I, Too, Am a Man:

The Forging of “Emancipatory” Masculinities in the “American” Laboring Classes

By Joseph Mullin

During the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, new forms of masculinity came to dominance in the working classes. In the years following the Civil War, those who worked as laborers in manufacturing were relatively few. Some were self-employed, or they hoped one day to set up their own shops. Others worked in larger concerns, but most still saw themselves as autonomous skilled craftsmen who had significant control over their work conditions and productive process. Artisan values of self-determination and self-assertion were paramount for these skilled workers: they fought vigorously to promote their interests and to demand respect for their role in the economy and society of their day. By the early years of the twentieth century, the working class was much more numerous and increasingly both less skilled and more dependent on the industrial economy. Skilled workers, rather than continuing to demand their rights to control production, instead sought ways to negotiate with their employers to satisfy their “needs.” Less skilled immigrant and native workers were appreciative of increased access to industrial jobs. After years of fighting for their place, many of the working classes to a great extent accommodated to the conditions of the modern industrial process and to the values of their employers.

Traditionally, various historians have depicted this transition as the result of fundamental changes in the economy: the introduction of the factory system itself and of Taylorism,[1] the ruthless defeat of early union activism, the importation of immigrant labor to staff the new mechanistic mode of production. These factors were important, but they do not adequately account for the willingness of workers to participate in their own accommodation. Alternative theories propose that the mass media and/or public education were responsible in disseminating “American” values supportive of the upper classes, yet, as will be argued, such top-down explanations also assume a lower class passivity that again needs itself to be understood. Increasingly in this period, new and transformed varieties of cultural activities, values, and norms came to dominate male working class life. Though based on types of interaction found in premodern societies, these activities were now actively promoted and sought out in urban communities. Exploited for new uses, earlier forms were also transfigured. Largely active displays of male self-assertion gave way to largely passive appreciation of male “role models” or “stars.” New masculinities–fundamentally destructive of male self-esteem–were born.

A number of historians have looked at these changes in “working-class” masculinity. These analyses can be grouped into “schools” of thought. One seeks a psychological explanation for class behavior. Most other historians reject this emphasis on psychohistorical explanations. Some look to societal ones and others more exclusively to cultural factors for the emergence of new forms of masculinity in the period. Another “school” tries to apply the post-structuralist contributions of Michel Foucault to account for these differences and transformations. This paper will look at each of these in turn, as well as some of the reasons for both adopting and questioning these theoretical positions. First, though, a couple of preliminary theoretical and empirical considerations will be presented, both because they are to a large extent, if unconsciously, shared by all approaches and they provide a framework for the subsequent debates.

Preliminary Considerations

Gender

Although a few individual studies have looked at the relation of forms of masculinity and labor history before the late 1980s, a major reevaluation took place at this time that might be seen as the “gendering” of labor history. Largely the contribution of feminist historians, a series of monographs were presented, particularly in anthologies published in 1991 and 1993.[2]

A number of these historians had already looked at gender relations, but largely in the interrelations of women and men in the workplace. They had found that, early in the period, women increasingly became employed in certain less skilled positions, for a time supplementing family incomes and even organizing alongside men in union activities. Yet, later in the period, women increasingly were seen as a threat by male coworkers, who increasingly excluded them from union activities and organized themselves in efforts to exclude women from working outside the home.[3] As Eileen Boris points out, efforts extended further to attempts to restrict female work performed in tenements, for such work “in the home” also posed a threat to male skilled labor and to men’s role as primary breadwinner for his family.[4] These efforts established a place for gender as an important conceptual tool in labor history, for union activities in the period could no longer be understood without reference to the role of women both in unionism and in union exclusionary practices.

Yet a few of these same historians began to ask if these same tools of analysis might not be used for understanding male unionism in general. Instead of only asking how women and femininity functioned in labor history, they began to ask how men and masculinity functioned to determine union activity and male labor more generally. Articles in the above mentioned anthologies attempted to look at working class masculinity in a number of ways, including its relation to age, class, femininity, race and region.[5] In such studies, masculinity is put forward as an important component in the history of labor in this period.

“Class”

One contribution of this reconsideration of labor history is the notion that there are a number of different working class forms of masculinity, and that these are linked to intraclass differences as well as evolving historical conditions. Mary Blewitt’s work best details the range of different masculine values and practices in the period.[6] In her essay “Masculinity and Mobility,” Blewitt suggests four separate forms of working-class masculinity in the period. The first might be called “agrarian” masculinity, for it is based on the model of a family economy in which a man’s masculinity did not preclude the use of his wife and children’s labor in the household. Those from rural communities, though perhaps themselves highly skilled in their farm work, conceived of their manhood in terms of family self-sufficiency and an idealization of rural life. The second, here subsequently referred to as “artisan” masculinity, is also traditional. Though similar to “agrarian” masculinity in their acceptance of a household economy that might rely on the contributions of a wife and children, artisans were more likely to look back to craft forms of production that tied a man’s manliness to his gender-specific possession of skills. These men believed that their ability to support their family and dictate the conditions and methods of their employment set them apart from the unskilled or the not-yet-skilled. A third form perhaps is best called “brawn” or “virile” masculinity, which included a willingness to resort to force or violence if necessary to assert one’s perceived “rights.” It was the form of masculinity more common for those who were less skilled and those who immigrated from non-Western European or Irish countries. It also was valued by many women in the period, including many wives of those who valued the “artisan” form, who sometimes saw their husbands’ lack of aggressive defiance as a lack of manhood. Therefore, instead of a singular “working-class masculinity” reflective of a unity of class, there existed, some argue, a number of different forms based upon intraclass difference and rivalry, including ethnic difference.

A fourth form, here called “emancipatory” masculinity, values, instead of the control of production or the use of force, the right to receive a “living wage” from one’s employer and the right to leave both one’s job or one’s place of residence to seek “a better life.” It conceives as truly “American” this “freedom” of mobility both in class status and in location. Blewitt argues, and most of the following historians concur, that this last form, though based on agrarian and artisan beliefs of freedom and liberty, is a newly forged type of masculinity in the period. Although Blewitt does not make this distinction, it is best to see this form as two variants sharing a common “emancipatory” rhetoric. The first variant could be called the “respectable” form, for these men saw upward mobility and middle-class values, norms, and practices as what was distinctively “American.” The second could be called “assimilationist,” for these men saw the overcoming of foreign ways as the route to their acceptance as “Americans.” Skilled workers of native or English origin tended to be those who adopted respectable “emancipatory” manliness; many less skilled and immigrant men sought to assimilate. But for most analysts, both forms, in distinction from earlier forms, were “consumerist,” in that they judged a man by his ability to participate and excel as a consumer, rather than as a producer or as a physically aggressive competitor.[7]

Sociality

A third important analytical tool for this subject is the distinction between homosociality and heterosociality. During this period, an important shift took place between men (and women) primarily socializing with those of their own gender to forms of interaction increasingly between those of different genders. This initial homosociality may at first appear simply as a manifestation of Victorian “separate spheres,” yet these forms took place in virtually all social groups, not just those of the middle or skilled working classes who may have shared this cultural construct. These early forms ranged, for men, from gentlemen’s “clubs” to fraternal organizations to trade union halls to neighborhood “pubs.” Sometime between the turn of the century and World War I, these forms of interaction became increasingly displaced by heterosocial ones: companionate marriages, the primacy of the nuclear family and the “home,” “dating,” dance halls, amusement parks, and movie theatres. Vestiges of the older forms certainly survived, but clearly it became expected and considered “normal” for young adulthood to associate with those of the opposite sex.

