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and infertility treatment. Men can now separate reproduction from heterosexual activity, genetically reproducing through sperm donation without any contact with a partner. At the same time, popular and medical attention has increasingly been focused on male-related infertility, which is believed to account for more than half of all cases of couple infertility. The traditional association of fulfilled manhood with reproduc tion has generated an emotional burden for infertile men, many of whom have turned to in vitro fertilization to bolster their sense of masculine identity.

Continuing Shifts in the Role of Men in the American Family

Americans in early-twenty-first-century, postindustrial society have witnessed the escalating instability of the traditional nuclear family. Men are more likely to cohabit, less likely to marry or remarry, and more likely to divorce than their fathers and grandfathers. Men's declining commitment to the nuclear family has both been a factor in and a result of women's increased participation in labor and economic independence. Increasingly, more children in the United States are born out side of marriage, and men's level of social and economic sup port of their offspring has declined. Men are also more likely to have biological children with whom they do not live, and to live with children not biologically theirs. These new roles for men in the family have led some conservatives to push for a return to traditional "family values" and more strongly gen dered household roles, while some liberal feminists have pushed for increased female autonomy and lessened male involvement in reproductive decision making. These positions point to tension between traditional structures of male authority in the household and shifting rationales for male involvement in reproduction for both men and women. B IBLIOGRAPHY

D'Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1 978.

Goldscheider, Frances K., and Gayle Kaufman. "Fertility and Commitment: Bringing Men Back In:' Population and Development Review 22S ( 1 996): 87-99.

Hawkins, Mike. Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860-1945: Nature as Model and Nature as Threat. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1 997.

Kimmel, Michael The Gendered Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Martin, Emily. The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 .

Shorter, Edward. Th e Making of the Modern Family. New York: Basic Books, 1975.

Tone, Andrea. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 200 1.

REPUBLICANISM

The term republicanism refers to an ideology that outlined principles of social and political order and the privileges and obligations of citizenship in the Anglo-American world from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth cen tury. Because it developed in a setting in which masculinity was a prerequisite of citizenship, republicanism necessarily constituted a prescription for ideal manhood as well. Frequently ambivalent and contradictory, republicanism embraced a range of ideas about political society, including notions of hierarchical and organic social order that empha sized mutual obligation over the pursuit of self-interest; a liberal, possessive individualism that stressed the individual's right to seek, accumulate, and dispose of property; and a civic humanism that called for devotion to the public good as the primary responsibility of citizenship. It also required both resistance to tyranny and subordination to legitimate rule and authority.

As a prescriptive code of manliness, republicanism aimed to inspire men to exercise their rights and obligations as citizens in an orderly society. Its critical task was to con strain self-interest and redirect it into socially and politically desirable channels. The central quality of ideal citizenship and ideal republican manhood was virtue, defined as the capacity to control, and sometimes sacrifice, one's selfish

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interests for the common good. Only in the 1 820s did states begin to introduce universal adult white-male suffrage, so, prior to this, the full privileges of republican citizenship and the status of republican manhood were confined to a white, propertied, patriarchal elite.

In republican ideology, the duties and privileges of citi zenship and the foundations of male identity lay in a man's status as an owner of land and the head of a household, both of which integrated him into the bonds of political society. The true republican man was a patriarch who governed his household like a well-ordered commonwealth in harmony with the mandates of public order. He was also married, since marriage would provide the basis for his establishment of a household, and he would sublimate his passions in work to support that household, channel his sexuality into the produc tion of offspring, and provide a framework for raising his off spring according to the political dictates of republican society. By siring offspring who would inherit his land holdings, a republican man demonstrated that he respected his birthright and the privileges of citizenship it conferred upon him. His

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doing so also ensured the perpetuation of the economic and political independence necessary to republican order.

If republican ideology understood the married household head as the ideal man, and as the basis of society, it portrayed single men as a grave danger to republican order. The bache lor, free to express his sexuality and passions outside the bonds of household, marriage, and civic fraternal society, was per ceived as a source of moral licentiousness and democratic excess. During this period, male-male sexual relations were redefined from a mortal sin to a crime against republican political order. Single men were expected to give up the free dom of bachelorhood for the social contract implied in the responsibilities of marriage and household.

The property interests of the republican man, who was bound to rule over, protect, and provide for others, would encourage him and his sons to support political stability and the rule of law. A republican man's devotion to political stabil ity allowed him to enter fraternal society and caused him to accept the leadership and protection of the government. Men of exceptional worth, meanwhile, who through self-restraint

This painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1 776 conveys the grounding of early American republican manhood in ideals of disinterested civic devotion and white patriarchy, and suggests George Washington's stature as a model of heroic republican manliness. (From the collections of the Library of Congress)

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and virtue were able to exercise power without corruption or aristocratic ambition, constituted a propertied patriarchal male elite that contributed to social order and the longevity of the republic by providing leadership and guidance.

By associating liberty and citizenship with masculinity, republicanism, by definition, excluded all women from such privileges, except when mediated through fathers or husbands. Yet republican theory accorded women functions crucial to the formation and maintenance of republican manhood. Isolated from public politics and denied the right to vote, women remained confined to the household and economically dependant on fathers and husbands-thus highlighting men's patriarchal status. Yet republicanism also understood mothers as critical to the reproduction of republican society, not only sexually, but also socially, since it defined women as exemplars of moral virtue who would raise their sons to become respon sible republican citizens. Furthermore, because wives tied their husbands to their households and counteracted the corrupting effects of political power, women were deemed essential to grounding men in republican civil society.

