Boys and Their Toys?: Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America (review)

Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America. Edited by Roger Horowitz. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. vi+282. $85/$24.95.

Gender as a category of analysis emerged in technological history during the 1970s, but gender meant "women" until the 1990s. Then Carroll Pursell, in an article titled "Boys and Their Toys" and a 1991 address to the SHOT annual meeting, espoused combining masculinity and technology. The guest editors of Technology and Culture's special issue of January 1997, "Gender Analysis and the History of Technology," dissolved boundaries between home and work, production and consumption, and masculine and feminine, usually in the context of women and technology. Nevertheless, Arwen Mohun's essay on laundrymen and Ruth Oldenziel's on Fisher Body, reprinted in Boys and Their Toys? Masculinity, Class, and Technology in America, highlighted masculinity. Oldenziel broadened her focus in Making Technology Masculine (1999), analyzing the definition of engineering as technology and technology as masculine.

This entry in the Hagley Museum and Library's Perspectives on Business and Culture series focuses on gender, labor, and technology. In his editor's introduction, Roger Horowitz advances Ava Baron's Work Engendered as a model; Baron elevated gender alongside other factors in workplace culture while recognizing that gender was about men as well as women. Horowitz also acknowledges Joan Scott's and Harry Braverman's influence in emphasizing a historical rather than linguistic approach to gender.

Stephen Meyer's essay describes the dominant theme, tension between rough versus respectable manliness. Respectable manhood emerged in the nineteenth century from masculine artisanal traditions, while rough manhood originated with unskilled laborers; twentieth-century workers reinterpreted and reapplied these in various ways and workplaces. Other authors explore this theme in sections on men at work, turning boys into men, and men at play. The articles are divided equally between those accentuating respectable masculinity, rough masculinity, or the two in opposition.

Janet Davidson's essay concerns railroads, so male-oriented that male office workers found their superiority and respectable manhood threatened by unskilled African American workers and the feminization of clerical work. Oldenziel depicts General Motors socializing boys into middle-class, corporate values. Todd Alexander Postol examines circulation managers who developed commercial boyhood through their training of paper boys in respectable virtues and proper demeanor to improve sales. In contrast, Nancy Quam-Wickham's essay on Western extractive industries demonstrates that men maintained a group identity and preserved drilling, logging, or timbering skill through rough initiations and sexual, occupational, and folkloric mechanisms. Jeffrey Ryan Suzik explores the Civilian Conservation Corps' Depression-era mission to turn boys into men in the absence of work around which to construct identities as adult males; the CCC produced brawny and bronze men through hard physical work involving low-level occupational skills. Paul Taillon's essay on the railroad running trades discusses the construction of this work through the tension between rough and respectable; railway culture entailed both ruggedness and proper dignity. Ben Shackleford's essay on NASCAR contrasts the rough danger and respectable technological mastery inherent in auto racing.

A secondary theme involves the tension between work and play. Postol's circulation managers defined the work of paper boys as serious, distinct from play. Lisa Fine links hunting and masculinity among Michigan autoworkers, who initially saw hunting as a remedy for domesticity and demasculinizing factory work. It evolved into a right that workers negotiated for like any other, gaining access to time, game, and land.

Social historians argue that one cannot understand gender in isolation from class, race, and ethnicity. Davidson considers them concomitantly in her essay on railway office clerks; white men used race to defend their prerogatives and their masculinity. Meyer affirms the importance of race while acknowledging his focus on gender and class. While Oldenziel privileges gender and class over race in her essay, all the figures in her accompanying photographs are white. Rough and respectable, boy and man...