Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917

In his career as a psychologist, Granville Stanley Hall had a particular interest in developmental and educational psychology as it pertained to the possibility of positively influencing the trajectory of the lives of young men. Like many of his contemporaries, Hall believed the effects of civilization—that is, of living in a civilized society—presented demands and stressors that had the potential to take a heavy toll on the lives of men in their pursuit of occupations outside the home. Hall felt that men were becoming too comfortable and effeminate, which was propelling them toward neurasthenia and preventing them from reaching their full racial potential. Civilization, in his mind, was a threat and a detriment to healthy, virile manhood. Hall believed if boys and young men were allowed to explore and embrace their primitive and barbaric side as children, they would grow into men who could exhibit the self-control required to maintain their masculinity as adults. He encouraged teachers to allow their male students to act upon their more primitive, savage instincts and not to overburden them with the rigors of academia, lest those instincts be squashed and young men left unable to prepare themselves for adulthood.

Neurasthenia was a contemporary illness and encompassed the belief that human beings possessed a finite amount of what was called nerve force, a kind of energy supply that could be sapped to the point of becoming unable to function in society and fulfill the roles expected of them. For Hall, neurasthenia in middle class white men was the result of those demands placed upon them by civilization, which overtaxed and drained them. Adult men were supposed to behave with restraint and be capable of denying themselves gratification in service of the higher aspirations of upholding one’s values and maintaining an upstanding character. The pressures of adhering to those demands could become overwhelming and result in the manifestation of this physical illness. Women could become neurasthenics by engaging in too much intellectual activity separate from their role in the household, shifting their focus from their intended roles, and creating an inappropriate demand on their nerve force. Hall believed that neurasthenia in women could be easily prevented; women simply needed to embrace their feminine roles and eschew outside distractions. Preventing the advent of neurasthenia in men was more difficult, but hall believed that if young boys were given the opportunity to explore their primitive tendencies in childhood, they would inoculate themselves against the future risk of neurasthenia.

Hall instructed schoolteachers to limit the academic rigor to which they subjected their young male students and allow them to express the more primitive, impulsive, and rambunctious behaviors he thought were perfectly appropriate to their developmental stage. If young boys were able to express themselves in their primitive state as they evolved through the natural and necessary process of raucous physical play and even pugilism and physical conflict, Hall thought they would be the better for being allowed that experience. As they aged through their school years, the permission to explore their age appropriate stages would provide the necessary outlet that would propel them toward a safe, productive manhood as adults. Hall believed strongly in recapitulation theory—the process through which young children and adolescents were thought to relieve the collective experiences of their ancestors from the beginning of their historical lineage—which required the permission to engage in a lengthy and extended adolescence so all these experiences could be thoroughly appreciated and integrated into their personhood. Hall did not believe any of these experiences were required for young women; in their developmental processes they need only be prevented from engaging in intellectual activity of too strenuous a nature, lest they fail to develop a healthy, balanced reproductive system or worse, in his opinion, render themselves sterile through becoming overwrought with such taxing activity.

Hall maintained that young men’s adolescence was even more crucial than their boyhood and an even potentially dangerous time for young men. Their sexual awakening presented the opportunity to embrace their carnal desires through masturbation and casual sexual encounters, thereby sapping their energies and ruining their opportunities to develop into the civilized men they had the potential to be. Hall’s solution to this dilemma was to suggest that young men’s sexual energy should be deliberately channeled into their educational activities, thereby converting it for proper, constructive use. In this, Hall saw tremendous potential. This period in a young man’s life could thus be a time for optimism, for harnessing his destiny and transforming him into an exemplary man. Hall saw a young man’s sexual coming of age in a holy context; in becoming sexually mature, a young man took his place among his male peers as a contributor to his race, able to engage in healthy competition with other men and fulfill the God-given expectation that he would participate in the furtherance of evolution and the relentless quest for advancement.

After publishing his most famous and comprehensive work, Adolescence, in 1904, Hall switched his track in his efforts to focus on advocating for the rights of people of color. Though his attitude toward them was inherently racist in its condescending, paternalistic perception of their abilities, he believed that his intentions were benevolent. He termed his approach “racial pedagogy,” and it encompassed the tenet that civilized white men should be responsible for protecting the rights and interests of people of color, who, in their collisions with white people through colonial and imperialistic interactions, were in need of the guardianship that white people, as superior evolved beings, could provide. Hall believed that a primitive impulse for destruction and genocide existed instinctually in white men, and that the gentlemanly and gallant approach to people of color was to protect them from this instinctual proclivity.