Though there have been several studies of how social, economic, and cultural factors have helped to shape society's concepts of womanhood at various points in American history, there have been comparatively few such studies of manhood. Gail Bederman's examination of the debates surrounding ideals of manhood and masculinity during the Progressive Era therefore explores a relatively new area of gender studies and is a welcome addition to the scholarship in this field.
Bederman argues that gender is an historical and ideological process, one that is continual and dynamic. During the decades around the turn of the century, a number of social, economic and cultural factors converged to make this process particularly active for middle-class American men. White, middle-class men began to adopt a variety of strategies in order to remake manhood in a way that was more powerful and more to their liking. Thus, Victorian ideals of middle-class manhood stressing self-mastery and restraint seemed to falter as economic changes made earlier ideologies of manhood less plausible. Instead, ideal manliness began to be defined in apparently contradictory terms: both as the aggressive, sexualized masculinity of "racially" primitive men, and as the refined superiority of "civilized" white men. In this process race became a factor crucial to their gender, as whiteness became a central part of manliness, and white men insisted that it was imperative to all civilization that white males made the decisions for the rest of humanity. Thus, as Bederman argues, Americans became obsessed with the connection between manhood and racial dominance, as white middle-class men sought to define "civilization" itself in their own terms. This definition of "civilization" did not go uncontested, however. By examining the lives and work of four very different American figures, Bederman illustrates the complex ways in which, drawing upon a common set of assumptions about the relationship between race and manhood, these people contested and shaped the concept of "civilization." Ida B. Wells the anti-lynching campaigner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman the feminist, G. Stanley Hall the psychologist, and President Theodore Roosevelt all sought to shape the ideology of manliness by using their own definitions of "civilization."
This is an intriguing book and offers a fresh understanding of certain aspects of the intellectual and cultural life of Progressive Era America. It is not an easy book, however, for it relies heavily on the language of cultural studies and is, consequently, rather inaccessible to the general reader. For the more specialist reader it is worth persisting -Bederman offers some interesting and innovative insights into the concerns of middle-class men and women at the turn of the century.