During the early nineteenth century the concept of republi can manhood became increasingly problematic and contested as the new nation was transformed by industrialization, urbaniza tion, the market revolution, political democratization, and west ern expansion. These developments stimulated the development of newer concepts of manhood-such as the Yankee entrepre neur, the "self-made man;' and an egalitarian ideal of democratic manhood-that undermined the notions of hierarchy and organic social order that had previously framed republican manhood. These trends presented a challenge to the traditional monopolization of political power by propertied male elites. Furthermore, while republicanism was intended by men to rele gate women to subordinate social and political roles, it also opened the way to women's empowerment by stimulating a women's rights movement that resisted the male monopoly on political power, while the ideal of republican motherhood also encouraged the education of women. Similarly, African American abolitionists interpreted republican manhood in ways that challenged its traditional association with whiteness.

Slavery and antebellum sectional conflict raised other issues that complicated notions of republican manhood. Diverging northern and southern versions of republican man hood developed in the 1 840s and 1850s. The northern version, articulated in the ideologies of the Free-Soil and Republican parties, emphasized ideas of political and economic independ ence grounded in Jeffersonian agrarianism, Jacksonian democ racy, and an emerging capitalist market. The southern version, meanwhile, prioritized notions of patriarchy, hierarchy, and an

organic social order, casting southern men as patriarchal rulers over extended households and as landowners who provided for their families (including slaves). Southerners portrayed the northern free-labor system as antithetical to paternal benevo lence and social harmony; northerners viewed southern slave holders as an aristocratic element detrimental to republican notions of manly liberty; and abolitionists charged that slave holders, through their sexual access to female slaves, separated sexual desire from marital obligation and practiced the sins associated with disorderly bachelors. These diverging interpre tations of republican theory and republican manhood made reconciliation difficult and helped to exacerbate the sectional divisions that culminated in the Civil War.

Republicanism and republican manhood would give way to different ideals of manliness and political order over the course of the nineteenth century. However, it also created an enduring cultural legacy in U.S. culture by suggesting that: ( 1 ) manhood is not innate, but must be earned and acquired; (2) manliness requires self-discipline and a devotion to the responsibilities of citizenship; and (3) men must procreate as a rite of passage to full manliness. In their broad outlines, republican notions of responsible citizenship have endured into the twenty-first century, although they are no longer con fined to white males.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloch, Ruth H. "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1 3

( 1987): 37-58.

Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1 994.

Kann, Mark E. On The Man Question: Gender and Civic Virtue in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1 99 1 . ---. A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered

Language, and Patriarchal Politics. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996.

Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. New York: Knopf, 1 996.

Shalhope, Robert E. The Roots of Democracy: American Thought and Culture, 1 760-1800. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

REVERSE SEXISM

The concept of reverse sexism, an idea developed in the late twentieth century and most frequently articulated by men, asserts that feminism has generated discourses and practices that disadvantage men. Because these discourses and practices have been grounded in a belief that traditional notions of mas culinity are to blame for a range of legal, social, political, cul tural, and sexual inequities in the United States, public debates about reverse sexism have focused on the position of men and the meaning of manhood in American life.

In the late 1960s the advent of second-wave feminism in the United States generated an often strident critique of patri archy and the development of a strongly antipatriarchal body of theory and discourse. In its most extreme forms this dis course suggested that men were, by their very nature, aggres sive oppressors, and that ideals of masculinity were to blame

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for the oppression of women. The more moderate theories underlying reverse sexism argued that masculinity was a social and cultural construction that had been developed by men to justify their power over women, and that conventional power structures and notions of manhood should be revised in order to create a more equitable political, social, economic, and legal system in the United States.

The 1970s saw feminism-driven legal reforms involving pay levels, housework, divorce, and custody, and many men began arguing that women were actually being given unfair preference. Some of these men sought legal acknowledgement that they were discriminated against. As a variety of men's movements and organizations began publicizing the issue and seeking legal remedies during the 1 970s and 1980s, the idea of reverse sexism-like that of reverse discrimination more broadly-gained increasing currency.

Legal actions involving claims and incidents of reverse sexism increased during the late twentieth century. During the 1 990s more than two hundred men in the United States filed sexual harassment charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and 14 percent of the federal work ers in the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board reported such harassment. The legal issues associated with reverse sexism also became visible in the mass media. The film Kramer vs. Kramer ( 1 979), for example, highlighted apparent discrimina tion against men as parents, and the film Disclosure ( 1 994) demonstrated that men were subject to sexist advances in the workplace-and that they could seek legal redress.

Reverse sexist rhetoric and imagery often took the form of what its critics called "male-bashing." It defined masculinity in terms of the negative characteristics often associated with it violence, hypersexuality, excessive absorption in work, insensi tivity to women's needs, and alienation from domestic life-though its proponents differed over whether these char acteristics were the result of socialization or were inherent to maleness. In popular culture, this trend fueled reverse-sexist humor from sources ranging from Hallmark cards ("Men are scum. Excuse me. For a second there I was feeling generous:') to comedian Joan Rivers ("Want to know why women don't blink during foreplay? Not enough time."). A popular 1980s television advertisement for Folger's coffee depicted a husband unable to prepare breakfast for his wife until a package of cof fee fell out of a pantry, literally at his feet. A flyer published in

1 994 by the Women's Issues Advocate of the O ffice for Women's Issues at the University of Southern California, stat ing that "There are no good men," caused a considerable furor.

Reverse-sexist discourse took other forms as well. In some cases it advocated an overturning of traditional power