Manhood on the Line: Working-Class Masculinities in the American Heartland (original) (raw)
Related papers
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, changing, and sometimes conflicting, ideas of masculinity played out in how working class men formed common identities among themselves, and how they interacted with others, on both the shop floor and in their neighborhoods and homes. These gendered identities form a basis for both solidarity and exclusion. In this paper I consider the relationship between gender and class identities in the late nineteenth-century U.S., focusing on skilled male railroad workers in West Oakland, in the San Francisco Bay area of California. During this period the craft unions to which these workers belonged articulated a vision of “respectable masculinity” for their members that was intended to replace prevailing notions of masculinity centered on homosociality and hard drinking. This paper examines the impact of these conflicting visions.
Class, Capitalism, and Masculinity: Celebrating Working-Class Culture In New Definitions of Manhood
Gender is an ideological process, constantly changing depending on space and time. While this conception of gender is modern, it, nevertheless, has applications when examining history, particularly manhood in nineteenth and early twentieth-century America. Specifically, from the 1820s to 1860s, America's small-scale, competitive capitalist system created an environment where white middle-class men could earn a comfortable living independently. Principles of high-mindedness and self-mastery were crucial for these men in maintaining a sense of stability amidst the unpredictability of the market. Interested in differentiating themselves from the stigmatized lower class, white middle-class men also adopted Victorian ideals of respectability, restraint, and intellectuality. 1 However, economic, social, and political changes by the 1880s challenged this traditional notion of manhood, highlighting how gender is a changing ideological concept. The emerging large-scale capitalist system and consumer economy of the late nineteenth century encouraged interdependence and incentivized pleasure over moral restraint, eroding conventional middle-class manhood. 2 Additionally, political and social challenges from women's movements, immigrants, and the working class contested white middle-class male power. 3 To reestablish this authority, middle-class men redefined manhood by glorifying physical prowess over intellectual capacity, appropriating working-class culture, and
International Review of Social History, 2009
is one of the most influential US historians of women, gender, and labour. Her book, Gendering Labor History, presents an overview of her work in the form of seventeen essays, divided into four sections: Women and the Labor Movement; Gender and Class; Labor and Social Policy; and New Directions. Together these essays, originally published between 1975 and 2004, show the development of her intellectual agenda-from including women in trade-union history, to arguing for the reciprocal interaction of gender and class, developing a gendered analysis of US social policy, and, finally, broadening the scope toward a global history of women's wage labour. The first four essays take us back to the 1970s, when the focus was on recovering the history of women workers and including them in labour history. The well-known opening article, ''Where Are the Organized Women Workers?'', immediately demonstrates Kessler-Harris's ability to identify key issues and change the prevailing perspective. Instead of wondering why women were not organized-''given a chance, women were devoted and successful union members'' (p. 23)-she asks how women were kept out of trade unions. The answer to this question lies in efforts by employers to prevent women from unionizing, as well as in the lack of support from male unions and outright hostility toward women workers, often expressed in the form of ''the home-and-motherhood argument'' (p. 25). In clear language, Kessler-Harris writes that ''the AFL [American Federation of Labor] was a conservative force whose relatively privileged [white, male] members sacrificed the larger issue of working-class solidarity for a piece of the capitalist pie'' (p. 25). The three other essays in Part 1 also discuss the complexities of women's relation to and role in the labour movement, including an article about trade-union activist Rose Schneiderman, who later became the president of the Women's Trade Union League, a ''middle-class ally'' of women workers. ''Rose Schneiderman and the Limits of Women's Trade Unionism'' describes the process through which Schneiderman came to believe that protective labour legislation for women was the only way effectively to ease the lives of women workers. Many of the issues discussed in the first section return and are developed further in the course of the book. Among them is the role of masculinity in shaping identities, union membership, and social policies, as explored in ''Treating the Male as 'Other': Redefining the Parameters of Labor History'', and ''Measures for Masculinity: The American Labor Movement and Welfare-State Policy during the Great Depression''. Kessler-Harris's sophisticated analysis shows that gender divided the working class against itself: male workers focused on preserving their sense of masculine independence and pride and their right to earn a family wage, rejecting ''women's work'' as competition, and, in concert with middle-class reformers, supported government policies intended to keep women in the home. In the 1930s their notion of masculinity also led AFL-organized male workers to reject a proposal for a new federal unemployment insurance programme because government support was seen as an attack on men's ''free labour''. ''American trade unionists believed 'socialistic' programs that created universal entitlements available to all would undermine manhood by creating dependent and cringing males''-a different position from the one supported by European labour (p. 239). Thus, these essays convincingly demonstrate the central role of gender in the history of the US labour movement as well as in shaping social policy, with the acceptance of terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
