Honor

One early-twenty-first-century development in the study of honor has been a changing appreciation for its role in the development of the modern state during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Earlier studies either focused on traditional societies or rural communities portrayed as isolated from modernity, or premodern state societies such as the European ancien régime. More recently, however, historians have used a more dynamic concept of honor to study such nineteenth-century phenomena as the integration of qualities associated with honor into the definition of citizenship. Instead of the family, the state becomes the guardian of honor, and begins to intervene in and exert control over individual struggles regarding honor, as in the attempts to stop the practice of dueling, discussed above. Similarly, the nation-state became much more involved in controlling the individual morality of women, particularly in campaigns about prostitution, but also as an arbiter of virginity and morality more generally. Men too began to feel more pressure to assume the role of income-earning head of household rather than simply inheriting the mantle of patriarchy, and honor began to be more entwined with both military or state service.