In Manliness and Civilization, Gail Bederman, a historian at Notre Dame, sets out to trace the development of the notion of manliness from 1880 to 1917. Using an approach developed by the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, to whose Madness and Civilization (Foucault, 1965) she refers in her own title, Bederman seeks to locate the notion of manhood within a specific historical discourse, which she defines as “a set of ideas and practices which, taken together, organize both the way a society defines certain truths about itself and the way it deploys social power” (p. 24). In particular, she sees turn-of-the-century American ideas about manhood as embedded in a larger complex which triangulates it with equally