This is perhaps most obvious in the lower classes, where competitive heterosexuality in dance halls and amusement parks replaced aggressive competition between male “gangs” and ethnic groups. No longer meeting in traditional family or community networks, young people of the lower classes increasingly purchased products and clothing to attract members of the opposite sex. What Kevin White calls “a public, youth-oriented, heterosocial leisure world” forged a synthesis between a former “bachelor subculture” of the streets with modern consumerism.[8] In this milieu, many male youths rejected the foreign ways of their parents and fashioned a new “American” heterosocial world of display and amusement.

Yet this shift also is apparent in the lives of skilled male workers. As Robert Griswold points out, and other works attest to, the nuclear family “Home” came to dominate both labor discourse and, apparently, labor assumptions.[9] Certainly based upon the “household” of agrarian traditions and the “family” of artisans, these elements became fused with middle-class, Protestant ideals of the “Home” to form a nuclear family model compatible both with their traditional values and with their upward aspirations. Preserving the Home, including the exclusion of women from having to leave the home to work, became frequent forms of rhetoric used by union leaders in the later decades of this period.[10] Individual workers increasingly saw their manliness constantly tested in their ability to solely provide for their families and in securing their own, their wives, and their children’s futures.[11] Finding fewer fulfillments in fraternal organizations or in union activity, they spent more time taking part in family-oriented activities such as father-son athletics, company picnics, movies, dances, and “family outings.”[12] So common was this phenomenon that many later historians based their analyses on the assumption that working-class men were sole breadwinners for their families, a “fact” easily refuted by gender historians in their analyses of women’s labor history.

The Historiographical Debate

Thus it is generally agreed that important changes in class, gender, and social preferences took place in the male labor force between 1880 and 1920. Although many individuals may have considered their masculinity in ways that showed continuity with agrarian, artisan, and “brawn” forms, increasingly both skilled and less-skilled workers were forging new forms sharing a rhetoric of freedom and “American” mobility. They were also much more likely to see the performance of these forms of masculinity in relationship to women rather than to one another. And this “heterosociality” had implications for the values, norms, and practices of labor unions and of rank and file laborers. The different “schools” of history to a great extent share these conclusions, especially after the contributions of the “gendering” of labor history in the years around 1990. However, they differ in their proposed explanations for these changes.

Status Anxiety Theory

Perhaps one of the earliest efforts to account for changes in manliness and its relation to labor history was David Montgomery’s work on the effects of the loss of skilled workers’ control of production in the last half of the nineteenth century.[13] His work is considered a major breakthrough, both for its role as producer of dissenting hypotheses and for its continuing contribution to the understanding of the psychological orientation of many skilled laborers as they lost the bases for their artisan masculinity. Montgomery outlines the “functional autonomy” of craftsmen at mid-century and the impact of factory production, scientific management, and the open shop drive used by employers to undermine it. He contends that this process led to the loss of status of labor, which struck at the very heart of their sense of themselves as men. They therefore experienced a sense of anxiety, which, when coupled with union leadership holding full-time salaried positions, led to union efforts to seek “to negotiate the terms of work with employers, rather than letting their members ‘legislate’ them.”[14] Skilled workers could no longer demand their rights as equal, or even superior, participants in the labor process on account of their possession of necessary skills. In these changed conditions of production, they presumably would have to base their manliness on their ability to attain needs through accommodation with their employers.[15]

One early variant of this thesis is the hypothesis that labor increasingly forged new “strategies of survival” that relied on child labor.[16] Industrial workingmen no longer could support their families on their own wages. “Vulnerability,” rather than autonomy, now characterized their lives. Breadwinning according to this early position continued to be crucial: family labor, for all “working-class fathers” including less-skilled immigrants, is seen as a result of the loss of male breadwinning ability. Yet exclusive male breadwinning–men supplying all the needs of one’s nuclear family–characterized one form of “emancipatory” masculinity, not artisan, agrarian, or brawn forms. The fact that breadwinning was considered the primary value of a man’s worth itself also needs to be explained, rather than simply assumed.

Elliott Gorn, in his 1986 work on bare-knuckle boxing, also adopts a status anxiety argument in his account of the origins of what is here called “brawn” masculinity.[17] Instead of seeing aggressiveness and male homosociality in saloons as continuous with traditions of immigrants from their countries of origin, he sees such forms of “rough conviviality” as new strategies of autonomy adopted in response to loss of autonomy in the workplace.[18] More recently, Michael Kaplan contends that unskilled working-class tavern violence can be explained by the male “identity” formed in response to their “declining social and economic status” and the resulting “perception of disappointment or declining status,” or “relative deprivation,” that manifested itself in forms of social pathology.[19] This argument points out general tendencies of these status anxiety positions: to extend artisan masculinity to the entire working-class and to account for deviations from this model in terms of psychological abnormalities.

Some status anxiety theorists after the “gendering” breakthroughs instead accept the notion of multiple working class masculinities. Ava Baron’s work on youth apprenticeship acknowledges the intraclass specificity of her conclusions, which chronicle the psychological responses of skilled craftsmen as relatively less skilled apprentices and later unskilled women and immigrants increasingly displaced them.[20] Peter N. Stearns takes this “class” diversity into account in his second edition of Be a Man! At the same time, he criticizes certain “recent feminist” historians who, he feels, fail “to comprehend the very real issues that workers were trying to address through their masculine culture or to the extent to which women as well as men helped form this culture.”[21]

Certainly “status anxiety” was an important component for many workingmen, particularly skilled labor, as industrialization radically changed the nature of work and the lives of working families. Urbanization, changes in immigration, changes in gender and other social relations, and changes in cultural values had fundamental psychological and emotional effects on many Americans as a new “modern” world came into being. Likewise, many working men seeking either security or survival made choices reflective of these fears and anxieties. Judgements that depict men in this period as fundamentally chauvinistic oppressors of women and others, without trying to understand such actions and values, need perhaps to be tempered with more complex and nuanced studies of masculine “identity” and male behavior.

