| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas Winter. Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 208. Cloth $40.00, paper $17.00.
Thomas Winter's focused analysis of the interactions between the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the railroad and industrial workers to whom it ministered makes a significant contribution to the literature on gender and identity formation in Gilded Age and Progressive-era America. This meticulously researched, beautifully written, theoretically informed, and intelligently argued case study of the YMCA and workingmen reveals, as few have before, that cultural constructions of middle-class manhood relied on articulations of class. By introducing the concept of class, Winter makes an important contribution to the growing literature on the redefinition of masculinity at the turn of the century that has, until now, focused on gender and race.	1
The mission and structure of the YMCA make it an ideal lens through which to view the intersection of gender and class. Not only did this national organization systematically develop and distribute prescriptive models for manhood to members, but it also reified societal divisions by providing segregated programs for white and blue-collar workers. Founded in London in 1844 as an evangelical voluntary association for young men, the organization took root in the United States in the 1850s, serving clerks and white-collar mercantile employees. In the years after the Civil War, under the leadership of a newly professionalized staff of "secretaries" and with the support of local and national businessmen, the YMCA undertook separate programming for railroad workers. By the turn of the century, it had begun to work with industrial employees in both rural and urban settings. This shift in attention from clerks to manual workers was as much a response to growing conflict between labor and capital as a broadening of the original evangelical mission. The goal, according to Winter, was to create "a society in which pious, moral men, regardless of social standing, would self-sacrificingly cooperate in the production of industrial wealth, while bringing about the Kingdom of God on Earth" (p. 14).	. . .

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