“Fostering Male Virility”: A Gender History of Land-Grant Education Discourse and Practice, 1862-1895

• In Event: Gender, Achievement, and Learning

Abstract

The industrial and agricultural classes maintained an antithesis to Nineteenth Century land-grant colleges, which hinged in part on class-situated constructions of maleness. Farmers and mechanics embraced a rugged “masculinity,” and disparaged college boys as idle, effeminate, and degenerate. To expand access, land-grant college leaders had to create a new “college man” ideal, by using a hyper-masculine discourse to debunk charges they fostered male degeneracy. Gendered institutional practices followed in support of this discourse. The standardization of these practices reinforced a hegemonic truth: colleges were primarily sites of cultivating middle class manhood that systematically excluded women. It is a history that reveals how colleges in postbellum America not only served the production needs of American capitalism but furthered middle class patriarchy.

Author

• Nathan Masters Sorber, West Virginia University