Yet a number of limitations continue to exist in status anxiety theories. Most fundamental is its reliance on individual psychological explanations to account for the behavior of social groups. Actually, social factors are seen as primary in the more sophisticated versions of this interpretation, which see industrial working conditions as the crucial changes that drive these alterations in “identity.” Other factors, both social and cultural, are put forward below as additional meta-individual influences on the construction of male identity and personality in the working classes. Associated with this reliance on psychohistorical explanations is the tendency mentioned above of pathologizing these forms of masculinity, because they deviate from those either preferred by individual (usually middle-class) historians or considered “normal” by workers who considered themselves “above” those less skilled or less “respectable” than themselves. Jon M. Kingsdale, in his 1973 study of urban lower working-class saloons, previously outlined real social functions of such forms of behavior. He shows both the Old World continuities of these types of homosocial institutions and their central role in the union, political, and social lives of working men in the nineteenth century.[22] Mary Ann Clawson documents the rise and fall of fraternal organizations that met the needs of many workingmen of various skill levels in the later half of the nineteenth century.[23] Status anxiety theory also de-emphasizes worker’s willingness to actively adopt new and transformed forms of masculinity, especially the “Emancipatory” forms that increasingly were turned to as more traditional forms were no longer judged relevant or advantageous in a modernizing United States.

Another major critique of status anxiety was more consciously a response to David Montgomery’s conclusion that male fears were based on real losses of status, as well as other historians’ proposals of real loss of breadwinning ability by workingmen in the period. Elaine Tyler May looks at this working-class “pressure to provide” by analyzing divorce statistics and case histories.[24] For skilled workers, real reduction in status or earnings did not appear to be the primary factors in destroying families in the period, but rather men’s inability to provide for the increasing material desires of their spouses. Rising material aspirations drove rising standards of male worth, rather than loss of traditional standards of status or traditional male familial roles. For less-skilled workers, loss of ability to maintain family incomes and thus male contribution to breadwinning played a larger role in most divorces. Yet, for a sizeable minority of lower class wives, their husbands’ inability to satisfy their consumer desires and expectations of upward mobility played a fundamental role in their wish to discontinue their marriages. These conclusions are further developed in the next two groups of historiography.

Modern Consumer Society

Central to this position is the shift May finds between a society based in the 1880s on the pressure to provide for the necessities of life to one based in the 1920s on the pressure to provide for increasingly higher ideals of “comfort.”[25] According to this set of historians, the United States by World War I had become a consumer society, with new sets of values, norms, and behaviors based on material possessions and middle-class leisure culture. Working class individuals, especially the sons and daughters of both skilled laborers and immigrants, no longer accepted the traditional forms of social interaction and material limitations that typified their parents. Either social forces and cultural images worked to supply values reflective of the needs of capitalism, or middle-class individuals sought outlets for their own consumer interests in a transformed working-class culture.

Lawrence Glickman looks at the shift of organized union rhetoric from a “wage slavery” discourse to a “living wage” discourse. Union leaders began to replace an understanding of manliness based on membership in the “producing classes” to one based on more equal participation in a consumer society. An “American Standard of Living” was a level of wages that permitted a “comfortable” style of life that devalued thrift, central to artisan responsibility, in favor of a “multiplicity of wants and desires.” This was promoted as good for the economy of the country: rather than “frivolous,” such desires “were absolutely necessary because they would unleash demands that would, in turn, lead to increased production.”[26] “Civilized needs”–the ability to buy a home, to purchase the material objects reflecting a middle-class lifestyle, to meet the aspirational needs of their family–separated the consumer values of the upper working-class from unskilled workers, immigrants, women, and ethnic minorities. The adoption of these consumerist values and the ability to supply for these aspirations–that is, the acceptance of middle-class values, norms, and ways of life–were seen as central to the “emancipatory” form of masculinity for the skilled classes.

For those less skilled, middle-class consumer culture had a more direct impact. Although Elliott Gorn adopts a “status anxiety” approach to understand the emergence of “brawn” masculinity, he uses a consumerist approach to account for the replacement of bare-knuckle boxing with a form according to more respectable Queensbury rules.[27] In the late nineteenth century, some middle-class men increasingly found little satisfaction in their jobs or in respectable society, which devalued an active life and considered certain types of interests uncouth. Bare-knuckle boxing, formerly taking place in the “underworld” of working-class saloons and music halls, now found an audience of some upper class men “slumming” for vicarious action and aggressiveness. Yet such lower class forms of pugilism were too violent and bloody for most respectable men. Moves were made to institute reforms on boxing, including the application of codes that were used in England. Some lower class boxers, including John L. Sullivan, responded to this commercialization of their sport by appealing more and more to these changes. Respectability and decorum increasingly replaced the “old barbarism.” Lower working-class “brawn” masculinity was transformed from above into values, norms, and behaviors more like those of the middle-class.

Yet both these approaches only impact on certain minorities of the working classes: union leadership of skilled craft unions and working-class sport “stars.” The relevance of these changes to other workingmen is questionable, for many continued to resist efforts from above to impose middle-class values on themselves and on their children. Tom Pendergast’s study of mass media efforts to disseminate consumer values to the working-class finds that consumer-driven magazines only began to appeal to the lower classes in the late 1930s and early 1940s.[28] Likewise, immigrant fathers resented school officials’ efforts to enforce compulsory school laws throughout this period, for they, according to Robert L. Griswold, did not want their children forcibly “Americanized” into materialist ways of life.[29] Whether reflective of socio-economic changes or not, top-down theories of cultural diffusion lead to a number of related problems. The numbers affected by cultural diffusion are limited. Dates of dissemination appear to show that dissemination from above seems to respond to, rather than precipitate, changes in the working class. And, most importantly, top-down theories assume cultural passivity that does not hold up to further examination. As Lisa Fine points out about later acceptance of “welfare capitalism,” workers “were not simply coopted or oppressed … [they] took a more self-conscious and active role, using these programs to their own advantage.”[30]

Social Mobility Theories

These theories follow from Elaine Tyler May’s observations concerning wives’ ever-increasing aspirations as presented in court records of proceedings for divorce. The manhood of most skilled workers and that of a minority of unskilled laborers were, by 1920, judged according to their ability to satisfy their material desires and future status goals and those of their spouses and children, rather than the satisfaction of the family’s current needs.

Earlier forms of this theory maintained a largely top-down idea of cultural diffusion. For skilled workers, Ilene A. DeVault looks at attempts of families to provide opportunities for their sons and daughters to “move up” the social ladder.[31] Children of skilled and native-born workers overwhelmingly performed clerical work in the 1890s. Such positions required the achievement of both sacrifice and relative comfort by their parents. “Respectable” Emancipatory masculinity, based on the “American Standard of Living,” included such aspirations and new “needs”: “[t]he unionist’s ideal ‘family wage’ would cover not only food, clothing, and shelter, but also comforts such as the pianos so many middle-class observers expressed surprise to see in turn-of-the-century skilled workers’ homes.”[32] Workers with such “needs” and demands would find it very difficult to jeopardize these promises of upward mobility by participating in union activism.

