Speaking to the ‘Hard Men’: Masculinities, Violence and Youth Gangs in Glasgow, c. 1965–75

This chapter unites perspectives from history and sociology in excavating the lived experiences of everyday masculinities and violence that lie behind the persistent image of the Glasgow ‘hard man’, while also interrogating popular representations of the ‘hard city’. Drawing on oral history interviews with individuals involved in violent territorialism – specifically through street-based ‘gangs’ of young men – c. 1965-1975, it contrasts popular representations of the Glasgow ‘hard man’ with the lived experiences of those living and working in the city at that time. Focusing specifically on Easterhouse, it highlights the prominence of ‘the street’ in narrative accounts of masculine identity formation for young working-class men and links this to the specific social, cultural and economic composition of the locale. Overall, it argues that such ‘street’ masculinities should be understood in historical context, recognising the influence of local cultures of machismo on the persistence of forms of masculine identity.

The Taming of Highland Masculinity: Interpersonal Violence and Shifting Codes of Manhood, c. 1760–1840

This chapter argues that male interpersonal violence provides a way in which divergent, conflicting and shifting codes of manliness in Scottish society can be discerned. Historians of masculinity have argued that the eighteenth century saw a change in the model of manhood as male interpersonal violence in defence of honour and reputation was replaced by the advocacy of self-governance and recourse to the law. Using court records of violent assault, this chapter focusses on a type of modernizing society – the Scottish Highlands 1760-1840 - in which a code of violence governed by an indigenous culture of manhood was gradually superceded by new cultural norms. An earlier association of masculinity with interpersonal violence in the Highlands was challenged increasingly from around 1800 by those who advocated civility and restraint amongst men, especially in the growing Highland town of Inverness, the centre of an emerging middle-class culture with changing social sensibilities

Music Hall, ‘Mashers’ and the ‘Unco Guid’: Competing Masculinities in Victorian Glasgow

This chapter examines an intra-gender competition between three masculine identities in Victorian Glasgow. In 1875, sexually risqué performances at a music hall prompted a group of men from the ‘unco guid’, or rigidly respectable middle class, to launch a morality campaign against the halls. Their efforts were largely unsuccessful due to the formation of a cross-class alliance between young, working-class men, known as ‘mashers’, and bourgeois hedonists, who together defended their male right to sexual pleasure. The analysis of this masculine power play is suggestive in three ways: it demonstrates the existence in Presbyterian Scotland of an unrespectable masculinity; it emphasizes the importance of considering alternative forms of masculine identity in their own right, and not in relation to a hegemonic norm; and it suggests that the preservation of music-hall style into the Edwardian period was the result as much of a gendered as a class-inflected contest of social hierarchies for control.

A ‘Polite and Commercial People’? Masculinity and Economic Violence in Scotland, 1700–60

Classical economic theory suggests that commerce played a central role in the growth of politeness and the decline of violence. This chapter complicates commerce’s role in the civilising process by exploring economic violence in eighteenth century Scotland. Economic violence is defined as constituting a range of physical and non-physical violent acts carried out against persons and property, and economic actions interpreted as forms of violence. Drawing examples from legal records and the debtors’ prison, it considers the intersections between masculinity, economy and interpersonal violence, structured particularly around notions of honour. It argues that violence played a functional role within eighteenth-century Scottish commerce, where it supported claims to masculine gender identity. Violence was not only the property of the crowd, used to defend customary rights, but was deployed by a range of different men, including the commercial middling sorts.

Negotiating Independence: Manliness and Begging Letters in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland

Begging letters provide a rich source for historians of the poor, who have used them to explore their lives, constructions of identity, and regional variation in charitable giving. The rhetoric of benevolence and gratitude that pervades them, however, has often been dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ or as interfering with our access to the words of the poor. This chapter explores how Scottish beggars used the language of gratitude in their letters to patrons, contributing to both a history of letter-writing and masculinity amongst the poor. It highlights the way that an emotional-charitable language placed patron and client in a hierarchical social relationship that brought benefits to both parties. It argues that, rather than being an unmanly act, begging could provide space for poor or subordinate men to articulate their masculine identities within a society where social hierarchies were normal and understood as key to social order.

‘That Class of Men’: Effeminacy, Sodomy and Failed Masculinities in Inter- and Post-War Scotland

This chapter examines the emergence of a distinct and subversive ‘queer’ man in inter-war Scotland. The attitudes of the police and courts appear to have been shaped by the identities assumed by the men that used the nation’s urban spaces for soliciting sex, for pleasure or for money. The effeminate homosexual, in particular the male prostitute, was marked out by his failure to perform expected norms of masculinity, and his deviance was perceived to be inscribed upon his body. Attitudes towards the effeminate homosexual continued in the post-war period and such men were the continued subject of scrutiny and derision from wider society and from homosexual men, the latter group perceiving effeminacy to be a discreditable form of homosexual identity

A Wartime Family Romance: Narratives of Masculinity and Intimacy during World War Two

This chapter focuses on a neglected facet of Scottish men’s sense of self – the expression of intimacy and emotion in the context of one man’s letters home to his wife during an extended posting abroad in World War Two. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire - these are not qualities commonly identified in the narratives of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century. The war provided the backdrop for a correspondence which allowed a serving soldier to explore his emotional side, and sustain his marriage, not only by consuming narratives of love but producing them too. Through a close examination of personal correspondence this chapter argues that this correspondent encapsulated a modern masculine self that Scottish men were to practice with greater confidence in the postwar decades.

Contrasting Kingly and Knightly Masculinities in Barbour’s Bruce

The chapter examines the multiple representations, evolution and opposition of masculine constructions in John Barbour’s Brus (c.1375) which tells the story of Scotland’s First War of Independence. The two main heroes, Robert Bruce and James Douglas are shown to represent a fluid masculinity, adapting to the changing social and political circumstances of medieval Scotland. This is contrasted with the negative models of Edward I and Edward Bruce. The chapter discusses the results of the initial absence of proper leaders and male models, secondly the evolution of Bruce and Douglas into ideal king and knight, and finally the interactions of the male protagonists with women. Patriarchy is shown to operate not only in the power of men over women, but also in the authority that groups of men exercise over other groups according to social hierarchies.

Making a Manly Impression: The Image of Kingship on Scottish Royal Seals of the High Middle Ages

A central aspect of the growing sophistication of government in thirteenth-century Scotland was the crown’s use of written deeds authenticated with the great seal as instruments through which to express the royal will. This chapter, using sigillography (the study of seals) argues that over the course of the high and later Middle Ages the rulers of Scotland demonstrated a keen interest in the images, words and symbols that appeared on their great seals, encoding into these objects a complex and constantly evolving series of messages about their conceptualisation of kingship. The decorated surface of the seal and its accompanying Latin-language legend offered the kings a unique medium through which to project powerful images of Scottish identity, masculinity and power.

The Importance and Impossibility of Manhood: Polite and Libertine Masculinities in the Urban Eighteenth Century

This chapter explores the continuum of polite and libertine expression of manhood in eighteenth-century Scotland through an examination of violence, independence, sexuality and friendship, drawing particularly on life writing by men such as James Boswell and the minister Thomas Sutherland. Shifting ideals of behaviour and sentiment served to assert manhood among different men and individuals could adopt different manly personas ranging from the polite gentleman to the libertine depending on locale and time of day. Among the issues discussed are changing responses to duelling, amended definitions of honour, the importance of economic credit and independence, varied attitudes to the sexuality of women, and the conflicting pulls of virtuous self-governed manhood and the opportunities for sexual licence, both heterosexual and homosexual, provided in the growing towns of Edinburgh and Glasgow.