What makes a man?

I was fortunate enough in having a father whom I have always been able to regard as an ideal man. It sounds a little like cant to say what I am going to say, but he really did combine the strength and courage and will and energy of the strongest man with the tenderness, cleanness and purity of a woman. He not only took great care of me . . . but he also most wisely refused to coddle me, and made me feel that I must force myself to hold my own with other boys and prepare to do the rought work of the world. I cannot say that he ever put it into words, but he certainly gave me the feeling that I was always to be both decent and manly, and that if I were manly nobody would long laugh at my being decent.

--Theodore Roosevelt, in a November 1900 letter to Edward Martin