For the less skilled, assimilation to American ways of life represented their own form of social mobility, according to Robert Griswold. Many unskilled immigrant workers, although they feared the materialism of American culture, actively sought out language and citizenship classes for themselves and especially for their children, in order to permit their children access to a better way of life.[33] Although they continued to value physical labor, many fathers felt shame, according to Griswold, in their reliance on their children’s labor and in their non-American ways of life.

Problems arise again with these earlier studies due to their reliance on top-down models. Robert Griswold himself reveals this dilemma. To him, many Italian-American fathers “doubted whether extended schooling, the white-collar jobs such schooling would bring, and masculinity were compatible.”[34] Yet many encouraged their sons nevertheless. Instead, reciprocal theories of class acculturation have been put forward, as Lisa Fine calls for above. These are the basis for the idea of new “Emancipatory” forms of masculinity forged by working class men in these years. Adopting the rhetoric of freedom and liberty, workingmen, both skilled and unskilled, began to associate their manliness with mobility, whether perceived as upward mobility or cultural modernism. Youth began to reject the traditional values, norms, and behaviors of their elders, forging new types of “youth cultures” that accepted consumer values and social mobility as representative of a man’s worth.

For the skilled, Mary Blewitt looks at changes in masculinity for textile workers in New England.[35] English-born spinners, holding to vestiges of artisan values, continued to attempt to push for their claims at their workplace. Though they reacted to changes in work relations by struggling for a “living wage” rather than control of the work process, they continued to see their own future connected with their skilled position and their place of residence. For many New England-born workers, geographical mobility, initially from farm to factory, was valued instead. These “American” workers associated individual rights with the “right to leave one employer or community and seek to better himself as a man,” rejecting as “spiritless and unmanly the claims of immigrant spinners and weavers to a right to work in their trade in their chosen community.”[36] Ava Baron looks instead at generational differences between master craftsmen and their apprentices. Unlike their masters who desired to impose standards and practices for their jobs, boys “preferred to have the right to leave for better job offers at will.”[37] As Ilene DeVault points out, even Pittsburgh’s “aristocracy” of skilled labor “often tried to escape from the very work they glorified, becoming full-time unionists or politicians or, in the case of clerical training, seeking something ‘better’ for their sons.”[38] According to Robert Cherny, who is working on a biography of the “radical” unionist Harry Bridges, he even did not want his son working on the waterfront and got very upset when his son did work there one summer.[39]

Ilene DeVault adds that less skilled industrial workers found even “less to glorify in their work and more to gain from having their sons escape it.”[40] Yet for some of the sons and daughters of the unskilled, upward mobility was not the primary form of mobility that they were forging for themselves. Instead, an “American” youth culture was their preoccupation: the rejection of the foreign ways of their parents and the fashioning of a new heterosocial world of display and amusement. [41] Although frequented by first- and second-generation immigrant youth “eager for assimilation,” this world, like upward mobility, was actually a synthesis of traditional forms and modern opportunities. Characterized by dance halls, amusement parks, “dating,” and movie theatres, it represented a development out of the homosocial bachelor subculture outlined by Elliott Gorn: transformed by heterosociality and consumerism.

Although these efforts to understand working-class involvement in these developments are important improvements to more simplistic cultural diffusion models based on class dominance, important questions remain. New forms of masculinity developed for some members of the working-class, but this in itself does not account for their eventual dominance in the years to follow. Griswold’s Italian-American fathers still held out the hope that their sons would remain the “men” that they considered normative. Upward mobility and accommodation to homogenous “Americanness” are values so pervasive today that the question can be easily overlooked, but other alternatives were, and remain, possible. Such values, norms, and behavior could just as well have been rejected as signs of chauvinism or immaturity. Larger social and cultural forces were at work that made the “American” values and practices of youth adopted by a vast majority of future workingmen. In addition, if working-class men increasingly wanted to be “Americans” without class, these theories fail to account for the substance or origins of these ideas, norms, and practices. Such bottom-up theories are too revisionary, for they need to look more deeply at the reciprocal relations between working-class men and larger or more powerful forces.

Marxian Class Analysis

A number of studies attempt to tie men’s sense of themselves as men to their class membership. Gender in these approaches is seen either as a result of class position, awakening class-consciousness, or growing acceptance of a false ideological consciousness. Articles on workers in the extractive industries and on cigarmakers will be reviewed here, for they show both the range of this “school’s” important contributions to gender analysis and some of its limitations.

One early effort to understand male gender construction in mining was Gunther Peck’s “Manly Gambles.”[42] In this article, Peck describes the divergent conceptions of manhood of Comstock miners and middle-class men during early industrialization of the mines, by focusing on their different ideas of what they considered “acceptable” risks. For him, both Comstock middle-class officials and miners developed these differences in relation to one another. He points out that early Cornish miners “cooly . . . risked their lives underground in pursuit of hard currency.”[43] Nineteenth century middle class commentators saw this as evidence of a fondness for gambling, which they considered immoral. They blamed miner’s high mortality rates and financial insecurity to this penchant for taking “unacceptable” risks. Some middle-class men criticized capitalists who subjected their workers to unacceptable risks. For them, capital investment was the acceptable form of risk-taking. [44] For early miners, their own notions of acceptable risk were “grounded in their definitions of it in the daily challenges of wage work.”[45] In addition to subjecting themselves to hazardous work conditions, this included prizefights and gambling contests. Gambling valued chance with limited economic gains, rather than rational capital accumulation. Thus risks were shared and mutualistic rather than individualistic, although white miners “feminized” Chinese workers. Yet both middle class mine owners and working class miners could affirm a common identity as manly risk-takers. Despite middle-class efforts to curb workplace and community risks, though, Comstock miners were men who rejected the total elimination of risk, because such ideas challenged their control over their own health and manhood.

Yet Peck does point out that this form of working-class masculinity differed from that found in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania by 1870. Unlike in the Comstock of the 1870s, notions in Pennsylvania of employer liability for miners’ safety gained considerable popularity,[46] for risk-taking with one’s life or money was not as central to these miners’ notions of themselves as men. Nancy Quam-Wickham argues that the tendency of historians to consider miners and other Western extractive laborers as militant risk-takers who valued the demonstration of individual strength is unwarranted. To her, it is merely an acceptance of the ideology of the American West as a “He-Man Land” that was fashioned by writers at the turn of the century.[47] Instead, she contends that these workers valued teamwork, brotherhood, union membership, and the demonstration of skill rather than strength. Instead of men rejecting forms of masculinity that celebrated self-discipline and hard work, miners were, according to Quam-Wickham, skilled workers who proved their manhood by demonstrating their experience, ability, and ingenuity in accomplishing their job. They were not isolated men bonding with other men in drinking, gambling, and whoring; alienated from women; or sole breadwinners in their families. Unlike middle-class notions of “True Womanhood,” but like early “artisan” notions of manhood, women’s labor was considered valuable and necessary, for it contributed to household necessities.

