Browse Exhibits (1 total)

The strongly patriarchal nature of British society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created a system where men, particularly wealthy men, had far more social power than other Britons. Whether they were titled nobility or simply well-off, many wealthy men therefore conformed with the ideals of this system. They went to White’s in the eighteenth century to gamble with their fortunes, risking all they had to prove their bravery and wealth, and in the nineteenth century they went there to relax in a fraternal atmosphere which valued luxury and the absence of women. They supported British imperialism, whether by gawking at Tipu’s Tiger in the British East India Company’s Indian Museum or by actually joining the military themselves. In the nineteenth century, men chose clothing which proclaimed allegiance to a new vision of masculinity as plain, dignified, virtuously unadorned. They acted as fatherly patriarchs in the home, loving or stern as their personalities dictated, and if they could afford it they went to Eton as boys to be molded into fitting a narrow definition of masculinity. Misogyny pervaded their everyday lives, including the design of the cards they played with.

In each of the six items in my exhibit, one can see the ways British men were supposed to conform with popular—and sometimes contradictory—ideals of masculinity. But by looking more closely at Charles Dickens’s preferred clothing, Francis Laurence Lawton’s abandonment of Ellen Lewis, and the anti-sports editorial in the Eton College Chronicle, one can also see ways in which men resisted those cherished ideals of modesty, domesticity, and athleticism. Resistance may have been as minor as a brightly-colored waistcoat or as major as leaving the pregnant mother of one’s child, but men did not always comply which what their society expected of them. The rigidity of social norms was painful even for many of those who ostensibly benefitted most from them.