Stand By Your Woman

After Frederick Douglass gave a rousing speech at the First Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, the press pilloried him as an “Aunt Nancy Man,” the nineteenth-century version of a “Mama’s boy.” When men joined women in suffrage parades, hostile crowds jeered and called them “henpecked” husbands. These men did not need to go to the woods to recover their manhood; they braved the treacherous arena of American politics.

But not so their contemporary counterparts. Men associated with the “masculinist” wing of the men’s movement seek their manhood in a mythopoetic past. The search for a usable past is nothing new. In the age of identity politics, every vic...