Elizabeth Jameson in an earlier article argues that miners in Cripple Creek, Colorado also valued skill and union membership, but, instead of possessing a skilled working-class form of masculinity, these workers came to adopt middle-class notions of gentility and “True Womanhood.”[48] Due to successful union control over wages and working conditions, miners fashioned a household economy based on a sole male breadwinner, sustaining a wide distance between the home and work. Therefore, although miners and their wives challenged industrial capitalism, “neither questioned traditional relations with the other.”[49] Yet her neat characterization quickly breaks down. She points out that after work, “men often spent time downtown in bars, gambling rooms, or at union and lodge meetings.”[50] Frequent prizefights reflected the value of masculine dominance in the mining camps. She contends that “real men” were not only concerned with strength and sexuality, with rugged individualism, but also with hard work and with supporting their families. Yet manhood was also tied to militant unionism:[51] miners derided scabs for their lack of manhood. With respect to women, Western labor unions, rather than relegating women to a secondary role in the home, championed their right to vote.

It is evident from these studies that efforts to find a single “working-class” masculinity fail to adequately account for the range of masculinities even in one industry. Mary Blewitt’s more complex and nuanced depiction of multiple forms, reviewed in the beginning of this essay, more successfully accounts for working-class manliness in this period.

Also problematic with these approaches is their tendency to underrepresent agency and the influence of non-class factors such as gender role expectations and ethnicity. Workers reflect social changes in these accounts, rather than appear as actors who have an impact to change their self-construction. Patricia A. Cooper’s work Once a Cigar Maker chronicles the changes over time of the masculinity of skilled cigar workers in a number of Northern cities.[52] After providing a description of the work culture and early union activity of these workers, she looks at how the industry increasingly was deskilled, through rudimentary forms of machinery and teamwork and the increasing use of female labor. Cigarmakers resisted these changes by developing union efforts to oppose female employment and, more consequentially, female membership in craft unions. To them, male cigar workers had their own exclusionary work culture and “manliness carried with it ‘connotations of dignity, respectability, defiant egalitarianism and patriarchal male supremacy.’”[53] Yet, instead of seeing this as inevitable or the development of false consciousness, due to the development of capitalism, Cooper understands this as a result of the notions of gender held by male workers and union leaders during this historical period. In the process, they alienated their efforts from the contributions of female workers.[54] Nancy Hewitt found similar dynamics in Tampa unions in the years immediately preceding World War I. Yet due to the war and increasing employment of “American girls,” ethnic solidarity came again to outweigh gender differences there, permitting continued, if fragile, cross-gender solidarity.[55]

Nancy Hewitt further adds to this debate by depicting the divergent forms of masculinity between the virile, militant form possessed presumably by Tampa Latin cigarmakers and the accommodationist craft union form enforced by labor leaders associated with the Cigar Makers’ International Union.[56] Local Tampa unions were organized on an industrial basis and included both men and women, and multiple racial and ethnic groups, in a unified community-based defense of their shared prerogatives. Although these unions were “gender-integrated” rather than “gender-neutral”–often employing the “rhetoric of victimized women and maternal martyrdom”[57]–they welcomed female employment and female labor militancy in the years before World War I. The CMIU instead described itself as a “conservative organization of American working men,”[58] championing patriotism and proper sex roles: for men, a sole male breadwinner model was alone acceptable for “honest,” rather than “virile,” labor.

Social Control Theories

Other sets of approaches look at non-socio-economic explanations for these new forms of masculinity. Historians producing social control studies look instead to efforts to “reform” the working-class by the more powerful or more organized. Desires for upward mobility and “Americanness” result, according to this view, from “Americanization”: whether promoted by private organizations or by state institutions. Research on such efforts is voluminous, but only a few studies specifically look at efforts to disseminate and enforce notions of masculinity.

Robert Griswold, despite his overall reliance on status anxiety theory, reviews research on reform efforts against child abuse and desertion among the working-class.[59] Linda Gordon looks at efforts by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children to make violence against children a social issue in the 1870s.[60] Martha May studied efforts to deal with the “problem” of male desertion and nonsupport by Minnesota’s Children Home Society in the 1890s.[61] Upper- and middle-class reformers, inspired by nativism, suspicion of “inferior” lower-class ways of life, fears of urban social disorder, and a sentimental conception of childhood, sought to combat numerous forms of behavior of the working classes. They felt free to intervene both directly and through governmental action in the lives of their cultural “inferiors,” including against fathers who they believed “violated all standards of manhood and fatherly decency.” To these reformers, working-class men, lacking character rather than capital, sometimes needed to be reminded, “by force if necessary, of their breadwinning obligations.”[62]

Foreign-born immigrant fathers had to face numerous efforts to forcibly “Americanize” them and their children. Lisa Fine looks at efforts of the Reo Motor Car Company to require Americanization and good citizenship programs of their foreign workers. These included efforts not only to stifle any activity “with a taint of radicalism,” but also customs and values, including alcohol consumption, that were contrary to “American” values.[63] Griswold’s review of research on the relation of compulsory education and the Americanization of immigrant children reveals that educators justified such efforts by claiming that such behaviors were necessary if immigrant children were to be successful in the United States.[64]

Yet the children, even if disinterested in education itself, often eagerly adopted the customs, styles, and mores of school officials.[65] Although efforts were undeniably made to disseminate middle-class values and behaviors to the lower classes, the problems of top-down explanations still apply to these theories, for they fail to account adequately for the uses and attraction of these efforts to the lower classes. They do expand historians’ awareness of the range of influences impacting on working-class lives in the period. The next “school” looks more deeply at the interrelationship of imposed values, norms, and behaviors and the involvement of the working classes.

Ideological Hegemony

A number of scholars have looked at ideas frequently expressed in texts from the period, in order to group together “rhetorical strategies” used by dominant classes to “persuade” working-class men to adopt new forms of masculinity. Instead of finding a single unitary set of beliefs, recent historians have proposed a number of often-contradictory clusters of hegemonic ideas that presumably appealed to different groups of workers.

