It's Tough to Be a Man, Baby

From “It's Tough To Be a Man Baby: A History of Manhood”
by Daniel Simer Ó Connell
Before 1800, men were seen as being virtuous and having great reason. The greater reason moderated their passions of ambition, defiance, and envy. Women were seen as not having as much control of those emotions as men did.
In this phase, a man’s identity was based on his social obligations and his social usefulness. His family name and history, his social position in society, his class, were seen as the ultimate determiner of his worth as a man. The amount and type of public service a man had to offer became part of his social worth which in turn defined his identity, which further affected how "manly" other people thought of him.
The second phase begins in the late 18th century. Then it becomes a man’s work role, not his social role that helped to define who he was. The idea of a man’s personal success in business came to be seen as more important to his identity than the notion of whatever public service he might offer. The traditionally male passions were given freer reign. Ambition, rivalry, and aggression were begun to be seen as good things in and of themselves not as vices. These passions then were not to be moderated as before, but channeled appropriately. What was heretofore seen as defiance was now seen as independence.
The third phase started in the late [19th] century. Society became much more positive about the "male" passions. Male sexual desire gained legitimacy as it had not before. Ambition, competitiveness, aggression: these were all seen as uplifting and necessary for the social good. They were exalted at the expense of the female sensibilities, particularly tenderness and mercy. Those qualities, seen in a man were viewed with scorn.
The ideas of what made up the self and the value of the manly passions moved from one of control and denial to what was good in constituting identity and worth. The contrast between men and women, which before this period had been seen as opposites, was now seen as different.
This is of course, the time of the rise of sports. Sports [had been] viewed as exercise. At the end of the 19th century, sports were seen much more as competition and this is when uniforms became standardized for teams.
Of course men’s views of women played a role in how men viewed themselves. As today, men felt they could turn to women for a kind of nurturing understanding that other men were unwilling or unable to provide. The hero of a 19th century novel put it like this: "I would as soon confess to my horse [as to a man]."
These ideas led people then to believe that women must take the initiative as the source of virtue in society, rather than men, as before. Women now had the task of trying to control the male passions by educating men in the art of self-denial. Marriage became based more on love than on social arrangements, although of course, a woman’s identity was still derived mainly from her husband’s.
Men came to marriage at this time with all sorts of conflicting feelings too. No longer merely a social contract with the community, marriage began to define manhood in new ways at this time. Rotundo writes:
Men came to this relationship with desires to dominate and to be nurtured; with views of woman as angel and as devil; with the fear that marriage and domesticity were a trap and the hope that they were a sanctuary; with the expectation that a wife would be a source of morality and the assumption that she would be a source of restriction; with the wish that marriage would offer him intimacy and an end to loneliness, and the fear that marriage would smother him and put an end to his freedom.