Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform

Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform
ISBN-10
0231129971
ISBN-13
9780231129978
Category
History
Pages
320
Language
English
Published
2010-08-06
Publisher
Columbia University Press
Author
Kevin P. Murphy

Description

In a 1907 lecture to Harvard undergraduates, Theodore Roosevelt claimed that colleges should never "turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men," warning that "the weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community." A paradigm of ineffectuality and weakness, the mollycoddle was "all inner life," whereas his opposite, the "red blood," was a man of action. Kevin P. Murphy reveals how the popular ideals of American masculinity coalesced around these two distinct categories. Because of its similarity to the emergent "homosexual" type, the mollycoddle became a powerful rhetorical figure, often used to marginalize and stigmatize certain political actors. Murphy's history follows the redefinition of manhood across a variety of classes, especially in the work of late nineteenth-century reformers who trumpeted the virility of the laboring classes. Challenging the characterization of the relationship between political "machines" and social and municipal reformers at the turn of the twentieth century, he revolutionizes our understanding of the gendered and sexual meanings attached to political and ideological positions of the Progressive Era.

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