I have no genius for marriage: Bachelorhood in urban America, 1870--1930.

Abstract

The cultural history of bachelorhood in the late 19<super> th</super> and early 20<super>th</super> centuries reveals dramatic changes in both the social fabric of middle-class, single male life and the ways that bachelor status was understood, legitimated, and criticized. Three main forces shaped these changes: the availability and consumption of urban pleasures; the emergence of new gender roles inspired by heterosocial institutions of work and leisure; and the labeling and regulation of deviant identity and behavior. The period between 1870 and 1900 was by some standards a golden age of bachelorhood. Social critics generally exonerated bachelors of blame for their single status after 1870, alleging that the cost of bourgeois respectability was so high that few middle-class men could marry. At the same time, the availability of urban amenities encouraged unwed men to forge a new bachelor identity that allowed them to enjoy a spectrum of pleasures without compromising either their independent status or their masculinity. One notable feature of this identity was a domestic ideology that gratified men's desire for a comfortable home life but included the semi-public as well as the private sphere and stressed aesthetic rather than moral cultivation. Another was bachelors' strategic participation in the world of 'rough' leisure, activities that permitted middle-class men to declare their independence from the feminized world in which they had been raised while maintaining a 'respectable' moral trajectory. Contested even during the late nineteenth century, the valence of bachelorhood became increasingly negative after 1900. The emergence of heterosocial leisure marked the decline of many sites that had sustained the middle-class bachelor world while widespread fears of social disorder prompted the regulation of those that remained. In addition, new theories about the psychology of the self and sexuality explained bachelorhood as either the dangerous repression of a man's 'normal' social and sexual inclinations or the unconscious expression of some essential psychological dysfunction. By 1930, bachelorhood had become a suspect category and the bachelor a stigmatized figure.