Men on the Suburban Frontier: Rethinking Midcentury Masculinity

In his survey of recent scholarship on American masculinity, Bryce Traister reminds us of this work's potential value to historians of culture: "the cultural analysis of 'men as men' . . . allows us to rethink what we thought we already knew about the canon (in literary studies), American history (in historical studies), the golden age of film, and the like." In other words, reconceptualizing the American male as something more than a historical given "invites a reconsideration of a cultural record previously examined."¹ This means, in the case of the book under review, that we can return to the "lonely men" of postwar suburbia and get beyond their supposedly imperiled masculinity. Gilbert's exploration of the range of ways in which American masculinity was performed in the 1950s offers revealing new insights into a subject that might seem to have already been exhaustively studied. Indeed, when I was asked to review this book, I wondered: what more is there to say about men in the 1950s? Gilbert puts familiar discourse and well-known figures in a new light, in the end showing that there is, in fact, much more to be said about the white, middle-class, suburban 1950s male than one might think.

Gilbert reiterates Traister's claim that much of the burgeoning scholarship on American manhood focuses around narratives of crisis. These studies of masculinity-in-crisis tend to zero in on two key eras, the 1890s and the 1950s. Starting around 1890, industrialization, the changing nature of work, increasing bureaucratization, and urbanization challenged the older ideals of rugged individualism and independent entrepreneurship. This tension between ideals of "manliness" and the ideology of "civilization" at the turn of the century is at the core of Gail Bederman's essential and groundbreaking study, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (1995). That book demonstrated that conceptions of manhood and conceptions of civilization are interdependent and mutually enforcing, with the modern categories staked out by the turn of the twentieth century.

Gilbert says that the older concepts of masculinity were further undercut in the 1940s and 1950s, "with the rise of the companionate nuclear family, the entrance of women in large numbers into the workforce, and finally by the feminist movements beginning in the 1960s" (p. 16). Again, earlier scholarship has given Gilbert much to build on. For example, Elaine Tyler May's study of domestic "containment" in the 1950s, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988), profoundly shaped cultural histories of that era, demonstrating that the policing of traditional gender roles was essential to the maintenance of the Cold War consensus in the years following World War II. Thus the social order itself, in which dissent was carefully contained, depended upon the maintenance of rigid gender divisions.² But just as the Cold War consensus proved fragile in the 1960s, so did the hard-edged masculinity projected by John Wayne or by the architects of American foreign policy, whose "tough guy" stance was an essential element of Cold War posturing, as several scholars have noted.³ Moreover, despite the popularity of westerns in the 1950s, as Gilbert reminds us, "this was never entirely John Wayne's world any more than it belonged to Liberace" (p. 8).⁴

So what did it mean to "be a man" in the 1950s? Gilbert suggests there are many possible answers. Like others before him, Gilbert begins with the assumption of manhood in "crisis" in the 1950s. "In some respects gender malaise was deemed a national calamity during the 1950s and projected backwards into a reinterpretation of American history," he writes.

It found innumerable expressions, first in the attack on powerful emasculating mothers and women, then in a critical literature deploring humiliating corporate work, fears of spies and homosexuals in the government, distrust of youth and worries about juvenile delinquency, and a tense film culture which lionized war heroes, misfits, cowboys, and...