#132： The History of the American Bachelor with Howard Chudacoff
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Brett McKay and Professor Howard Chudikoff discuss the culture of bachelorhood in America in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the influence that bachelorhood had on American masculinity.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so whether you
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are married with kids divorced a grandparent with grandchildren a widower or an unmarried man what
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we all have in common as men is that at one point in our lives we have all been bachelors
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that is an unmarried man it's funny we don't really refer to unmarried men as bachelors anymore
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you know we also don't talk about unmarried women as spinsters we're going to talk about why today
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well what's fascinating is that even though all men have been bachelors at one point in their life
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there isn't a lot of history or sociology written about the culture of bachelorhood that grows up
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around unmarried men because it's different from the culture of married men or grandparents or
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divorced men it's completely different i found a few books one of my favorite is by brown history
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professor howard chudikoff it's called the age of the bachelor creating an american subculture
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and in it he explores the history of bachelorhood in america starting in the colonial days of america
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going all the way to late 20th early 21st century but a big portion of the book is dedicated to the
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culture of bachelorhood that sprung up during the late 19th early 20th centuries and it was during this
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time that bachelors american bachelors and companies catering towards bachelors created what a lot of
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the culture a lot of the aesthetic what we consider old school manly today so facial hair like mustaches
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and the big beards it was big during that time american bachelors were pushing it the barber shop
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exploded during the late 19th century early 20th centuries saloons billiards halls gambling became huge
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it was all because of american bachelors popular men's magazines first got their start during this
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time they were driven by and catered to american bachelors sports were huge particularly boxing
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baseball and football john l sullivan the bare knuckle pugilist that is at the top of the art of
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manliness header he was a huge american celebrity during this time and he was considered the king of
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the bachelors even though he wasn't a bachelor for most of his life so yeah a lot of stuff we think of
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as old school manly was started by bachelors during this time period so today on the podcast
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professor chudikoff and i are going to discuss this golden age of bachelorhood and its influence that
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we can still feel today on american masculinity you're a long-time art of manliness reader you love
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the whole old school man thing you're really gonna enjoy this podcast because you're going to find out
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a lot of great insights about where this stuff that you like sprung up and got its start so without
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further ado professor chudikoff with the age of the bachelor howard chudikoff welcome to the show
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thank you thank you for having me okay so you published a book a few years ago called the age
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of the bachelor and a few years ago i did a series of articles on the site about the the cultural history
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of bachelorhood in america and in my research i was surprised how few books there were on the topic
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and still are uh yours is one of the the few i think there's like two others that i found why are
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why haven't historians or anthropologists or sociologists why have they looked into this subculture or this um
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this uh of of america um i don't know i can't speak for them i guess because they didn't think that it
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was a popular enough topic or somehow i mean i think other stages of life have attracted more attention
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maybe because people thought they were more consequential whether it was uh adolescence or
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infancy or old age um and of course bachelorhood is tied up with issues of gender and and male
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illness that you were interested in um and women's history and women's culture i guess was uh far more
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uh attractive to a number of historians so uh i'm not really sure i guess those are what answers i can
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think of sure well in your book um you call bachelors both a um a subgroup and a subculture
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um what's the difference between the two and how does bachelorhood in america fit those two
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definitions i'm not an anthropologist so i'm very using i'm using these definitions very loosely in
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this concept so i probably uh am open to criticism on that you know a culture is often uh described or
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defined as a way of life uh of a group of people their values their symbols their beliefs that they
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pass on almost automatically from one generation to the next and the subculture of bachelorhood
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is one that exists within male culture and i guess that i call it a subculture because maybe it
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uh does not adopt all of the values of uh does not adopt all of the values of male culture uh and
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therefore is a subgroup within it and i guess i'm maybe interchanging the uh the term subgroup and subculture
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i don't recall how often i use the term subgroup but maybe i did i can't remember for sure well you you
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raise an interesting point because throughout the book about that um bachelorhood is a subculture of
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male culture and that there was a tension between bachelors and married men and um i mean what was that
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tension was it a tension about what it meant to be a man did were bachelors seen as less of a man
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i think it was not less behavioral in some ways and that is there's always pressure on men and women
