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Labour's True Man: Organised Workingmen and the Language of Manliness in the USA, 1827–1877
Author(s) -
Kaster Gregory L.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
gender and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1468-0424
pISSN - 0953-5233
DOI - 10.1111/1468-0424.00216
Subject(s) - period (music) , sociology , mainstream , identity (music) , craft , ambivalence , newspaper , collective identity , class consciousness , gender studies , history , law , media studies , political science , politics , aesthetics , psychoanalysis , art , psychology , archaeology
This essay examines the language of manliness that both marked and shaped nineteenth‐century mainstream labour activism during a formative period of craft bastardisation, class formation, and movement building. It sketches the logic and meanings of manliness embedded in labour newspapers, journals, addresses, and trade‐union proceedings from the period. The analysis recovers a persistent, complex, and problematic racialised and gendered/classed language central to skilled white workingmen's collective self‐identification. Assimilationist in thrust, it beckoned workingmen to an ambivalent double identity defined as much by manly character as by class characteristics. Thus it both facilitated and limited labour activism and class consciousness.