Reimagining working-class masculinities in the twentieth century

Men and masculinities provides an engaging, accessible and provocative introduction to histories of masculinity for all readers interested in contemporary gender politics. The book offers a critical overview of ongoing historiographical debates and the historical making of men's lives and identities and ideas of masculinity between the 1890s and the present day. In setting out a new agenda for the field, it makes an ambitious argument for the importance of writing histories which are present-centred and politically engaged. This means that the book engages head-on with ferocious debates about men's social position and the status of masculinity in contemporary public life. In establishing a critical genealogy for the proliferation of this crisis talk, it sets out new ways of understanding how men's lives and ideas of masculinity have changed over time while patriarchy and male power have persisted.

My chapter is the first academic work to offer an assessment of working class masculinities across the 20th century in Britain and in doing so, it challenges the overriding narrative of crisis that dominates the field of history of masculinity. I use oral history and works magazines related to the steel industry in Sheffield to make new arguments about the solidity and strength of a working class masculinity, based in work and class culture that lasted until the deindustrialisation of the latter part of the century.