One set of ideas has already been covered here in detail: the consumerism that seemed to typify both forms of “Emancipatory” masculinities. Earlier historians tried to see these values as a manifestation of consumer capitalism[66] or of aspirations to become one of the middle-class.[67] More recent studies look at consumer culture relatively disconnected from economic inequality. Ilene DeVault and Lisa Fine stress skilled workers’ parental desires to provide security as well as prosperity for their children.[68] Lawrence Glickman sees consumerism as a means of skilled workers to assert their relative “superiority” over those less fortunate.[69] Tom Pendergast looks at the relation of consumerism to the selling of magazines and other forms of mass media.[70]

A second cluster of ideas is that of competitive teamwork. During the period, individual acts of heroism or prowess are increasingly given less value, while action as part of a team is increasingly celebrated and validated. Donald J. Mrozek looks at the role of the military in supplying ideals to both middle-class and working-class men in the period. Instead of validating “brawn,” the military of Theodore Roosevelt’s time attempted to cultivate a sense of restraint and deferential relationships that fostered a “predisposition towards unity.” Mrozek contends that this military ethos spread widely in the culture.[71] Mary Blewitt, in her study of New England weavers and spinners, shows that mill agents, in an attempt to make use of workers’ pride to increase their productivity, posted daily work records of each spinner “to create competition” and “to encourage shame and ridicule among men about their work capabilities.”[72] Lisa Fine looks at how the Reo Car Co. used organized competitive sports to encourage teamwork and values of “fair play.” The object of the bowling league was “to unite its members in the closest bonds of fellowship: to get a better understanding of each other and thereby to ensure closer cooperation between departments to create better sportsmanship and insure fair play in keen competition.”[73] Such efforts minimized workers’ attention to class divisions.

A different set of ideas uses organic metaphors to promote an image of American society that also de-emphasizes differences between classes. Melissa Dabakis attempts to interpret an 1896 sculpture, proposing that the artist organized capitalists, skilled workers, and unskilled workers into a harmonious unity sharing common beliefs in progress and industry.[74] Commissioned by the estate of a San Francisco industrialist, the sculpture depicts each class, according to her, working “together” to drive a machine. Yet hierarchy is established in the sculpture. The sculptor represented the capitalists in portrait plaques on the stand, presumably both representing their rational powers and their foundational role. Skilled workers depicted with near-naked bodies most directly control the machine itself, acting as intermediaries in the ensemble. To Dabakis, they represent a synthesis between “the independent yeoman of the frontier past and the mostly immigrant proletariat.” The unskilled are contorted and virtually out-of-control: needing the machine to provide order for their bodies and presumably their lives. While resembling both agrarian ideals and those of the “Old South” in its attempt to both conceal and justify differences in social worth, this hierarchical organicism establishes, she argues, a new form of “muscular” masculinity that celebrates common American values and purposes in the service of industrialization.

Mary Ann Clawson contributes a similar “hegemonic ideology.” For her, nineteenth century fraternalism likewise provided a set of ideas and practices that functioned to de-emphasize class differences, creating social institutions based on the brotherhood of men as men. For her, the image of the artisan, when institutionalized in cross-class fraternal organizations, provided a unifying symbol for both “proprietors” and skilled workers.[75] Because artisan work embodied both individual accomplishment and brotherhood, it, according to her, fulfilled the purpose of giving value to middle-class notions of individualism within institutions committed to mutual support. The hierarchical structure of most fraternities, permitting the attainment of higher status but open to the achievement of all, further reinforced this fusion of class values. Gender was key: women were excluded except in auxiliary organizations. Fraternalism was particularly strong in the nineteenth century, when the ideal of artisanship was still persuasive. Further development of industrial work relations made this ideal untenable in the twentieth century, along with the expansion of heterosocial relationships and alternative sources of entertainment.

Paternalism is more in continuity with ideologies prevalent in the years following World War I, for it influences both “welfare capitalism” and the welfare state. This was the strategy most utilized by the Reo Motor Car Company, as studied by Lisa Fine. The goal was to make their employees feel that “the Reo” was their alternative family, in order to “evoke workers’ loyalty and preempt unionization.”[76] Managers achieved this by bestowing a range of services and benefits, using a paternal management style, and fostering the impression of employee security. Further, the company sought to appeal to men as men, across class, by affirming and supporting their “manly independence” and their role as breadwinner for his family. In return, the workingmen of Reo, perhaps hardly representative of their class because of their overwhelmingly native and local origins, participated in these efforts. The company had one of the lowest turnover rates of any automobile company.

What is unclear with all of these studies is whether these “hegemonic ideologies” are in fact the result of capitalist development and the workings of its dominant classes, or whether they are not better understood as attempts to recover or maintain precapitalist ways of conceiving and structuring social relations. Historians can persuasively argue that military values, competitive teamwork, “harmonious” hierarchical relationships, idealization of artisanship, and paternalism are all values and behaviors replaced by competitive individualism and material accumulation. Even consumerism can be seen as a response against the prevailing work ethic and self-denial that is frequently seen to represent a truly capitalistic spirit. If these rhetorical strategies were in fact functioning in this period, they could just as well be seen as efforts to react against the “hegemony” of capitalism or its negative effects.

Anti-Modernism Thesis

Another cultural approach to understanding changes in working-class masculinity in this period rejects the notion that new forms of ideological hegemony attempted to make men compatible with modern society. Instead, these views see workingmen themselves acting against modernization and the values, norms, and behaviors they associated either with those they judged “inferior” or with the “upper” classes.

Numerous “feminist” or other historians have studied the relationship of craft unionism and attempts to exclude women from the workplace during the 1870s and 1880s. Ava Baron’s work generally has focused on the way skilled labor responded to changes in their role as laborers by excluding women from work outside the home[77] and Eileen Boris extends this to union attempts to restrict “home” work in tenements.[78] Roderick Ryon looks at how craftsmen’s union halls, originally homosocial institutions excluding women, continued to act as barriers to women’s involvement in skilled positions in Baltimore at least until the First World War.[79] Yet such studies focus on craft leadership and skilled laborers. As Ryon points out, first and second generation immigrants, and presumably also men valuing especially “agrarian” masculinity, depended on their spouses’ labor: “immigrants generally had organized after 1900 in gender-integrated shop floors and neighborhood assembly halls, not in all male union halls away from working neighborhoods.”[80] Increasing involvement of women in the “public” sphere most likely precipitated some anti-feminist male responses, but these were more likely found with middle-class men and skilled workers.

Responses to increasing employment of “racial” minorities perhaps were more general. To many white men, these men “failed” to live according to the values, norms, and behaviors of both emerging “emancipatory” forms of masculinity. Lawrence Glickman looks at white, male trade unionists. He shows that they sought to exclude not only women and unskilled workers from skilled positions, but also African-Americans and other members of “less civilized” groups. To these white men, Chinese laborers, eating diets presumed inadequate for truly human consumption and having “no nuclear family to speak of,” required lower wage levels and thus placed impossible burdens on the “American” workers and their masculinity. African-Americans displayed their “inferiority” by instead consuming “mindlessly and limitlessly.”[81] Both Chinese and African-American workers, whose employment would disrupt traditional roles in the workplace, therefore were judged unfit and unmanly. Native- and European-born less-skilled workers also participated in turn-of-the-century racial intolerance, possibly because these non-white groups were also unwelcome competitors for scarce jobs.

