The Intersection Of Femininity And Masculinity Symbolically Materialized By Team Games For Boys In Historic Playgrounds

Summary

Early-twentieth-century American reformers aimed to teach boys a feminized form of masculinity that was symbolized and materialized in supervised team games on playground ballfield landscapes. Organized play expressed new conceptions of childhood in a sequence of stages. Reformers organized team games to modify capitalist masculinity with what were considered feminine moral values of cooperation, fairness, and individual self-sacrifice for the greater good. Women became identified with these and other Christian values as men were drawn away from churches by the conflicting, self-centered, competitive values of capitalism, which promoted the Biblical sins of usury, price gouging, and exploitation of labor. Women upheld the republican values and virtues considered fundamental for male citizenship in a democracy that counterbalanced capitalism. The historical development over 200 years of the dominant belief in women’s higher morality, followed by the intersection of this form of femininity with capitalist masculinity, contributes historical insights enhancing masculinity theory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Masculine Materiality and Intersectionality   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2016

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 577