It's truly an interesting look at how manliness and masculinity worked to with ideas of civilization in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century.

Easy-to-read writing but don't let that fool you into thinking it doesn't pack a punch. The writing can feel repetitive at times, but it's all to hone in the author's thesis.

This book explored the wide range of ways that the racialized discourse of civilization shaped conceptions of gender between the collapse of reconstruction and the first World War, providing five main case studies that are examined in detail on their own and compared against eachother in order to show the evolution of though across this period. My main complaint is that it is difficult to gauge the relative popularity of different ideas presented in the book when they come into conflict with eachother and how these ideas interacted with American public and foreign policy at the time

Fascinating historical study of the use of the discourses of manliness (think hegemonic masculinity), masculinity, and civilization (ie, whiteness) by four different historical figures: Ida B Wells (anti-lynching activist), G Stanley Hall (the psychologist who came up with the developmental concept of adolescence), Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Teddy Roosevelt. The more I read about this time period, the more I realize how everything that is happening now has happened before. Totally fascinating. And gave me a different vantage of Gilman--one I never learned in feminist theory.

Bederman draws a connection between race and gender and argues that one must dissolve the racist/sexist discourse on both ideas in order to change either of them. At the end of the 18th century, middle-class Americans were explaining male supremacy in terms of white racial dominance and male power. These Progressive Era men used ideas about white supremacy to produce a racially based ideology of male power. Bederman argues that gender is a historical, ideological process. At this time, men were claiming certain kinds of authority through a particular type of body. Bederman describes "civiliation" as denoting atributes of race and gender. Ultimately, the discourse of civilization linked both male dominance and white supremacy to a Darwinist version of Protestant millennialism. This millennialist fight against evil was challenged by Darwinian understanding of random conflict (rather than conflict shaped from the hand of God). Protestants reconciled Darwin and Protestantism by assuming the goal of the conflict was to perfect the world (through the white race). Whiteness and civilization = manly.

This book is a tightly woven argument for how masculinity has been intertwined with race and gender through narratives of civilization. Bederman demonstrates that modern conceptions of masculinity emerged in the late nineteenth century, along with racialization movements driven by a kind evolutionary millennialism. Different people "synthesized" race, gender, and civilization in different ways to make sense of social phenomena, like lynching, women rights, adolescence, and American imperialism. I'm particularly impressed at how Bederman uses the novel Tarzan in her conclusion to show how all these narratives work together in a popular text.

Needless to say, many of the discourses she identifies still play important roles in how masculinity is constructed today, even if some of the foundational ideologies have seemingly disappeared. This would be an excellent book to use in a gender studies class or even a cultural studies class. That said, the clarity of Bederman's argument and fascinating primary sources makes this a good read for anyone who wishes to expand their knowledge of turn of the century America or develop their sense of gender.

Classic. Must-read for anyone studying 20th century American history.

A little redundant at times, but it's a really interesting history of gender. What I liked about it is - unlike a lot of histories of masculinties - she doesn't conceptualize masculinity as a "thing." She considers it a "discourse" (a la Foucault) and charts the transition from a discourse of "manliness" to one of "masculinity." Google Ngrams support her idea - that masculinity gradually replaced manliness around the turn of the century. But, to illustrate how and why that happened, she uses four really interesting case studies (the best, IMO is Ida B. Wells). Good read.

Really interesting book, and responsible for my senior thesis. Presents a whole different interpretation on the way history is learned and our masculine heroes are worshipped.

This is one of the better explorations of masculinity and US history, although it has its limitations as well. Bederman set out to discuss "the ways in which middle-class men and women worked to re-define manhood in terms of racial dominance, escpecially in terms of 'civilization'" in the period 1880-1917. To do so, she picked four case-studies: Ida B. Wells, an anti-lynching activist, G. Stanley Hall, a professor of psychology, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a women's rights advocate, and Theodore Roosevelt, Republican President of the United States. She then proceeds to give what is essentially a discourse analysis (her indebtedness to Foucault is acknowledged in the intro) on each, providing historical context for their arguments and noting the ways in which the tropes of primitive masculinity and civilized manhood are utilized by them. Bederman does not argue that manhood/masculinity are fixed concepts, but rather sees them constructed by the flux of discourse of a given era, and is interested in the ways in which they are negotiated through reference to commonly-accepted norms and conflicting ideas. Interestingly, she is skeptical of the idea of a "crisis in masculinity" which many authors on the subject base their arguments around, to the point where one (I forget which) has argued that masculinity is nearly always in crisis. Rather, she claims that gender "implies constant contradiction, change, and renegotiation," an observation with which I would tend to agree, although there may be certain points when such change causes a certain amount of panic and defensiveness for those who perceive their gender-identity as "dominant" and thus at least the perception of crisis. Overall, however, I find Bederman's theory to be sound, and somewhat more well-developed than a lot of the masculinity scholars one could name.
The weakness of the book is grounded more in her case studies, which are rather arbitrary (probably chosen because of the availability of sources) and questionably representative. It's hard to prove anything with discourse alone, as many historians have come to see in the years since 1995, and this is an example of a book that rest on little else. Further, if manliness was in a process of renegotiation, why should we look at such limited examples of the process of negotiation. Each of these examples is, arguably, a "success" in using gender for their own purposes, but what about the many failures? What about those who didn't quite "get" the argument, or who turned it against itself? Of course, these could be subjects for future study, but are four examples really enough even to prove anything about a dominant narrative, or are they just selective ways of reinforcing a pre-determined argument? That may be the weakest point of the book, it simply doesn't cast a wide-enough net to really prove its argument, although the argument, and the book, are challenging and interesting in their own right.

Groundbreaking study of masculinity and its relation to race in the United States.

Putting together a list for a four-semester seminar I'm teaching on Women's Studies