"Let us live for those who love us": faith, family, and the contours of manhood among the knights of Columbus in late nineteenth-century Connecticut

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2004 by Amy Koehlinger

The inclusion of the Knights of Columbus complicates Carnes' picture, for within this same context of Victorian gender norms the Knights consistently praised an ideal of manhood (7) that was predicated upon deep attachments to religious faith and that valorized men's integration into their families. In the revised introduction to his authoritative history, Faith and Fraternalism: the History of the Knights of Columbus, Christopher Kauffman observes that while the Knights appropriated fraternal forms and structures from Victorian culture, the messages conveyed by their ceremonials "were based upon Columbian moral and religious themes that fostered deep attachment to their Catholic faith." (8) Columbian manhood located men primarily within their families and within their parishes, in striking contrast to Carnes' portrait of fraternal manhood that was realized through ritualized escape from female-identified spheres of home and church. And whereas the rituals enacted by fraternal orders in Carnes' study encouraged male identification with a symbolic authoritative father--to the exclusion of connection with a mother-figure--literature produced by the Knights of Columbus valorized affectionate bonds between men and their mothers, and idealized the relationship between men and their wives and children.

The ideal of manhood that emerges from the early records and publications of the Knights is one that was relatively untroubled by anxieties that a contagious feminization might result from men's commitments to faith and family. Rather, the first generation of Knights equated American manhood directly with Catholic religious faith and, by extension, the ungrudging performance of familial obligations. Thus, Columbian manhood was, in many ways, explicitly about idealized religious attachments and "nurturing and paternal" emotions that Carnes denies to the men in fraternity in his study. Columbian manhood emphasized chivalrous character, harmonious marriage, social responsibility, and Catholic respectability. Carnes argues that Victorian men would have resisted such messages unless they were masked in secrecy and coded within fraternal rituals, yet straightforward articulations of Columbian manhood--from ritual to publications to public displays--consistently emphasized the vigorous presence of men in parishes and the tender presence of men within households, seemingly without negative consequences for the order's ability to recruit new members.

The close examination of the early records and publications of the Knights of Columbus that follows suggests that Carnes' portrait of alienated Victorian males who resisted female domestic power by creating fraternities is based upon an exaggerated model of the gendered bifurcation of public spheres from private and religious ones in Victorian society. Such rigid and abstract formulations of the influence of "separate spheres" fail to take into account how men's location within complex webs of obligation and identity mitigated extreme experiences of gendered exclusivity in their lives. For the founding generation of Knights, the commitments that followed from being immigrant Catholics muddied the supposed "separateness" of separate spheres, embedding powerful evocations of faith and family in their rituals and rhetoric. Members of the first generation of the Knights of Columbus were not just fraternal members; they were at the same time fathers, husbands, sons, parishioners, and friends. And though the early Knights identified themselves as Catholics, they also claimed identities as veterans, workers, immigrants, and citizens. Because Columbian fraternal forms addressed men primarily as members of parishes and households rather than as refugees from them, they provide a valuable window into the subtle interplay of identities and commitments that shaped the experience of men in late 19th-century fraternities. In the same vein, historical methods that similarly locate historical actors within intersections of family life and faith traditions offer important insights into the fullness and complexity of the lives lived in the past.