| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 61

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press 2007)

CHRISTOPHER DUMMITT'S The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada tackles two huge topics: masculinity and modernity. The author limits the scope of his study by examining his twin themes in the context of one city – Vancouver – from the end of the Second World War until the late 1960s. A revised version of Dummitt's doctoral dissertation, the book is a series of case studies – probably the most feasible way of analysing two vast concepts in an empirical fashion. The result is a polished, well-written, and provocative exploration of two phenomena that remain understudied by Canadian historians.

Modernity is a term often used loosely by historians to refer to a number of different periods and processes. Dummitt chooses to examine the postwar period of high modernity that Eric Hobsbawm has called the "Golden Age." Inspired by such scholars and theorists as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, he focuses on the concept of risk as a defining characteristic of modernity. Under conditions of modernity, technocratic and bureaucratic visions transform "dangers" into "risks" that can be predicted, measured, managed, and, ideally, prevented. The idea of control is central here – control, in Dummitt's words, "of the physical, social, and psychological environment." (153) Dummitt argues convincingly that the high modernity of the postwar era was gendered masculine. Reason, technical expertise, and self-control were all, he persuades us, phenomena associated with men and masculine attributes. Yet what Dummitt calls the "doubled nature of manly modernism" (21) meant that if men were seen to be the principal actors of modernity, they could also be perceived as its victims. Not only does modernity create alienation but, claims Dummitt, "this alienation was mapped onto other social hierarchies such as class and race." (6) Working-class and racialized men were sometimes regulated and controlled by the postwar modern project in ways that they would not have chosen. Moreover, while middle-class men such as the mountaineers considered in Chapter 4 voluntarily undertook risks as part of their leisure pursuits, working- class men (such as the soldiers and ironworkers analysed in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively) were compelled to face risk as an everyday matter of course.

Dummitt draws effectively on most of the recent Canadian historiography of the postwar period, as well as on recent international studies of masculinity, risk, and modernity. His book is based on thorough and wide-ranging research in such sources as newspapers, the records of two Royal Commissions, capital case files, and the papers of associations such as the British Columbia Mountaineering Club and the Vancouver Traffic and Safety Council. The book is well organized and tightly structured. A thorough Introduction provides a thumbnail sketch of postwar Vancouver and a valuable historiographical and theoretical discussion of modernity and gender. The five chapters that follow each deal with an episode that allows us to glimpse the ways in which risk structured postwar Vancouver and the particular kinds of masculinity found there. In these chapters, primarily middle-class risk managers (engineers, civil servants, safety experts) rub shoulders with primarily (but not exclusively) working-class risk-takers (soldiers, ironworkers). Most of these case studies provide intriguing insights into masculinity and risk in the postwar city. The exception is Chapter 5, on capital-murder cases. While the evidence in this chapter points to a certain number of contemporary conceptions of masculinity, and shows us the prominent role played by 'experts' (notably psychologists and psychiatrists) in this period, these two things on their own don't tell us much about risk. The concept of risk, as proposed by Giddens and Beck, also figures less centrally in the chapter on war veterans than in those dealing with mountaineering, automobiles and the safety movement, and the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge. The book closes with a substantial conclusion that reflects upon the emergence, in the 1960s, of multiple sources of opposition to the masculine voice of technocratic and bureaucratic authority.

The Manly Modern is a stimulating and valuable study. Like any stimulating work, it raises questions and leaves room for debate. To begin with, Dummitt states that his book is "not a history of Vancouver modernity and masculinity but a history of manly modernism as it took shape in Vancouver" (25–26, emphases in the original); he treats the experience of Vancouver as "characteristic" rather than unique. The book is thus subtitled "Masculinity in Postwar Canada." This seems to me to be both audacious and somewhat misleading. While some of what we see in this book no doubt played out in similar ways elsewhere in Canada, local and regional inflections are nonetheless important. Postwar Vancouver was not simply a "vacant lot," to borrow a term used by Ian McKay in another context, and I would argue that it is worth reflecting in a sustained fashion upon its specificities.

Second, Dummitt acknowledges in his Introduction that he did not explore gender relations as fully as he would have liked. In this period, most war veterans, civil servants, and mountaineers were men – but not all of them. Without necessarily undertaking parallel studies of masculinity and femininity in postwar Vancouver, the author might have asked what the presence of women in these milieus, even if they were a small minority, meant for the masculinity of these men. Such an approach could be even more fruitful in the chapter on automobiles and traffic safety, as a significant number of drivers in postwar Vancouver were women. How did these women perceive "manly modernism"?

Finally, readers of Labour/Le Travail might wish for a bit more social history in what is essentially a work of cultural history. Dummitt's analyses of the case studies chosen are clever and persuasive, but at times his attention to the construction of the various narratives of risk seems more clinical than compassionate. I was particularly struck by this in the chapter on the collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge, where the very real tragedy experienced by these risk takers and their families seems underplayed. The slightly ironic tone found in parts of this work extends to the book's cover, which represents the vulnerability of the modern man by depicting a masculine face adorned with a scrap of toilet paper stuck onto a shaving nick.

One of the first monographs to focus explicitly on masculinity in a Canadian setting, Dummitt's book is the product of a particular historiographical moment, building effectively upon the wealth of research in women's history as well as the insights of gender history. Whether The Manly Modern will be followed by fulllength studies of masculinity in other Canadian settings at other moments remains to be seen. Such future studies should be encouraged and would allow us to assess the specificity of the masculinities, and modernity, seen here.


MAGDA FAHRNI Université du Québec à Montréal

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.