Left History (E-Journal - York University)

Johnson, Julie A.

148 Reviews 
ished class solidarity that was common to many workplaces. There are similar 
results for seasonal fruit workers. But here Heidi Tinsman argues that dictator- 
ship policies had a more profound impact on women than on men. Her argu- 
ment is sophisticated. Pinochet's assault on organized labour led to a severe 
exploitation of women that was marked by much longer hours and poorly paid 
piece-work. At the same time, Tinsman contends that work and wages improved 
women's authority in their communities and homes, including the power in 
many situations to leave abusive relationships. Rachel Schurman's "Shuckers, 
Sorters, Headers, and Gutters" considers work in a new dictatorship-period 
export industry--seafood. Here an environmental problem is linked to declin- 
ing work conditions. While the state-supported fishing industry produced enor- 
mous exports, by the early 1990s a combination of domestic and foreign over- 
fishing had destroyed Chilean fish stocks. Workers not only confronted the low 
wages, job insecurity, and absence of benefits common to other sectors, but the 
industry itself was jeopardized by reckless inattention to the well being of fish 
populations. 
Ever since the late 1970s, there has been a steady stream of statistics 
flogged by economists dead set on "proving" that Pinochet's state terror was a 
"necessary" evil on the path to prosperity for all Chileans. There has never been 
any credible evidence for that claim. A range of scholarly analysis has long 
since highlighted growing poverty in Chile since the mid-1970s, associated 
with each of the Pinochet Era major economic ventures, from the gross mis- 
management of privatizations to the failed promise of private pension plans over 
the past few years for the first generation of dictatorship era retirees. But in the 
context of Chile's ongoing struggle to rid itself of the Pinochet legacy, and the 
strong ongoing presence of pro-Pinochet apologists in positions of authority, a 
deeply politicized and polarized argument around the "miracle" will continue, 
in spite of this edited tour de force and other important works showing the mir- 
acle for what it really was. 
David Sheinin-Trent University 
Mary Gluck, Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in 
Nineteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Haward University Press, 
2005). 
In Popular Bohemia, Mary Gluck aims to re-orient our historical and theoreti- 
cal understanding of modernism, in order to bring it closer to the "humble and 
neglected regions of popular culture and everyday experience" of the nineteenth 
century (2). In doing so, she sets her argument against that of scholars such as 
Matei Calinescu (Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, 
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism [ l  982]), Andreas Huyssen (Ajier the Great 
Left History 1 1.1 149 
Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism [1986]), and Car1 Schorske 
(Fin-de-Sidcle Vienna: Politics and Culture [1981]; Thinking with History: 
Explorations in the Passage to Modernism [1998]), who have envisioned mod- 
ernism as a phenomenon exclusive to the world of high culture, identified by its 
sense of "aesthetic autonomy" and its "retreat from the historical world into the 
interiorized realms of the psyche and of art" (2-6). Gluck develops her argu- 
ment about a more "inclusive" and "democratic" modernism by charting the 
various permutations and expressions of nineteenth-century bohemian culture, 
which is often linked with modernist aesthetics, from its emergence in the 
1830s to the start of the First World War (4). Through her "historical archaeol- 
ogy" of different forms of the bohemian, including the romantic hero, the urban 
Jdneur, the decadent, and the Primitive artist, Gluck persuasively shows how 
the modern artist, traditionally depicted as an isolated and removed figure, actu- 
ally possessed many ties to popular Parisian society and culture throughout the 
nineteenth century (23). 
Those concerned with the cultural and intellectual histories of Paris will 
find much of interest in Popular Bohemia. Gluck rightly emphasizes the role 
of the marketplace, commercial culture, and the mass press, all of which were 
fundamedtal to notions of modernity during the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, in order to draw connections between modernism, bohemia, and popular 
culture. By showing the ways in which the modem artist developed in direct 
relation to an expanding consumer society, new avenues of interpretation 
emerge about the origins and nature of the bohemian experience. Gluck 
