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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Thomas Winter, Making Men, Making Class: The YMCA and Workingmen, 1877–1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2002)
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| WRITING IN the acknowledgments of Making Men, Making Class, Thomas Winter recounts a conversation he had with his PhD supervisor about the direction of his dissertation, the basis for this book. Originally conceptualized as a case study of philanthropy and labour relations in late 19th- and early 20th-century America, his thesis changed radically after taking up his supervisor's advice to "look into" what the records of the YMCA's Railroad and Industrial Department said "about being men"(ix) at the turn of the century. Evidently, they said a lot. |
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Drawing on the burgeoning literature on masculinity during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Winter takes aim at the notion that, in a time defined by "the rise of bureaucratic structures, new forms of work, and altering career paths," middle-class men sought out a new sense of themselves which "sanctioned a more aggressive, physical type of manhood." (4–5) This "hedonistic cult of masculinity" might have satisfied some middle-class men, he argues, but not all. Indeed, for the middle-class men who orchestrated and ran the YMCA's programs amongst railroad and industrial workers, it was not the "strenuous life," but a "sense of mission" and "social purpose" that defined their response to the "predicaments of their time."(5) In seven short, tightly focused chapters, Winter explores this evolving sense of middle-class manhood. |
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Created with the support of corporate America, including heavyweights like John D. Rockefeller, the YMCA's outreach initiatives were designed to dampen working-class militancy by recasting the relations between employer and worker "within a cultural framework of benevolent, manly paternalism."(47) Situated in the "domestic" and more feminine setting of a YMCA building, and used to the "flabby-handed" routine of white-collar work, the organization's officials and secretaries were faced with the daunting task of reforming "rugged workingmen." To resolve this paradox, they deployed a new understanding of their gender that rested, increasingly, on updated notions of "character" and "personality." By exhibiting these qualities, so the argument went, they stood a better chance of gaining the confidence of railroad and industrial employees, and, in the process, providing a living, breathing example of the sort of manhood the workers ought to emulate. Or at least that was the plan. |
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By the early decades of the 20th century, however, as the YMCA's role in labour relations contracted, the language of personality and character, and the social practices within which it was enmeshed coalesced around new issues of expertise, professionalism, and leadership. According to Winter, this shift in focus "helped create an ideal of the service-oriented 'corporate man' and 'team player' when the standard of upward social mobility as a primary means of affirmation of the male self became an increasingly elusive quest and salaried, white-collar work became the major occupational domain for middle-class men."(146) The irony, here, is striking: by trying to "submerg[e] the realities of class difference in an ideal of manliness," the YMCA actually helped to create "new cultural codes and boundaries" around gender that, over the long term, made the gap between labour and capital more obvious. (64, 147) "As YMCA officials set out to make men," Winter argues, "they ended up making class as well."(1) |
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Readers of this journal will not be surprised to learn that the YMCA played an influential role in the cultural history of the US at the turn of the century; over the past decade or so, scholars have explored the YMCA's role in policing men "adrift in the city" and in making "the age of the bachelor" — to cite but two examples. What is important about this book, however, is its principal assertion that definitions of class difference were critical to the formation of a new sense of masculinity amongst middle-class men. While that, too, might not sound novel, it is worth noting that in the context of the American literature on this topic, considerations of class often take a back seat to considerations of race (Gail Bederman's important Manliness and Civilization comes to mind here). |
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What's more, Winter's emphasis on class, both as a lived experience and a socio-economic force, does not come at the expense of an attentiveness to the changing language of manhood and its connection to wider structures of determination. Not only did the new language of character and personality shore up the YMCA secretaries' sense of self, and ease their transition into a new corporate and professional world, but, he argues, it became a powerful resource for the maintenance of class differences, the sine qua non of a capitalist society. Blending the techniques of post-structuralism and historical materialism, and keen to resist the urge to substitute one determinism (language) for another (economics), Winter has produced a study that deserves a wide and appreciative scholarly audience. His decision to follow his supervisor's advice was certainly the right one. |
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Andrew Parnaby
University College of Cape Breton |
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