The 1866 book Once a Week: An Illustrated Miscellany of Literature, Popular Science and Art poked fun at the women-looking-for-husband ads that were common in what the author, Eneas Sweetland Dallas, referred to as “the cheap papers.” It read: “ Twenty Thousand Husbands Wanted - Lonely One, with a little property, and twenty years of age, wants a husband to protect her. She is tall, dark and handsome.”Ĥ) That said, the description had long been expressed in literature. Case in point: In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), she implies the leading man, Mr. (She does not, however, use that description exactly.)ĥ) As Tristan Bridges, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, explains, in the 1900s “tall, dark and handsome” came to describe a mysterious and attractive white, heterosexual man at a time of precarious masculinity. Privileges men had previously enjoyed were falling away as it became harder to live on family wealth alone. Fears of waning masculinity led to the founding of the Boy Scouts of America and an emphasis on men exercising and lifting weights.
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