| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920. By John Pettegrew. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. xiv, 409 pp. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-8018-8603-4.)
Gender historians will take it as unremarkable that John Pettegrew's sophisticated and historically rich study of modern masculinity proceeds from an understanding that masculinity is socially produced, though some will be surprised with his characterization of it as a "cultural disease" or "contagion" (p. ix). The formulation proves especially useful, however, in encouraging readers to consider how masculinity reproduces itself, the significant material harm it inflicts on women and men, and the possibilities for its eradication.	1
In recent decades, studies of gender have tended to focus on the heterogeneity of identity, with a collateral result being that socially damaging or politically unpopular strains of masculinity are shunned rather than dismantled. If a given academic finds a particular formulation of masculinity unpalatable, the dominance of the heterogeneity model suggests that the solution lies in the adoption of a more appealing alternative. In our late capitalist society, even Marxist academics frequently proceed as if the "marketplace" of identity might offer the means to avoid those masculinities that inflict harm.	. . .

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