What's on the worker's mind?: Class passing and the study of the industrial workplace in the 1920s
Journal of The History of The Behavioral Sciences, 2003
Posing, living, and laboring as American workers, several 1920s reformist labor investigators sought to develop an alternative to Frederick Taylor's famous characterization of a typical manual laborer as mentally akin to an ox. Through their experiences as workers, they believed that they gained real if limited access to working-class pyschology. Accordingly, they presented views of the worker's mind that significantly loosened the strictures of hereditarian and, expecially in the case of foreign-born workers, scientific racist thought. But their efforts were shaped by their own backgrounds and biases, and by those of the academic authorities upon whose work they built, and were also mediated through the complexities of their efforts to pass across the class line. Their work finally lent itself less to the purposes of industrial democracy and reform than to those of the rising 1920s schools of industrial psychology, industrial sociology, and personnel relations. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Labor, 2016
B ook Rev ie w s 115 gay and lesbian bosses. They ignored the complaints of some workers that "being gay and working for a gay is not what it's cracked up to be" (143). When at last gay union leaders began to target gay-owned workplaces that employed largely gay workers, dual loyalties hindered the organization process. And even union members who had come to terms with LGBT issues sometimes had difficulty with trans members and the notion of transsexuality, leaving the process of neutralizing sexual orientation for workplace purposes far from finished. Frank adopts an anecdotal strategy to tell her story. Moving from the personal experiences of LGBT union members in the fifties and early sixties, she takes us into the conversations inside union locals and moves from there to the moments when LGBT members literally put their bodies on the line in order to challenge labor-movement hostility. For her, personal experiences constitute a moving entry point into the daily struggle to reconcile the rhetoric of economic solidarity with rampant hostility toward LGBT people. Each story illustrates a larger process whose significance lies in its capacity to demonstrate how individuals and groups learned to discard personal prejudice in the interests of common purpose. Finally, Frank argues, sexuality became not an irrelevant factor in local union activities but a positive asset. The milestone was achieved in 1997 when AFL-CIO president John Sweeney announced a coalition with "Pride at Work." Yet, as Frank suggests, that moment marked not the end of a common struggle for justice but a step along the way of a more inclusive labor movement.
Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker, and the Historian’s Gaze
International Labor and Working-class History, 2006
While historians have provided insights into the ways women's work culture and labor organizing were infused with issues of sex, sexuality and appearance, they have not similarly examined the white male working body. This article discusses the significance of this different analysis for our understanding of men workers and for its ability to continue to marginalize women at the workplace. It considers how to incorporate the "bodily turn" in history by examining three conceptual themes in research on working-class masculinity: masculinity crises, muscular masculinity, and homosociality.
Book review symposium: Huw Beynon, Working for Ford: Men, Masculinity, Mass Production and Militancy
Work, Employment and Society, 2015
Working for Ford ‘describes what it is like to work in a car factory’ (as the cover blurb put it) and it explores the nature of trade union workplace organization, militancy and workers’ economic and political aspirations. Readers of this journal are likely to be aware of what it said, and I thus go straight to comment on two issues: the methodology and the form of explanation that can be gleaned from the book. Re-reading it led me to reflect on it at more length; these reflections are available separately (Edwards, in press). One myth is that Beynon produced a highly fanciful account, based on what shop stewards told him outside the factory. In fact, he first entered Halewood in 1967, with the company’s agreement. He interviewed 36 shop stewards and 43 workers and shadowed the stewards’ convenor or his deputy for a day a week. He attended meetings and talked informally with stewards and workers. He maintained regular contact, after the end of his permitted time within the plant, up to 1971. As he put it in the 1984 edition (which deleted some of the details from the 1973 edition): ‘I knew that I hadn’t produced a false account’ (p. 14; emphasis in original). He was also not opposed to standard sociological investigation, having published in a book on perceptions of work based on structured questionnaires (Beynon and Blackburn, 1972). That book is directly relevant here, for it concluded with two observations on the orientations to work tradition: an orientation should not be reduced to a single dominant dimension, for other aspects are also important; and certain groups of worker were real entities reflecting the social division of labour that needed to be understood holistically, rather than have their social views reduced to separate variables. In the Halewood study, this holistic view was to the fore, while shifts in orientation were charted through the ways in which leaders challenged managerial control and developed a more oppositional ‘orientation’ than existed initially. It is true that the picture does not pretend to be representative. As Ralph Darlington (1994) has pointed out, Beynon focused on the assembly and not the body plant, despite specific features of the former that may not have reflected Halewood as a whole. He also addressed the oppositional aspects of workers’ behaviour and said little about consent or those who may have opted out from or even disliked these aspects. It was clear where intellectually Beynon was coming from, he provided a substantial amount of information 598259WES0010.1177/0950017015598259Work, Employment and SocietyBook review research-article2015