The history of womanhood has now been much studied, here and abroad, yet historians have been slow to recognise ‘manhood’, ‘manliness’ and ‘masculinity’ as social constructions requiring historical investigation and elucidation.1 This is all the more remarkable in Australia as for men in this country their ‘manhood’ has so often seemed their chief source of pride and identity. The men in most Australian history books are sex-less: they appear in most accounts as neutered and neutral historical agents. Men become universalised Man: White Man, Working Man, Nineteenth-Century Man, the Coming Man. Male historians have been blinded to the problematic nature of the sex of their subjects by their own sex-centredness. It is time that we started treating men, historically, as men, socialised into ‘masculinity’ (whose meanings have changed from one age to another, one society to another) and pursuing their ‘masculinist’ interests as men, as well as the interests of their class and race. In other words, it is time for historians interested in gender to move beyond ‘women’s history’ — beyond the static conception of ‘woman’s role’ which lies at the heart of ‘contribution history’.* It is time that gender became a central category of all historical analysis. For just as women’s history cannot be fruitfully written without reference to men, neither can men’s history be properly written without reference to men’s relations with women. The gender factor has been obscured in Australian historical writing by a number of phenomena: by the dominance of a narrowly defined political history, by the sex-blind nature of much of what passes as class analysis and by the centrality in our historiography of organising concepts such as ‘national character’ and ‘national tradition’ and the dichotomy of ‘respectability’ and ‘unrespectability’.
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