Mensa's World Gathering 2021

Sessions Speakers Floor Plan Buzz

‘It Must Be Right Hearty Manhood To Go to America’: A Century of Ideas of Honor and Masculinity in the American South (1850s-1950s) (Room Lanier Grand Ballroom L)

In the cultural and societal context of the American Old South, honor and masculinity were joined in a relationship of mutual dependence: One deserved honor because of manliness and was considered a man for deserving honor. Manliness was not an innate quality but an achievement in need of validation external to the self. The context and manners in which masculinity was displayed — and the definition of who deserved to be considered a man — are pivotal for understanding gender, racial, and ethnic relations in the American South. Historians have often regarded ideas of Southern manhood as evidence of Southerners’ exceptionalism, thus contributing to the creation of a mythology of the South. Nevertheless, using manhood and honor as an analytical category reveals how American sectionalism was never neatly defined. Moreover, Southerners’ conceptualization of manhood did not efface in the tale of conquered reunification that followed the Civil War. Instead, its fundamental traits persisted and expanded, defining the U.S. relationship with the “others” on its land and those who inhabited the informal American empire.