Another anti-modernist response suggested by historians was directed against workingmen’s social “betters.” Mary W. Blanchard looks at a turn-of-the-century response against the Aestheticism of some of the upper- and middle-classes.[82] Some members of the elite, “war-weary” from the Civil War, responded by adopting interests and forms of masculinity that rejected “manly” forms of behavior. The aesthete, personified by Oscar Wilde who visited the U.S. in 1882, dressed in “feminized” attire, celebrated the “domestic sphere,” valued the “womanly” sentiment of compassion, preoccupied themselves with artistic and literary pursuits rather than manual labor, and, some perceived, “preyed” for sexual gratification on boys of the working classes. The self-image of the “soldierly” industrial worker was confronted with “effete” members of the elite who represented degeneracy and emasculation. Lawrence M. Lipin extends this working-class response to elite “debauchery” in general. Studying a court case presented to a largely “respectable” non-elite jury in New Albany, Indiana, he shows that the defense relied on depicting a teacher who killed a “libertine” son of a merchant who seduced his wife as a “virtuous defender of a simple and moral home.”[83] Yet again though, in both cases, the groups studied were members of labor’s “aristocracy,” who would more likely possess a form of “artisan” masculinity. George Chauncey’s work on working-class attitudes towards sex between men reveals, at least in New York City, that urban laborers were far more accepting of forms of gender-deviation and sexual difference than the middle-class, with some willingly selling their sexual services to members of the social elite. Even some members of the homosocial “bachelor subculture,” who later went on to marry women, found little trouble in engaging in such “immoral” forms of behavior as long as they maintained the masculine role in behavior and in sexual acts.[84] Stephen Maynard has found a similar openness to homosexual behaviors in mining and logging communities.[85]

Ironically, most of these studies attempt to represent as “traditional” responses that are instead reflective of the values, norms, and behaviors of emerging classes in American society. Gender roles reflective of “separate spheres,” the intolerance of immigrants and other non-Anglo-Saxon peoples, and “respectable” responses against “immorality” are indicative of “Victorian” middle classes and working class elite and their assertions of “superiority” against less evangelical lower or former elite classes. Yet these positions do warn against over-reliance on socio-economic explanations, as well as depictions of lower-class masculinity which do not consider their own contributions and preoccupations.

Political Ideology

Appeals to the possessed or potential ideals of the working-class are central to works that look at masculinity within the context of political thought. In their studies, these historians present labor leaders who are able to appeal to their constituencies because they are able to combine awareness of class conflict with notions of political manhood.

Nick Salvatore’s biography of Eugene V. Debs focuses on the transformations in Debs’ notions of manliness from his childhood to late in his life.[86] In his childhood, Debs considered the taking of personal responsibility for one’s deeds the only truly manly way of life. Later, willingness to follow the moral example of socially prominent individual leaders, even if they were capitalists, showed to Debs a man’s worth. Pledging one’s honor either to another or later to “the people,” though, conflicted with his earlier affirmation of an “individualistic, even atomistic, responsibility” to one’s own duty[87]. He later found ideological tools to overcome this contradiction in ideologies of the American Revolutionary political tradition, merging them with Christian symbolism. According to Salvatore, a true man to Debs was one who took responsibility for the erosion of one’s own liberty, acted for the good of the collective, and resisted corporate capitalism while acting politically to further workingmen’s goals. Thus stressing individual freedom of action, his strategy was controversial with some other socialists who found his individualism not compatible with Socialist theory. Yet it appealed successfully to many of the rank-and-file, for he understood that the working-class, particularly skilled laborers, resisted a conscious identification of themselves as the “working-class” and considered themselves at least political equals.[88] Debs provided both himself and his followers a way to resolve both their own internal and their social contradictions under industrial capitalism, divided as they were between traditional religious notions of individualism and those of collective responsibility.

Todd McCullum also finds conscious fashioning of a political manhood in efforts in Canada in 1919 to create a revolutionary industrial union, called “the One Big Union.”[89] McCullum contends that unions attempted to develop a conception of radical manhood that would appeal to male workers, while excluding the participation and consideration of most women and their affairs. “A Marxist form of patriarchal politics”[90] attempted to link aggressive socialist politics with a specific sense of male gender identity. Equating masculinity with strength, radical men confronted bosses and conservative unionists to follow their radical political agenda. Reformists were seen as timid men, unwilling to “scrap” for working-class causes. In contrast to the servile manhood of scabs, union leaders associated radical men with loggers, the “timberbeasts,” who were seen as the true bearers of Marxist masculinity.[91] Even the masculinity of skilled workers, based on traditional elements of skill, job control, and responsibility more consistent with Eugene V. Debs’ version of manliness, was devalued to some extent in favor of the values and modes of behavior of workers in transient and often brutal unskilled occupations. Due to the new “realities” of industrial capitalism, some union leaders felt that craft values could no longer be sustained; instead, the new socialist man would “know his Marx” and possess the technology of industry for himself, exclusive of ‘’parasites.”[92] Trying to unionize members of minority groups, McCullum contends, One Big Union leaders sought to construct a commonality of radical men across both race and ethnicity at the cost of subordinating women.

These are important contributions, especially in mapping some of the appeals of particular notions of masculinity for some of the working-class. Socialist politicians and revolutionary unionists sought to construct ideologies that would further their political causes and mobilize mass political action. Yet in both cases, these constructions were only able to appeal to a minority of working-class men. Instead of identifying and explaining working-class notions of masculinity, these studies may instead provide an understanding of how some prominent leaders of labor movements sought to influence the rank-and-file to transform their given or self-constructed notions of what constituted true manhood.[93]

Cultural explanations such as these have more general problems as well. Some describe cultural phenomena like working-class forms of masculinity without attempting to explain why such cultural notions increasingly came to replace types found in mid-nineteenth-century America. Did loss of status or breadwinning ability compel skilled workers to respond to increasing roles for women and minorities or were they just “misogynistic” or “racist”? Did structural factors like industrialism, bureaucratization, or urbanization fundamentally impact the timing and/or content of these new forms? Did class issues play a primary or minimal role? Were other cultural phenomena most important, like ideas of female gender roles; elite or popular forms of expression; publishing or other mass-media developments; or the introduction of “Emancipatory” ideas of masculinity that replaced “artisan,” “brawn,” or “agrarian” ideals?

Post-Structuralist Analyses

A final set of articles use the theories and methods of Michel Foucault to attempt to move beyond a separation of cultural from social factors in the construction of notions of manliness. These scholars also explicitly seek to account for agency as well as domination. They differ in their desire to integrate this theoretical orientation with more traditional historical approaches.

