Chris Smaje, Finding Lights in a Dark Age:
The free play of patriarchy within the household is arguably conditioned by the free play of patriarchy outside it. At the extreme, this involves a kind of untrammelled and predatory male collective violence - essentially the Viking problem of a heroic-styled warrior culture or of what’s sometimes termed ‘masterless men’.
Many societies have recognized the dangers of this and sought ways to counter it. For example, Anglo-Saxon England emphasized ‘hearth-fasting’ men - linking them to a home and hearth, to the possibilities of local status and livelihood. In Edo Japan, the wakamono-gumi associations of young, unmarried peasant men mobilized them as nightwatchmen, firefighters and festival organizers, and linked them into wider local knowledges and systems. Age-set systems and initiation rituals have served similar functions in many societies. The emphasis is less on the man being the master of the household, and more on making the household the master of the man.
But - as demonstrated by Melissa Kearney’s work, mentioned earlier - we’re not doing a particularly great job of this in contemporary liberal-modernist society. Education, employment and financial systems almost seem set up to fail and marginalize many young men, especially from low-income families. The erosion of kith, kinship and positive local associational possibilities adds to the risk they’ll turn to misogynistic and violent ideologies to make sense of their situations. Models of society based on making widespread the possibility for men to become kith-and-kin connected, livelihood-making householders rather than atomized, internet-connected consumers of masculinist self-images adrift in a hostile job market can mitigate against this. Something to aim for, perhaps, in a postliberal dark-age future?
That second paragraph in the original text includes a reference to Azby Brown’s Just Enough: Lessons from Japan for Sustainable Living, Architecture and Design (2022) and Rosamund Faith’s The Moral Economy of the Countryside: Anglo-Saxon to Anglo-Norman England (2020).
I love that phrase: hearth-fasted. Fixed to a hearth.
I haven’t read the book but based on what I can find online, a hearth-fasted man was a freeman in Pre-Norman England with social standing, public duties, and reciprocal responsibilities with neighbors. They were not dependents.
“Domesticated” is a word that comes to mind here, though that clearly has a negative connotation. A domesticated man is one that has been beaten down, reduced, “whipped.” That idea has roots in a sexism that sees women as shrews and marriage as a power struggle.
”Hearth-fasted”, on the other hand, is a man in service to his household. (Obviously I’m riffing on the language here, making no comment about actual pre-Norman history about which I know nothing.)
It feels something like “yeoman”, “citizen”, and (a word from my childhood that I rarely hear anymore) “family man.” Definitely a word I’ll be keeping in my back pocket, both because it is pleasing language and because it represents something deeply important to me.