Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture 1900-1950 (review)

Although men’s history has grown over the past 15 years, much of this has focused on how men have interacted in conventionally masculine environments such as the workplace, pub, gang, fraternal organization, and athletics rather than on the energy men put into more personal activities such as relationships, parenting, and consumerism. Thus, Pendergast’s study of the role that men’s magazines played in encouraging men to think of themselves as consumers is an important addition to the growing history of men and popular culture.

Essentially, Pendergast documents how the articles, editorials and advertisements in middle-class men’s magazines go from promoting an inner-directed masculinity centered around character, hard work and integrity (1900–1920s) to an outer-directed masculinity dedicated to improving one’s appearance, personality, and personal life through enlightened consumerism (1920s–1940s). By intensively and then selectively reading the material in 22 magazines that were largely or entirely aimed at men, the first half of Pendergast’s book explores how the (male) magazine editors’ personal indebtedness to Victorian ideology led them to champion male character and professional success while advertisers were simultaneously undermining these values by encouraging men to value consumption over work.

The book’s second half traces how magazines such as Colliers, the American and New Success evolved from advising men how to succeed in business to advising them how to succeed in their professional, personal and recreational lives by purchasing appearance and personality enhancing products. His analysis of how Esquire magazine paved the road to modernity by being the first men’s magazine to explicitly and exclusively focus on men’s personal and leisure lives is particularly insightful to students of gender, popular culture, and consumerism. Pendergast also explores how the attention to racial oppression in the early Negro “race journals” precluded them from receiving much advertising money, and how John Johnson’s styling of Ebony as a magazine about middle-class black success helped it become the first commercially successful black magazine.

Although Pendergast’s argument is generally well presented and supported, my own research into gender history, consumerism and advertising suggests that Pendergast’s conclusions about both masculinity and the relationship between masculinity and consumerism are crippled a bit by his somewhat a-theoretical and a-historical approach; he erroneously dates the beginning of consuming masculinity to the 1920s, and treats masculinity as a monolithic and universal construct.

Concerning the first point, Pendergast labels consuming/modern masculinity a 1920s phenomenon by asserting that “modern men... were made to be consuming men within the pages of the American magazine” (p. 18), and that the pro-consumer messages of the 1920s men’s magazine “editors and contributors...announced the emergence of modern masculinity” (pp. 111). This makes large scale male consumerism a twentieth-century phenomenon which had middle-class men’s magazines and advertising as its parents. However, a good deal of social history indicates that American men of all classes in the large Northern cities were already highly engaged with consumerism from the 1880s on, and that such consuming began nearly a century earlier in London and Manchester. ¹ Thus, consuming masculinity seems to have originally been cultivated by vibrant, commercially-driven urban culture rather than by men’s magazines and advertising itself. The magazines that Pendergast studies appear to have helped promote consuming masculinity to non-urban men rather than create such a phenomenon in the first place.

Pendergast’s a-theoretical approach to gender shows little recognition of how masculinities vary enormously by class and race, as recent gender theory and social history suggest. ² His framework recognizes only two strands of masculinity : “Victorian masculinity” vs. “modern masculinity”. Thus he overlooks what numerous historians have referred to as the middle-class “crisis of masculinity” which suggests that most of the masculinist denunciation of consumerism as “feminine” was done by middle-class intellectuals who saw their masculinity threatened as the corporate economy transformed middle...