Stefan Dudink
Domestic Masculinity in Pre- and Post-war Dutch Political Culture
During the period from 1800 to 1815 the independent existence of a Dutch nation was repeatedly at risk. Napoleon’s 1810 annexation of the Netherlands confirmed a fear that had repeatedly been expressed in Dutch public opinion in the preceding decade: this nation’s time was past. The rhetoric deployed by those who refused to resign themselves with the seemingly inevitable decline of the nation was, unsurprisingly, highly gendered. In this rhetoric the continued existence of the nation was presented as depending on the manliness of either a ‘great man’, or of Dutch men more generally. This paper analyzes this rhetoric of manliness and nation and points to one remarkable aspect of it in particular. In many cases the manliness on which the independent existence of the nation was thought to depend appeared as ‘domestic’: its place was first and foremost in the home. This domestic masculinity emerges not only where one would expect it to do, i.e. during the post-Napoleonic Restoration where it served the aims of de-politicization and national reconstruction. It was also present during the final stages of the Dutch democratic revolution, during the years of gradual annexation by Napoleonic France, in calls to take up arms against France, and in the making of the Dutch monarchy.
Stefan Dudink teaches at the Institute for Gender Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His main field of research is the history of gender and sexuality in modern Western political culture, with a focus on the Netherlands in a comparative context. He has published a study on Dutch late nineteenth-century liberalism, Deugdzaam liberalisme: sociaal-liberalisme in Nederland, 1870-1901 (1997) and is co-editor with Karen Hagemann and John Tosh of Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History (2004); and with Karen Hagemann and Anna Clark of Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture (2007, 2012).
