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

[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.