On Teddy's Virility
Good essay by Harvey Mansfield about Teddy Roosevelt's manliness. Here are two excerpts:
In a notable chapter of his Autobiography entitled “Outdoors and Indoors,” Roosevelt says that love of books and love of outdoors go hand in hand, both being loners' occupations and neither requiring wealth.
As if speaking closer to today, he declares that “women [must be put] on a footing of complete and entire equal rights with men,” including “the right to enter any profession she desires on the same terms as a man.” Yet normally, he adds, “the woman must remain the housemother, the homekeeper, and the man must remain the breadwinner.” That is because we must not live in a regime of rights abstracted from the performance of duty with “indulgence in vapid ease.” In effect, women are not equal to men according to TR, but both above and below them. Women receive the bread won for them by men, and delivered to them with gallantry. But they are models of effeminacy, the very thing a man must avoid.
