Michael S. Kimmel and Thomas E. Mosmiller's Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States 1776-1990
Rosen, Ruth
AGAINST THE TIDE: PRO-FEMINIST MEN IN THE UNITED STATES 1776-1990: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY, edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Thomas E. Mosmiller. Beacon, 1992. 552 pp. $40. After Frederick Douglass...
...Nor does it provide men with a weekend away from women...
...Heirs to the Enlightenment, they argued that women were born with inalienable rights that could not be violated...
...By the end of the nineteenth century, profeminist men appropriated the language of female reformers and insisted that women's superior morality required their presence in public life...
...history, one sarcastically said, "That will surely be the shortest book in history...
...If only women could vote, these men argued, women would control men's vices, end war, and put a stop to political corruption...
...This sexual stereotyping," he observes, "has created a subtextual rhetoric that has proved remarkably persuasive with one group in particular: white men, especially white Protestant southern and western men...
...In the New York Times Book Review, Jill Johnston goes one step further and FALL • 1992 • 539 insists that Bly's initiation rites "tell us something about the difficulty many men have in establishing themselves as sons of their fathers—that is, as heirs to the patriarchy...
...Such are the limits of identity politics...
...These men did not need to go to the woods to recover their manhood...
...After Frederick Douglass gave a rousing speech at the First Woman's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, the press pilloried him as an "Aunt Nancy Man," the nineteenth-century version of a "Mama's boy...
...An excellent introduction provides a history of men's changing arguments for women's equality...
...To comply with feminists' demands, men had to move over, make room, change habits of a lifetime...
...Ever since the first years of the industrial revolution, generations of social critics have worried about a "crisis in masculinity...
...In 1982, a widely reprinted interview with Keith Thompson, "What Men Really Want," set the stage for resurrecting a warrior sensibility...
...The belief in a golden age can be incredibly comforting...
...Enter Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 17761990, a documentary history edited by Michael S. Kimmel and Thomas E. Mosmiller, both longtime activists in the antisexist wing of the men's movement...
...Men associated with the "masculinist" wing of the men's movement seek their manhood in a mythopoetic past...
...Both presume that women cannot heal men and men cannot heal women...
...But it does offer men a glimpse of men who braved ridicule to promote equality for women...
...In fact, their search led to over one thousand documents—letters, sermons, speeches, and tracts...
...That program, in the words of one admirer, became the "Magna Carta" of the men's spirituality movement...
...These are times that try women's souls...
...Against the Tide is an inspiring, pathbreaking collection of remarkable documents—a realistic alternative to Bly's mythopoetic fantasies...
...In the 1980s I grew increasingly suspicious, when, under Robert Bly's encouragement, disgruntled middle-class men took off to the woods to drum, sniff each other's armpits, and rediscover the hirsute self within...
...The search for a usable past is nothing new...
...The New Right's efforts to roll back the sixties, counter the "Vietnam Syndrome," and discredit feminism were partly successful...
...The men's movement, insists Bly, is not a backlash against the women's movement, but rather a male search for initiation into manhood...
...women to their covens...
...it meant supporting women's efforts to emancipate themselves as individuals...
...Against The Tide, a superbly edited history, reminds us that there exists a long and honorable tradition in which men actively championed women's causes—not as feel-good warriors but out of conviction...
...Indeed...
...This position required that men do more than support women's formal rights...
...The expulsion from Eden, after all, is one of Western culture's central narratives...
...Cultural feminism and black nationalism share this parochial vision...
...The women's movement did ask men to give up real power—at home and at the workplace...
...In the 1970s my distrust deepened when male friends confided that their men's groups ignored the subject of women's subordination...
...The immense popularity of Robert Bly's Iron John testifies to the hunger white, middle-class men feel to join the victim culture and enjoy what writer David Morse calls "a psychic bailout" from political responsibilities...
...I first became skeptical about men's comprehension of gender equality when a young man told me, in 1968, that "women's liberation is great because women will want more sex and make fewer demands on men...
...Anxiety over masculinity affects all aspects of our political culture today...
...It justifies one's sense of loss, vindicates one's victimhood...
...There is an eerie commonality between cultural feminism and Bly's mythopoetic masculinity...
...And now, white, middle class men, not to be outdone by those who have blamed them for the destruction of civilization, have invented their own mythic past, a warrior tradition demolished by too much mothering and too little fathering...
...Some are well-known and predictable names— Frederick Douglass, Theodore Weld, Alan Alda — while others, such as Woody Guthrie and Howard 540 • DISSENT Cosell, are surprises...
...One doesn't have to invent an Afrocentric past to acquire racial pride...
...Ridiculed by the press as men who "ought to wear petticoats," they understood, as Todd Gitlin has noted, "that it is manly to stand up for someone else's rights...
...beneath that lies the implicit promise to exalt the Wild Man within...
...These men demonstrated the kind of bravery for which no medals are given...
...But what should white men read...
...Both assume that a loss has occurred and that only same-sex communion can heal the wound...
...In the age of identity politics, every victimized group seems to require a golden age that was destroyed by—take your pick—hordes of male barbarians or Eurocentric plunderers...
...When men joined women in suffrage parades, hostile crowds jeered and called them "henpecked" husbands...