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to get married because it always has been historically that's been the uh the standard uh way of going
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through adulthood so there's tension there not that bachelors were necessarily uh opposing males uh married
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males but uh especially because most bachelors eventually did get married as i said in my book every male
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is a bachelor for at least some part of his life but the bachelor subculture has always been associated
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with a kind of alternative and sometimes oppositional behavior that the more um uh settled and traditional
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men who are married and uh raising families sometimes feel is um too uh deviant too far out too uh unacceptable
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so the bachelor subculture sometimes uh pushes the extremes of of behavior and in doing so um causes some
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tensions between the unmarried and the married what was the um the status of the bachelor in early
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american history you know from colonial times up until you know the mid-19th century one of the factors
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of course that affects bachelorhood uh probably as much as any if not more is the marriage market that is
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in many early american uh communities there was an excess of men uh going over well into the 19th century
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as the country moved westward a lot of the societies and territories of the united states had uh large
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majorities of men so bachelorhood in some respects was the consequence of their
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just not being enough women to marry or at least to marry in the traditional legal way there of course lots of
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stories of men uh having quasi-marital arrangements with native americans or uh african slaves but the uh formal
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marriage structure was affected by these uh sex ratios
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and during this time too if i recall uh in early american history there were taxes
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sometimes levied against bachelors or they're called bachelor taxes
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yeah right because in order to have an established community you need to have established families that are
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appropriating and raising a new generation and those men who
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were not married at least beyond a certain age were deemed to be not contributing to the community
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in a way that was desired so there were taxes levied against them uh as a means to
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induce them to marry and penalize them for not being married
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yeah and i also think it's interesting some of the uh the pamphlets and and other essays put out by
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some of the founding fathers were like benjamin franklin uh had was kind of harsh on bachelors
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uh for some reason he he's really a proponent of the married life i think he called them rogue elephants
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is that correct yeah i remember that yeah rogue elephants uh i mean that
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uh really uh goes uh goes back to what i was saying about the uh supposed deviant behavior of
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bachelors especially any kind of wild carousing activities that they might have been uh
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engaging in uh so uh benjamin franklin called them rogue elephants as uh these outliers of the community
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so early american history there were probably a lot of bachelors because of the marriage market
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because men were usually the first ones to arrive to new territory to settle an area and then the
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women followed a couple years later but it seemed like in the 19th century middle of the 19th century
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late 19th century there was a boom in the number of bachelors uh how did this why did this bachelor boom
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happen in the mid 19th century the boom in bachelors happened i think because marriage the uh marriage was
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postponed it wasn't that there was a big boom in the the number of proportion of committed bachelors
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that is bachelors who never married but uh as marriage age rose and i'm sorry i don't have the figures at
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hand um it meant that men were and women too were staying unmarried for a longer period of time than
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they had been in the past now there are several reasons for explaining the rise in the age of
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marriage i'd like to think that it was because there were simply alternatives to marriage that is
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there were reasons not to get married because uh both economically some men couldn't afford it
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and uh those men who could afford it uh had diversions that kept them unmarried for a lot
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remember this is beginning of the flowering of community of consumer uh culture and the beginnings of
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mass entertainment the beginnings of diversions that men and women could participate in outside of
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marriage and uh were uh accepting and buying into that postpone their marriages for sometimes two three
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four five years did the uh influx or the migration to urban areas contributed to that as well yeah yeah
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yes and i think it's interesting too how you talked about uh people delayed marriage this time and i think
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it's funny how today we we sort of wring our hands about how young people are putting off marriage longer
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and longer but then you if you go back to their great great grandparents and they were it's basically
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about the same age that people are getting married late 20s um and i guess the 50s and 60s was sort of an
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anomaly in american history about marriage age right um yeah today the average age of marriage is higher than
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it's ever been um but of course the circumstances under which that occurs today are a lot different in the past
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because there are large numbers of people who live in marital arrangements but are not formally married uh as
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you know with licenses and and vows and everything else that uh accompanies formal marriage so it's a little bit
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difficult to make comparisons between the present and the past because of the circumstances of today