Francis Shor employs one approach indebted, he insists, to Foucault’s post-structuralism.[94] In his article, Shor tries to understand the attraction of some miners, participating in the Industrial Workers of the World, to direct action and sabotage. According to him, a particular form of male-centered gendered solidarity came along with this. Living together in crowded bunkhouses and working together below ground, miners drank, gambled, and “whored” together far from the ties of conventional society. Like the workers appealed to by the One Big Union, they rejected the masculine ideals of hard work and self-discipline, fashioning an oppositional masculinity that emphasized “virility, strength, and unconquerable optimism.”[95] Emasculation stood in opposition: those, whether capitalists or union leaders, who accepted respectability and compromise were less than men. From Foucault, Shor contends that members of the IWW were in a struggle over control of their own bodies. For her, these men were “uncertain about their manly status in the workplace,”[96] due to their employment in a historical period when industrial discipline, economic efficiency, and social regularization [were] the guiding imperatives in the reconstruction of power and authority in the workplace.”[97] They therefore subjected themselves to “a ritualistic test by which one could claim one’s own manhood.”[98]

Yet Foucault would probably object to this use of status anxiety theory to explain this form of masculine self-construction. Rather than reacting from psychological compulsion, group actors for Foucault create their identity in power relations that, though unequal and not free from social limitations, include both domination and active attempts at resistance. More important, Shor uses an analysis that, Foucault would argue, reifies the body as the essential site of labor struggle. Though these “virile” men may have been reacting to socio-economic change by “taking control of their own bodies,” Foucault would not see this as universal, but rather as an instance of the late nineteenth and twentieth century exercise of a strategy of power Foucault called “biopower.” Although this was a kind of empowerment, it required an active process of self-monitoring. Neither of these deviations from Foucaudtian analysis is necessarily incorrect with regard to these workers, but, if so, they would show the limits of Foucault’s own theoretical contributions to an understanding of the self-constructions of these men. Yet, contrary to Shor’s interpretation, there is evidence of “virile,” or “brawn,” forms of masculinity that predate the development of industrial capitalism proposed by him as the cause for this form of self-identity.

Daniel Bender utilizes a more Foucaudtian use of the body to understand the union activism of Jewish garment workers. In “’A Hero . . . for the Weak,’” Bender looks at how these workers used illness as a means of organizing and effectively reforming “unhealthy” conditions in the workplace.[99] Garment workers were subjected to poor ventilation and cramped conditions that left them with symptoms consistent with consumption. They accepted their medical diagnosis as sick men, yet they did not respond by relying solely on medical treatments or on individualized physical conditioning. Instead, they utilized these contemporary notions of medicine to fashion a new form of enfeebled class hero, fighting against inevitable death to change the conditions that “caused” their illness. Instead of essentializing the body as a site of contestation, Bender believes that these workers specifically employed this form of strategy, using contemporary “progressive” ideas of medicine. Instead of responding psychologically to changed conditions, Bender contends that these workers actively utilized what was meant as a form of disempowerment as a strategy of empowerment.

In The Gender of Breadwinners, Joy Parr also borrows this notion of strategic action from Michel Foucault.[100] According to her, woodworkers in Hanover, Ontario, used the conceptions of Christ as carpenter and men as sole breadwinners to, for a time, effectively organize in order to further their union goals. Skilled workers, they consciously valorized craftsmanship and male labor, rather than multiple alternative forms of masculinity, in response to efforts to deskill their local workplace and to increase the use of women in order to depress their wages. By using a claim to being a “family man,” responsible for providing for their family, they for some time and to a great extent effectively built a cross-class consensus concerning their rights as wage earners. Yet this effectively closed off union activities from the involvement of less-skilled and women workers, which was ultimately necessary for success. This is similar to Cooper’s analysis of cigarmakers, except that, for Cooper, those workers were not seen as actively adopting this strategy among others, but rather responding passively to contemporary notions of gender. Nancy Hewitt’s discovery of both gender-based and ethnic-based alternative strategies used by Tampa Latin cigarmakers substantiates Parr’s observation that such strategies, while structured and thus limited by social conditions, are among a variety of choices for given group actors in any given set of conditions, place and time.

Yet these accounts tend to under-represent the influence of “class” differences and aspirations. These historians acknowledge that masculinity was both limited by and actively constructed from specific positions in a social hierarchy, and strategies were deployed to respond to these social relations of power. Yet other historians contend that class membership was crucial. Limits placed upon workplace self-determination and the possibilities of upward mobility and job security are among the important socio-economic factors de-emphasized in strictly Foucauldian accounts.

Yet attempts to integrate a Foucauldian analysis with a Marxian awareness of how socio-economic factors structure the choices of men in constructing their masculinity have been, like Francis Shor’s, less than successful. Deborah Stiles contends that many leather workers like Martin Butler, who had origins in rural New Brunswick, Canada, fashioned a new rural working-class identity when they were employed in Maine leather factories. [101] Such an identity sought to preserve a love of nature with the reality that the site of self-valuation now was the workplace rather than the rural household. Skill and strength to a great extent replaced self-determination and household production: some attributes of “artisan” and “brawn” forms thus replaced some attributes of “agrarian” masculinity. Individual masculine behavior was now more connected to class. Unfortunately, while invoking Michel Foucault when promising to consider both the structural and discursive components of Butler’s identity, her own uses of discourse theory shows little difference from traditional Marxian analysis of ideology.[102] In addition, Butler’s own involvement in socialist activism and journalism placed him in an atypical relation to these processes. Stiles nonetheless relies on his views as representative of a form of identity-construction shared with other workers, despite Butler’s criticism of others’ lack of both “principle” and universal codes of modesty.[103]

The more sophisticated cultural analyses, like some of those presented above, attempt to account for the relationship of cultural phenomena and emotional, social and/or cultural epiphenomena. Yet research in working-class masculinity is still very much in its infancy. Loss of status and resulting “anxiety” remain useful analytical concepts for understanding the manhood of some in the working class, especially many skilled workers. Historians looking at labor history who were trained by Neo-Marxian scholars or themselves were predisposed to such analyses have highlighted the socio-economic elements in its construction. To consider forms of masculinity as anti-modernist are possibly revisionist attempts to provide alternative explanations to those that emphasize social change, but these approaches have not been convincing in displacing socio-economic theories. Awareness of a new “consumer society” and of heightened desires for social mobility is crucial for understanding changing forms of masculinity in the period. Other types of social history, like politics, are important additions to this research. Studies that employ social order or ideological hegemony theories are empirically plausible, yet these need to account more adequately for the success of these efforts: reform must have met to some extent the perceived needs of increasing numbers of working people in the twentieth century. The application of theories of strategic utilization to these diverse values, norms, and behaviors appears promising in helping historians to move beyond the limits of both top-down and bottom-up theories, if considered as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, the findings of alternative “schools” of gender research.

Members of the working-class, including both the skilled and less-skilled, developed specific and often conflicting ideals of what it was to be a “man.” These differed between subgroups of workers and between traditional values and new “American” constructions which valorized respectable upward mobility or assimilation to “American” ways. Future research should build on these early studies. Yet research will also benefit by its expansion in new directions, including more studies of how geographical and ethnic differences complicate these forms of masculinity. Again, the work of Nancy Hewitt on Tampa Latin workers provides an initial step in these directions.[104]