In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840
  • John Baranski
Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840. By Joshua R. Greenberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006 [e book 2008: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/greenberg/] xxvi plus 254 pp.).

In Advocating the Man, Joshua Greenberg joins a growing number of social and labor historians investigating the ways gender influenced workers. His tightly focused study looks at white journeymen, who he calls organized men, in New York City in the first four decades of the 19th century and argues that a breadwinner ideology, based on a masculine identity of provider and a patriarchal role in the home, shaped organized men's understanding of the labor market and their responses to economic insecurities. Importantly, this group of men saw themselves fully embedded in the home and "did not ideologically, culturally, or politically experience a separate sphere existence" (x—all page numbers in cloth version). The other half of his argument is that within the context of rapidly changing market conditions organized men "endured and challenged their working conditions...because of domestic responsibilities to themselves and their families" (xi). The author challenges the idea that republicanism, whiteness, and class consciousness primarily motivated the city's journeymen to act in labor unions and party politics. [End Page 609]

The book is part of the e-Gutenberg on-line history series from Columbia University Press. The cloth version offers only the text. The e-book (see link above) is the full version and has an excellent collection of graphics, maps, and cartoons, and documents such as wills, sheet music, and political statements. These digitized documents reflect just the tip of an impressive array of materials consulted for his study.

The core of the book is organized into three sections. The first section reconstructs the demographic, economic, and cultural landscape of New York's journeymen. These organized men, that is, skilled white workers engaged with the market through unions and political parties, were older, more established in their neighborhoods, and likely to have large families. The second section, chapters 3 and 4, examines the real and perceived threats to these men's ability to provide for their families. These threats came from cultural figures (dandies, speculators, and bankers) and institutions (banks, state-chartered monopolies, debtor prisons, paper money, to name a few), from bosses and landlords, and from nonwhites, immigrants, convicts, and women who competed for wage work. In response to these threats, Greenberg documents how white journeymen consistently framed their critiques and interest in domestic terms. Section three discusses the internal and public debates over the different goals and strategies of working men's organizations, especially as these debates "related to working men's attempt at family maintenance and their desire to fulfill their conception of household-based masculinity" (xvi). The conclusion offers a thoughtful, gendered analysis of how the Loco Foco party reflected the anxieties of men trying to meet their obligations as fathers and providers.

Greenberg, like other early republic scholars, is interested in the motivations, ideological positions, and actions of New York City's skilled workers during a period of rapid economic change and social inequality. Because gender is his primary tool of analysis, he views the motivations of the city's organized men to come from an individualistic concern for their masculine identity and their family's economic wellbeing. To cite a few examples, organized men tried to control their respective crafts not to maintain their labor power, but to "earn enough to maintain their role as petit patriarchs in the home" (82). Nonunion workers were urged to join the union not from class consciousness and solidarity, but for a "battle for masculine legitimacy" (87). In his discussion of union mutual aid benefits, Greenberg writes how "many individuals probably joined trade unions just to ensure some form of family health insurance" (130). His study paints a narrow, individualistic worldview of journeymen that diverges from Sean Wilentz's classic Chants Democratic, which more convincingly shows how ideas of solidarity, class interest, and republicanism led workers to collective actions, unions, and political parties.

Greenberg's narrative...

pdf

Share