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of marriage couples uh or quasi married couples uh or quasi married couples but not formally married couples
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and so the age of formal marriage is now um much higher than it had been now back in the 1950s and 60s
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there was of course pressure by society for people to get married and pressure on uh families to have
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children and primarily the um circumstance in which children were born then was to a married couple
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and um the sooner that men and women got married then the sooner that they would begin having children
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so um let's let's go back to the 19th century so there's all these things going on we have um a
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booming bachelors because people are putting off marriage an influx of young people to urban centers
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urban areas cities we have the rise of mass consumerism the rise of mass um entertainment
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mass media and all of this sort of brewed together to create
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the bachelor culture and you call the 19th century the age of the bachelor
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bachelor and as i was reading this i thought it was interesting that a lot of the things that we
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consider manly today right if you look at the web art if you've seen our website we sort of like this
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vintage aesthetic it came from this period of time so what were some of the bachelor institutions that
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developed during this period that we still see remnants of today sports for one thing yeah the rise of
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mass sports and the rise of commercial institutions uh like saloons barbershops which barbershops are real
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hangouts for uh unmarried men um the boarding house that was the place where bachelors lived when they moved
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into the cities um and uh commercial amusements amusement parks and then later movie theater movies uh these
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sorts of things were the establishments that unmarried people uh patronized quite a lot yeah and as i think
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you mentioned uh pool halls as well was another and pool halls yeah yeah right and i think what's
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interesting is that all of these what they have in common is sort of that again going back to that
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idea that bachelors are somewhat social deviants right so it's saloons pool halls where there's lots of
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drinking gambling uh smoking going on uh these are sort of the institutions in it i guess the the
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tension between married men and the rest of society increased between bachelors and them during this
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period yeah i i my research uh didn't focus on getting any hard evidence of of that but there are
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certainly hints about that yes yeah um so yeah going back to sports too this was the rise of
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professional sports and i guess it was primarily bachelors who were participating in watching uh
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like baseball was one and then boxing was the biggest if i remember correctly i think yeah boxing and
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horse racing have to include that yeah and uh baseball yeah yeah football was primarily still a
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college sport then and there weren't a lot of uh people in college at the time so i think it was
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primarily baseball boxing and horse racing and then we are speaking of boxing uh you know on our
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website the sort of the unofficial icon is john l sullivan he became during this period he was like
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america's first celebrity in a lot of ways and he became sort of the king of the bachelors
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he was in the sports world anyway as a celebrity uh and even though he was formally married he led a
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what many people would call a bachelor's life of carousing and womanizing and traveling around and
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brawling uh and earning and spending money on himself and others instead of developing a family
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so he's a married man living as a bachelor yes yes and so one of the another interesting
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um topic you delved into which i was aware of this magazine for some reason i don't know i came across
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a whole bunch of old copies one time um but the national police gazette oh yeah it's a defunct magazine
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but at the time it was considered the the bachelor bible can you tell us a little bit about the national
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police gazette and the content that young men would find in this magazine i described the national
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police gazette as a combination of sports illustrated um national inquirer and playboy because it focused on
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all three well as well as true detective i mean it started off um as an urban publication um
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um publishing stories of sensational crimes abductions and murders and uh even rapes and these kinds of things
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um but in the back of the newspaper was always sporting news that um the publisher richard j fox expanded over
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the years he even himself became a boxing promoter and even promoted some of the fights that john l sullivan
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was involved in although he had a stormy relationship with uh sullivan but um and then on the some of the
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inside pages there were gossip stories or uh drawings and then later photographs of what were called
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those soubretts that i guess we would today call uh starlets young women young attractive women of the stage
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whose uh pictures were published simply to appeal to the prurian interests of men there were also drawings
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and illustrations of these crimes against women uh with uh these drawings of men trying to abduct women and
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their the women's clothing falling off their shoulders um but also a lot of stories of how women took
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revenge against men against cheating husbands and boyfriends and that sort of thing uh so it was a
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it's a fascinating publication it's very hard to estimate how many men actually read it because
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the subscription figures don't tell the whole story uh it was um delivered weekly to most saloons and
