Survey of Life and Labour in Londonwould have details. Men, however, might be chasing the kind of work that was handed out by the day, e.g. on the docks.

[kore]

Didn't mill/weaver families all work at home at times? (remember this from reading biographies of the Brontes)