| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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By the eighteenth century in England and the rest of Europe, a powerful and prominent middle class arose that prized and pursued money and social status. In this milieu evolved the bourgeois male ideal of manhood (Doyle). With money and prestige as the symbols of power, the ideal of the middle class man was the successful businessman and entrepreneur who dared to undertake adventurous and risky business enterprises in order to succeed in order to validate his sense of manhood. Mosse (1996) documents a resurgence in the Greek ideal of the masculine body as a symbol of manliness. The classical emphasis on outward harmony, control, and proportion was mirrored inwardly as indicative of manly will power and moral courage.
The sixteenth century enclosure movement contributed to the rise of the industrial age and significantly influenced the future development of masculine identity. The enclosure movement was the large-scale walling off of public lands by large landholders in order to preserve farming and animal management, but it effectively removed the land that the peasantry had traditionally been permitted to use for personal subsistence. The enclosure movement forced men and their families to migrate to the cities and to sell their labor to the mills and factories of the Industrial Revolution. Kimbrell (1995) called the enclosure of men a metaphor that explains the current masculine identity crisis. It began the economic process that ultimately removed men from a close connection with their families and finally with themselves. The result was that men were the victims of two enclosures: