Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America.

Readers searching for the best example of the new men's history should look no further than Meanings For Manhood. This volume punctuates the emerging realization that "women" can no longer be equated with "gender" in historical analysis. The essays in this volume, which will be of particular interest to family and labor historians, focus on American Victorian men and combine to mov scholarship closer to a holistic gender history focusing on how men and women together have made history.

The articles are wide-ranging topically, well-written, insightfully introduced and analyzed by the editors, and convincing in their combined theoretical point--that there is little that is "natural" or genetically determined about how men behave. Testosterone plays little role in this work. The twelve contributors present late nineteenth-century middle-class manhood as diverse an constructed. The men in Meanings For Manhood share tender friendships, engage wholeheartedly in family life, and adapt masculinity to new work roles. When "traditional" male values do win out, such as in E. Anthony Rotundo's essay on neighborhood boys' gangs or in Mark Carnes's discussion of fraternal rituals, they are presented as constructed and as serving a definable purpose in larger cultural systems--not as self-evident.

Arranged in four sections, the first three essays comprise thematic aspects of the male experience, with the last containing interpretive essays by Clyde Griffen and Nancy Cott. In the first section, "Constructions of Masculinity Fro Boyhood To Adulthood," contributors ponder how youth negotiated identities as they moved from "feminized" households to "masculine" workplaces. Topics

include: the development of a mid-century "Boy Culture," in which Rotundo argue that neighborhood gangs prepared boys for the competitive capitalist world; fraternal rituals, which Carnes suggests provided the "solace" of male bonding to young men entering the workplace; madness standards, which John Stuart Hughe argues reflected cultural boundaries beyond which a man could be labeled "too masculine" (too removed from the feminized home); and finally Susan Curtis's loosely relevant cultural/religious analysis of how portrayals of Jesus's manhood changed in response to the emotional needs of social gospelers.

A key theme in part two, "Constructions of Masculinity in Friendship and Marriage," is that men increasingly became more companionate in marriage and participatory in the family as the nineteenth century progressed. This point informs Robert Griswold's discussion of Victorian divorce laws as well as Margaret Marsh's depiction of a "suburban masculine domesticity." A third contributor, Donald Yacovone, takes a different tact. He uses abolitionists as an example of a middle-class group which cultivated intense friendships, "fraternal love" even, behavior which would become taboo by the twentieth century. Yacovone's article, along with Anthony Rotundo's earlier work on male friendship illustrates that there was a masculine counterpart to Carroll Smith Rosenberg's "Female World of Love and Ritual." While Yacovone suggests that these friendship did not include acts now considered homosexual the findings of Martin Duberman and others will make this a topic of lively debate in the future.

In part three, "Constructions of Masculinity in Work and the Workplace," the focus shifts not only to the workplace, but to the volume's only consideration of working-class masculinity. Contributors concerned with the working class include Ava Baron, whose essay on the remasculinization of printers' work also appears in her own edited volume Work Engendered, and Mary Blewett who draws comparison between native born and immigrant masculinity in her chronology of weavers' and spinners' labor struggles in Fall River, Massachusetts. Working-class masculinity in these articles demonstrates the variability of identities the other essays in the volume discuss for the middle-class: men at various times define themselves through skill and craft autonomy, through endurance (after Linotype mechanization in the printing industry), and through quiet respectability and "doffed caps" (immigrants in Fall River). Michael Grossberg's analysis of the antebellum legal profession provides the middle-class counterpart to this "flexible" workplace masculinity in the section's third essay.

Overall, Meanings For Manhood illustrates that there is a depth to the male experience not captured in stereotypes like "rough and tumble" Jacksonian masculinity or Teddy Roosevelt's physical, vigorous manly ideal. The emphasis o the manhood of everyday people may indeed point the way to what the editors hop will be a holistic, balanced gender history. Huge gaps in the literature will have to be addressed, however, before their vision will become reality. While the primarily white, native, middle-class focus here is effective in creating cohesion, future researchers will need to address African-American and immigran masculinity in ways that are nearly absent in the existing literature. Clyde Griffen's synthetic conclusion, which suggests that nineteenth-century flexibility in masculine styles narrowed by the early twentieth century, would be interesting to test within a more multicultural framework. For example, were African-American men, in supposed "crisis" by the late twentieth century, actually more successful than middle-class whites in maintaining a masculinity based on flexibility and tolerance--as recent ethnographic literature indicates How about Irish and German masculinity? It is these sorts of questions, perhaps only answerable through a broad community study of masculinity in industrial America, that these essays elicit.

Tom Buchanan Carnegie Mellon University