In 1755 Benjamin Franklin observed "a man without a wife is but
half a man" and since then historians have taken Franklin at his
word. In Citizen Bachelors, John Gilbert McCurdy demonstrates that
Franklin's comment was only one side of a much larger conversation.
Early Americans vigorously debated the status of unmarried men and
this debate was instrumental in the creation of American
citizenship.
In a sweeping examination of the bachelor in early America,
McCurdy fleshes out a largely unexamined aspect of the history of
gender. Single men were instrumental to the settlement of the
United States and for most of the seventeenth century their
presence was not particularly problematic. However, as the colonies
matured, Americans began to worry about those who stood outside the
family. Lawmakers began to limit the freedoms of single men with
laws requiring bachelors to pay higher taxes and face harsher
penalties for crimes than married men, while moralists began to
decry the sexual immorality of unmarried men. But many resisted
these new tactics, including single men who reveled in their
hedonistic reputations by delighting in sexual horseplay without
marital consequences.
At the time of the Revolution, these conflicting views were
confronted head-on. As the incipient American state needed men to
stand at the forefront of the fight for independence, the bachelor
came to be seen as possessing just the sort of political, social,
and economic agency associated with citizenship in a democratic
society. When the war was won, these men demanded an end to their
unequal treatment, sometimes grudgingly, and the citizen bachelor
was welcomed into American society.
Drawing on sources as varied as laws, diaries, political
manifestos, and newspapers, McCurdy shows that in the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the bachelor was a
simultaneously suspicious and desirable figure: suspicious because
he was not tethered to family and household obligations yet
desirable because he was free to study, devote himself to political
office, and fight and die in battle. He suggests that this
dichotomy remains with us to this day and thus it is in early
America that we find the origins of the modern-day identity of the
bachelor as a symbol of masculine independence. McCurdy also
observes that by extending citizenship to bachelors, the founders
affirmed their commitment to individual freedom, a commitment that
has subsequently come to define the very essence of American
citizenship.
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