Manhood on the line: working-class masculinities in the American heartland - 237

In the early twentieth century, industrialization upended long-entrenched notions of gender and work identity in working-class men.

They responded by creating new identities that blended a rough masculinity of carousing and hard drinking with a respectable masculinity that aspired to join the nascent blue-collar middle class.

Stephen Meyer charts the complex vagaries of men reinventing manhood in twentieth-century America.

Their ideas of masculinity destroyed by principles of mass production, workers created a white-dominated culture that defended its turf against other racial groups and revived a crude, hypersexualized treatment of women that went far beyond the shop floor.

At the same time, they recast unionization battles as manly struggles against a system killing their very selves.

Drawing on a wealth of archival material, Meyer recreates a social milieu in stunning detail--the mean labor and stolen pleasures, the battles on the street and in the soul, and a masculinity that expressed itself in violence and sexism but also as a wellspring of the fortitude necessary to maintain one's dignity while doing hard work in hard world.