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pool halls and barber shops in urban areas and therefore sat on the table and men who were just there to
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hang out or waiting for a haircut um would read it and so every issue had multiple readers
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most of whom of course were men and i'm sure a great proportion of those men were unmarried men so they
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were exposed to all these different kinds of uh exciting stories and um sporting news and all of the rest
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yeah richard j foxwell he was a a savvy businessman the way he promoted that that magazine first with the
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using promote promoting the boxing matches i think for a while the national police police gazette
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they're the ones who determined the world champion boxer uh for a period of time and then yeah using
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the um distributing the magazine to barber shops i think he had a section i thought was really nice
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it seems like tonsorlioris is that the word for yes it's like the barber of the week yeah barber of
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the week and i guess that encouraged barbers to subscribe so they can possibly be a the barber of
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the week i think he also if i remember correctly i could be wrong uh also did the same thing for
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bartenders that's correct you did i don't know if you've never seen it yeah i've seen that as well
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and uh yeah so if you're listening to this i think that you can find some uh facsimiles online we did a
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post about it a few years ago but some of the stories you're going to find in it it's just some of them
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are just outrageous some of them are just really funny there was they had this common a series going
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on about women doing manly things so they they'd have an illustration of a woman wearing pants to
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church and everyone's looking scandalized uh women smoking women playing baseball and remember there
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also were uh ads in the publication for male oriented products that's true for uh sexual uh
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aids for playing cards and gambling uh materials for tonics of variety of sorts and uh those sorts of
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things that were only uh to be consumed by men and it seems like i guess things haven't really changed
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that much because if you go to the back of most men's magazines today you're going to find advertisements
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for products that can enhance sexuality or improve virility same thing happened 150 years ago yes that's
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right interesting so um what's the legacy of the age of the bachelor um did the status of the bachelor
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change during the early part of the 20th century or did a lot of what began in the 19th century carry
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over into the early part of the 20th well i think it carried over as i said and as you suggested
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yourself in the immediate post-world war ii era with the baby boom was of course preceded by a marriage
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boom and there were um there's a lot of social proscription against bachelorhood and encouragement
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to get married but by the time you get to the late 60s and early 70s the the notion of the swinging
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single becomes far more uh appealing in american society and i attributed to some uh to some extent
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in any way with the rise of popularity of playboy which of course replaced the national police gazette
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as the bachelor's main uh organ the main publication and playboy celebrated all of those uh different
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qualities of singlehood bachelor behavior with wine and women and sports and uh
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all of the sexuality and all of the rest that helped to reinforce this swinging single image
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of man in american society that actually that hasn't really subsided i don't think yeah i mean so i
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guess would it be safe to say that in the early part of american history and even up through the 19th
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century bachelorhood was something that happened because you know the marriage market it wasn't a choice
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oftentimes did it slowly and over time become more of a choice people just decided i'm going to be
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single and that's what i'm going to do well i want to be single for a longer period of time yes
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right and what's the status of the bachelor today i mean it seems like people don't i don't think i've
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ever heard a man referred himself as a bachelor um no you don't it's interesting yeah why is that do we
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just not identify with that anymore is it just a a word from a bygone era i think it is i'm you know
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i've moved on to research and other things so i haven't given this much thought and i'm trying to
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process that myself um there are probably others more qualified to uh speak about that than i am but
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of course you know i think it's because being unmarried has become much more acceptable in american
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society and just as you don't hear the term bachelor used very much how many times you hear the word
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spinster used very much anymore you don't so i guess they've become um pejorative what's the word
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sort of insults that we don't use yeah politically yeah politically incorrect well president chudikov
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this has been an interesting discussion thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure
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well thank you very much i've really enjoyed speaking with you and saying hello to your audience
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our guest today was howard chudikov he's the author of the book the age of the bachelor
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creating an american subculture if you are a history buff definitely pick up this book it's a
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well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
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make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy
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give us a review also please share us with your friends the more the merrier your reviews your
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shares i really appreciate that thank you so much and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to