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Brutes in Suits

Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920

John Pettegrew

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Are men truly predisposed to violence and aggression? Is it the biological fate of males to struggle for domination over women and vie against one another endlessly?

These and related queries have long vexed philosophers, social scientists, and other students of human behavior. In Brutes in Suits, historian John Pettegrew examines theoretical writings and cultural traditions in the United States to find that, Darwinian arguments to the contrary, masculine aggression can be interpreted as a modern strategy for taking power. Drawing ideas from varied and at times seemingly contradictory sources...

Are men truly predisposed to violence and aggression? Is it the biological fate of males to struggle for domination over women and vie against one another endlessly?

These and related queries have long vexed philosophers, social scientists, and other students of human behavior. In Brutes in Suits, historian John Pettegrew examines theoretical writings and cultural traditions in the United States to find that, Darwinian arguments to the contrary, masculine aggression can be interpreted as a modern strategy for taking power. Drawing ideas from varied and at times seemingly contradictory sources, Pettegrew argues that traditionally held beliefs about masculinity developed largely through language and cultural habit—and that these same tools can be employed to break through the myth that brutishness is an inherently male trait.

A major re-synthesis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century manhood, Brutes in Suits develops ambitious lines of research into the social science of sexual difference and professional history’s celebration of rugged individualism; the hunting-and-killing genre of popular men’s literature; that master text of hypermasculinity: college football; military culture, war making, and finding pleasure in killing; and patriarchy, sexual jealousy, and the law. This timely assessment of the evolution of masculine culture will be welcomed and debated by social and intellectual historians for years to come.

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Reviews

Pettegrew... casts a challenge against conventionally accepted Darwinian notions of brutishness as an essential and natural male trait. He argues that male dominance and aggression are not predestined by instinct, but culturally and ideologically constructed, desired, and performed through time... This book contributes to intellectual and cultural history on gender and manhood.

Pettegrew's book remains rigorous and passionate in its narration of the historic appeal as well as the immediate dangers of de-evolutionary masculinity.

Ambitious study... valuable in exploring the vast cultural production of masculine instinct as a fact of life.

To Pettegrew's great credit, his study looks both forward and back: at the way masculinity was naturalized as aggressive in turn-of-the-century society; and, perhaps more importantly, at the extent to which modern-day historians, scientists, and ordinary citizens deploy discourses of evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and psychology in a misplaced effort to read gender as the offspring of biology and society.

Will be of interest to scholars of cultures of violence and middle-American masculinity. He offers a solid history of the naturalizing revelry of men in the violence they do.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x
9.25
Pages
424
ISBN
9781421407647
Illustration Description
24 halftones
Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: The De-Evolutionary Turn in U.S. Masculinity
Darwin and Evolutionary Psychology, Then and Now
John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, and Masculinity as a Habit of Mind
"The Caveman within Us"

Preface
Introduction: The De-Evolutionary Turn in U.S. Masculinity
Darwin and Evolutionary Psychology, Then and Now
John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, and Masculinity as a Habit of Mind
"The Caveman within Us" and the Masculinist Culture of Mimicry
1. Rugged Individualism
Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis: Origins, Composition, and Meanings
Turner's Influence on the Social Psychology of the City
Radical Individualism: Masculinist Art, Angst, and Alienation in the City
Dudism, Cowgirl Feminism, and the Search for Authenticity in the "Old West"
2. Brute Fictions
The American Literary Genre of Hunting and Killing
Reading for Plot: Call of the Wild, The Virginian, and the New Male Readership
Irony, Atavism, and Other Variations on the De-Evolutionary Theme
3. College Football
Thorstein Veblen and the Rise of "Exotic Ferocity" in American College Football
Victor Turner, Stanford Football, and Hypermasculine Liminal Subjects
Clifford Geertz at the Big Game: "Thick Description" of Football as the Cultural Equivalent of War
4. War in the Head
Civil War Memory, Blood Sacrifice, and Modern American Fighting Spirit
Of Rough Riders, Blood Brothers, and Roosevelt the Berserker
War as Sport for Doughboys, Golden Boys, and Slackers
Postscript: Marine Corps Spirit and the U.S. Warrior Class, 1941–2003
5. Laws of Sexual Selection
Race, Lynch Law, and the Manly Provocation
Marriage, Cultural Defense in The People v. Chen, and the Heat-of-Passion Defense in Texas
Compulsory Heterosexuality, the Charles Atlas Muscle-Beach Fable, and Sexual Dimorphism Unbound
Epilogue: Irony, Instinct, and War
Irony, Sam Fussell's Muscle, and Masculinity as a "Parodic Tableau Vivant"
Instinct, Deep Masculinity, and the Decline of Males
The Iraq War, Hypermasculinity, and the Metaphor of Disease
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

John Pettegrew

John Pettegrew is an associate professor of history and director of the American Studies Program at Lehigh University and coeditor of the three-volume Public Women, Public Words: A Documentary History of American Feminism.