...In 1990, Bly became a media celebrity when PBS broadcast his interview with Bill Moyers, A Gathering of Men...
...The problem with mythic pasts, however, is that they feed self-righteousness with historical half-truths or, even worse, lies...
...Still more shelves groan under the weight of Afrocentric fantasies that "document" the glories of Egypt and idealize Africa as the cradle of all that was great and good—before, that is, white European men destroyed the truly founding fathers...
...During and after the American Revolution, for example, men used the logic of justice and fairness to justify women's rights...
...Many feminists disagree...
...Let's not kid ourselves...
...As increasing numbers of men entered white-collar work, they left behind lower-class men—poorly paid, doing the dirty work, but with their masculinity intact...
...the most popular wing of the men's movement encourages men to howl in the woods...
...I confess to a certain wariness toward the men's movement ever since it emerged in the late 1960s...
...Sidney Blumenthal has recently argued that the lack of a strong masculine figure has kept the "Democrats wandering in search of an elixir that would transport them out of the desert and into the White House...
...Many of these men would have understood the words of a contemporary feminist bumper sticker: "A Man of Quality Is Not Threatened by Women's Equality...
...In the absence of fathers, such "soft males" lost their self-esteem (the worst thing any American can lose these days) and need to reclaim a positive masculinity...
...The search for an invented tradition, moreover, leads to more, not less, self-absorption and cultural and political separatism...
...True, it doesn't offer ritual...
...In the age of Rambo, concerns for the poor, children, the elderly, or the planet were discredited as "soft" issues...
...One doesn't need to invent a matriarchy to learn about women's power...
...Separatism is all...
...In search of consolation, self-proclaimed victims mourn the loss of a past that never existed in the hope that they can reinvent it as a future—always a doomed proposition...
...If Blumenthal is right, then Americans are in need of an alternative to Bly's soft-focus mythopoetic past—a manly tradition rooted in the nation's political culture...
...Reading Elizabeth Cady Stanton will teach women more than resurrecting the Great Goddess...
...The new masculinists instead retreated into cultural politics...
...Between 1910 and 1930, a third wave of male supporters—anarchists, socialists, and Greenwich Village Bohemian cultural radicals—embraced feminism because in the critique of masculinity and inequality they saw the blueprint for a new society...
...When Kimmel and Mosmiller first told women friends that they intended to compile a documentary history of men who had supported women's struggles in U.S...
...But not so their contemporary counterparts...
...It's no coincidence, I think, that Bly's promotion of the Wild Man accompanied the rise of the New Right...
...Shelves of books on mythical matriarchies "prove" the existence of femaledominated societies whose peaceful, nurturing, egalitarian cultures were overrun by the shock troops of patriarchy...
...Male politicians allowed Clarence Thomas to ascend to the Supreme Court...
...In the words of the Greenwich Village writer Floyd Dell, feminism would make it "possible for the first time for men to be free...
...The sociologist Robert Blauner has written that the antisexist men's movement often made men feel guilty for being men...
...The Republican position on the issues is at the superficial level of its appeal...
...Robert Bly is hardly the first to trumpet a warning about the loss of middle-class men's masculinity...
...The women's movement, Bly argues, made many men feel guilty about their manhood...
...Both the Great Mother and the Wild Man reinforce timehonored gender archetypes of men and women...
...Susan Faludi, the author of the best-seller Backlash, sees Bly's meteoric ascent to guru status as part of the recoil against the women's movement...
...By finding the Wild Man within themselves, men can ostensibly heal each other and reclaim the masculinity they have lost...
...American history, as it happens, is rich with real—as opposed to mythic—political traditions...
...The New York Times recently quoted a male batterer who asked, "Why should men want to change when we got it all already...
...the other operates out of the executive branch of the federal government...
...Still others quietly worked for equality for women and never achieved recognition for their work...
...Bly began leading men's conferences in 1981...
...they braved the treacherous arena of American politics...
...But the sensitive new male, heralded during the 1970s, became an object of ridicule during the 1980s...
...Ida B. Wells, the indefatigable anti-lynching crusader of the early twentieth century, is a more valuable guide to the strengths of the African-American experience than is the study of African queens...
...Suzanne Gordon, author of Prisoners of Men's Dreams, argues that "if men really want to construct a positive new vision of masculinity, they will have to move beyond hugs, tears and self-revelation...
...Traditional masculinity was rooted in physical labor...
...What Susan Jeffords calls "the remasculinization of America" started even before Ronald Reagan galloped into the White House to fight the Evil Empire...
...Here is the antidote to that guilt...
...Repeated efforts to redefine masculinity—in the guise of the tough corporate magnate or the expert technocrat—never took hold in the American popular imagination...
...The antisexist wing of the men's movement understood that men must fight established power to ensure gender equality...
...American popular culture took a sharp turn to the right, tore down Alan Alda's pedestal, and built a new one for Sylvester Stallone...
...The yearning for Cuomo, "or another natural force of aggression, is a desperate bid by Democrats for the recovery of their manly self-respect...
...Blumenthal is on to something...
...Men must go to the woods...
...As a result, "one wing of the men's movement chats with Bill Moyers...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
