Men and romantic love: pinpointing a 20th-century change

Journal of Social History, Summer, 1993 by Peter N. Stearns, Mark Knapp

Esquire magazine was established in 1933, the first durable magazine ever aimed explicitly at middle-class men as men, rather than professionals, Christians or another ancillary focus. The magazine's founder and long-time editor, Arnold Gingrich, combined the innovative and masculine claims directly, in explaining Esquire's purpose: It is our belief, in offering Esquire to the American male, that we are only getting around at last to a job that should have been done a long time ago--that of giving the masculine reader a break.

The general magazines, in the mad scramble to increase the woman readership that seems to be highly prized by national advertisers, have bent over backwards in catering to the special interests and tastes of the feminine audience.(1) Esquire's efforts to court its male audience--many of whom had previously purchased far more eclectic fare, including the Ladies's Home Journal(2)--had several facets. One key claim, articulated simultaneously with the magazine's inception, involved an effort to help men redefine 19th-century standards of romantic love. The magazine paid a great deal of attention to love motifs during its initial years of publication. Twenty-seven short stories involved love topics during 1934, for example, with such titles as "Forgive Me, Irene," "On the Rebound," "All My Love," and "Have a Rosebud." The pace slackened a bit in 1935, with 18 stories, but this rate was sustained through the remainder of the decade.(3) Intensity of interest was not, however, the main point. The revisionist tone was the striking feature. Editorial policy, attacking Victorian love standards for men, stated that "this is a man's magazine, it isn't edited for the junior miss. It isn't dedicated to the dissemination of sweetness and light." Esquire trumpeted the idea of a "New Love," explicitly different from the etherealized and spiritual ideals urged on Victorian men. In defining the New Love and emphasizing the unsuitability of love old-style, Esquire made its initial mark in suggesting the advent of new male standards.(4) This article explores the context and significance for Esquire's claim, as part of a definable shift in middle-class male culture. For the magazine was correct: it was innovating, though in an atmosphere in which for at least a decade Victorian romantic standards had been eroding. The emergence and popularity of Esquire, given its own early emphasis on the redefinition of love, open questions about the timing and causes of larger changes in men's emotional relationships with women. Recent work on 19th-century love ideals makes it clear that this aspect of emotional culture, particularly on the men's side, has greatly changed; love soars less than it once did.(5) There is, further, a larger sense that men's values shifted considerably after 1900, not only in love, but also in friendship and standards of work and leisure.(6) But the nature and timing of the shift, and the reasons for it, have not been analyzed. A study of Esquire and its context by no means provides the whole picture of the transformation in the ideals urged on men, but because its challenge to tradition was so explicit, and also directly tied to other commentary on gender relations, it provides a suggestive beginning to an unresolved conundrum in gender history. To explore the cultural shift Esquire embodied, we must begin of course by discussing Victorian standards, as they have been studied by other scholars but also as they emerge in prescriptive materials designed for the middle class--for the same social group whose later-day counterpart began to read Esquire. We can then turn to the new environment that emerged by the 1920s, elements of which are already familiar: the changes in sexual behavior and expectations among college students, for instance, which Paula Fass has traced, or the growing requirements of sexiness and allure for small-town women that the Lynds captured in their 1937 reassessment of Middletown.(7) We build, obviously, on cultural materials that supplement established scholarship, and we describe an evolution whose most recent results, in a decline of male commitment to love, have often been noted. Most available analysis of the process involved, however, focuses on women. The Lynds claimed explicitly that women were changing more than men. In a recent survey, that deals extensively with middle-class men's commitment to romantic love in the 19th century, Steven Seidman turns entirely to women and their sexuality in dress and behavior in dealing with 20th-century transitions.(8) Men become faceless backdrops. In fact, as Esquire loudly proclaimed, men changed too. Some of their shifts paralleled those of women, but others moved in more complex directions, raising new prospects for gender dispute. Men in Love Cultural approval of familial love gained ground reasonably steadily in Western civilization from the 17th century onward. The most important spur was Protestantism,(9) though Catholic doctrines became more favorable to family intimacy as well.