The company he keeps: White college fraternities, masculinity, and power, 1825--1975.

Abstract

This dissertation explores the construction of masculinity through a social history of predominantly white college fraternities in the United States. Beginning with fraternities' founding in 1825, I argue that ideals of fraternal manliness in the nineteenth century were based primarily upon class status, had begun to encompass whiteness and Protestantism by the turn of the century, and by the post-World War II period were anchored in the performance of an aggressive heterosexuality. This masculinity was affected by social changes that took place outside of college campuses such as industrialization, war, the rise of the middle class, and changes in women's roles. The fraternity is also a unique case, however, because of its place on the college campus; for this reason I pay special attention to the changing purposes of education and changing college populations. Utilizing college administrative records, fraternity correspondence, diaries, fiction, and many other published and unpublished sources, I explore the function of academics, athletics, alcohol, hazing, and extracurricular activities in fraternity men's conceptions of masculinity. In contrast to much of the recent social and cultural history of masculinity, I am less interested in how men in fraternities experienced their own masculinity and more so with how that masculinity affected others. As selective groups, fraternities have always gained power through exclusion, an exclusion that has shaped the experiences of countless college students. In their earliest years, they excluded their more pious peers, later their poorer classmates, and more recently their non-white and non-Protestant fellow students. Most importantly, fraternal masculinity in the twentieth century, especially---in response to the visibility of a homosexual minority, a rise in coeducation, and to women's increased autonomy---has been bound up in the performance of an aggressive heterosexuality that has far too often led to rape and assault. Through examining the development of one very organized group of influential, white men, my dissertation reveals the construction of masculinity more broadly. It is the story of the evolution of a particularly harmful strain of virile masculinity that has had effects for men and women well beyond college campuses.