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Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others. By Kim Townsend. (New York: Norton, 1996. 318 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-393-03939-0.) Two types of "men's history" are being written these days. One builds on twenty years of women's history scholarship, analyzing masculinity as part of larger gender and cultural processes. The other, motivated by contemporary efforts to redefine masculinity, looks to the past to see how men in earlier generations understood (and misunderstood) themselves as men. Books of the second type mostly ignore women's historians' findings and methodology. Although Kim Townsend's Manhood at Harvard is one of the best of the latter type of "men's history," weaknesses in this book suggest some problems with that approach.
After the Civil War, Townsend suggests, American men felt pressured to be masculine in a new, narrower way....