(10) Protestant writings on the family routinely urged the importance and validity of mutual love between spouses; families were meant to instill proper love of God, but love within the family itself was quite compatible with this task. Familial love was also promoted by improved material circumstances, among property owners at least, which made the physical home a more pleasant place and a more central locale.(11) It was promoted, finally, by larger changes in the economy, particularly the growth of market relationships which augmented the competitive element among men and turned them, for emotional support, increasingly toward the hearth.(12) Evidence of growing commitment to family love not just in Victorian decades, but over a two-hundred year span, adds significance to the turn away from romance in male culture after 1920. By the 18th century, the cultural standards favorable to love were being more widely internalized, on both sides of the Atlantic. Love gained recognition as a valid element in the formation of marriages, and absence of love a compelling reason for a young person to reject a match. Absence of love might even be cited as proper cause for dissolving a marriage, in those European circles where divorce was possible.(13) The growing importance of love in courtship and in sustaining happy marriages affected women and men alike, but it may have constituted a particularly decisive shift for the males affected, in causing and symbolizing a new importance for family relationships. One study of 18th-century families in the English aristocracy particularly emphasizes male involvement in emotionally-intensive marriages, epitomized by such innovations as anxious attendance at a wife's bedside during childbirth.(14) Recent work on upper-class families in early 19th-century Virginia suggests a similar male shift, generating greater concern about women's risks in pregnancy, as new emphasis on female frailty conjoined with new husbandly affection.(15) To the extent that love or an interest in love brought men to consider their wives in a more favorable light, granting them greater importance in making the family what it ought to be as opposed to insisting on rigid familial hierarchies, the new emotional schema suggested some particularly interesting adjustments on the male side.(16) When the research on early modern family relationships began to emerge a decade ago, with its substantial implications about changing emotional standards, it was possible to imagine a 19th-century hiatus, in which the separation of work from home and the general pressures of industrialization erected new barriers to the love ideal, at least on men's part.(17) Men's historians indeed continue to stress the male absence theme throughout the mid-century decades.(18) Women's historians, for their part, have attributed much of the power of domestic ideology and even the emotional ties formed among women to the lack of corresponding male commitment.(19) The calculating Victorian husband, proud of his freedom from the emotionality that described his wife even as he relied on her for a new level of care for hearth and children, survives abundantly in the historical literature.(20) But nineteenth-century middle-class men did love, often with great intensity; they extended the previous trends in emotional culture. A major study of 19th-century courtship patterns showed how frequently young men would pour out their souls to the objects of their love, how vulnerable, indeed, they might become to the slights of love.(21) A fascinating examination of Victorian love letters presses the male dependence on the emotion even further.(22) Karen Lystra argues that love was a central preoccupation of middle-class men from the 1830s until the end of the 19th century. For seven decades, men joined women in seeking intense emotional intimacy as the basis for marriage and as a profound expression of personal need. Precisely because men had to adopt a calm and calculating demeanor in their public sphere, they sought a richly expressive private counterpart. Family constituted more than a tranquil haven; it became a site for deep passions. Men argued that it was only through love that their true selves could shine through. They accepted, even gloried in the idea that love required full emotional disclosure, agreeing with women that any holding back contradicted the basic goals of love. They accepted also the pain that love could bring, sometimes noting their jealousy when a lover showed interest in others, even more commonly citing their grief when a loved one was absent. As Nathaniel Hawthorne put it, writing to Sarah Peabody in 1840: "Where thou art not, there it is a sort of death."(23) Men could even dismiss mere romantic love as transient and superficial; true love, wrote one ardent wooer, "is to love with all one's soul what is pure, what is high, what is eternal." In love, he added, "all things blend that are high, ardent and pure," and for love "I have no word for it but worship." "Love is a cult and our love shall be our religion.... To each other we shall reveal only the divine attributes of tenderness and patience."(24) The emerging picture of love's central place in men's emotional lives during the 19th century has some lingering shadows, to be sure. Lystra notes how some men found a tension between a public posture of self-control and the unrestrained intimacy their definition of love required.(25) Other work on