demonstrates, for example, how romantic bohemians of the 1830s, typically 
seen as radical and subversive eccentrics, were "public performers" who used 
theatricality, spectacle, and lavish costumes to parody popular forms of enter- 
tainment, such as melodrama (78). In her analysis, flrineurs of the 1840s, 
known for their sober and detached musings on the urban experience, were 
"novelists and journalists, who occupied a symbolic and mediated public space, 
made available to them by the commercial press and the mass media" (78). 
Gluck also emphasizes how decadents of the fin de sidcle, traditionally identi- 
fied by their sense of alienation, malaise, and exclusivity, had attachments to the 
"carnivalesque world" of popular venues such as the cafks and cabarets of 
Montmartre (1 10). 
Gluck argues that these aspects of bohemian culture were significant to the 
artist's desire to capture the essence of what it meant to be modern: "The 
bohemian artist, in his changing guises as melodramatic hero, as anonymous 
journalist, as cabaret performer . . . had a common mission: to make transpar- 
ent the hidden, mysterious and fragmented aspects of modern experience" 
(163). In this way, she contends that artists were not aloof in their attempts to 
understand and make sense of their modern world, nor were they marked by a 
withdrawal from society into an interiorized and esoteric world of art. Rather, 
150 Reviews 
they utilized popular forms of performance, theatricality, and ironic parody, to 
make their messages "legible" and "visible" to a wider public (119). 
Throughout Popular Bohemia, the city of Paris is integral to this line of inquiry. 
Theatres, clubs, cafCs, cabarets, and the streets of the capital, all factor into 
Gluck's ideas about the performative nature of the bohemian, and famous sites 
such as the Salpetrike and the Trocadero Museum play critical roles in her fash- 
ioning of a public modernism. The city and its artists also figure prominently 
in her collection of illustrations from popular publications such as Les Fran~ais 
peints par eu-mgmes (1841), and famous caricatures by HonorC Daumier. 
These depict the many varieties of bohemian culture, and underscore Gluck's 
point about its pervasiveness at the commercial level. 
There may be some disagreement over Gluck's approach to popular culture 
and its public venues. She admits as much when she points to critics such as T. 
J. Clark, who contend that bohemian spaces such as cafks and cabarets, while 
popular and democratic on the surface, and open to a "heterogeneous audience" 
that blurred class divisions, were not truly able to erase the "economic inequal- 
ities, social injustice, or class oppression of modern society" (125). Gluck's 
reply is that bohemian cultural venues were never intended to fight this battle. 
Their goal, in her estimation, was to "transform perceptions" about the world in 
which people lived: "their hope was to transform modernity on the symbolic 
and experiential level, making it transparent, accessible, and emotionally 
expressive for ordinary people" (125-126). In linking various aspects of 
bohemian culture to this objective, not only through her discussion of artists 
from the romantic hero to the Primitive artist, but also through her re-evaluation 
of key figures such as Gautier, Baudelaire, and Gauguin, Gluck presents us with 
an alternative version of bohemia which "never subscribed to the myth of auton- 
omy" (187). In this way, Popular Bohemia is an important study that should 
encourage historians to envision a modernism that is rooted in a public and pop- 
ular experience, and will be of interest to those who continue to explore the 
intersections of art, culture, and society, as well as the historical conditions of 
modernity. 
Julie A. Johnson-Queen's University 
Victor Serge, What Every Radical Should Know About State Repression: A 
Guide for Activists (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2005). 
Introduction by Dalia Hashad. First printed as Les Coulisses d'une SGretd 
gbnirale. Ce que tout rdvolutionaire doit savoir de la repression (Paris: 
Librairie du Travail, 1926). 
How do we understand the role of the police and law in maintaining capitalism? 
As revolutionaries and radicals how do we watch for and evade the police before 


Mary Gluck — Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Editorial Note 
While it is certainly not the case that the study of masculinity (or masculinities) 
is now free from criticism, in the decade since the publication of Robert 
Connell's seminal Masculinities, it seems that many of the central theoretical 
models presented within that text have emerged relatively unscathed from the 
uproar that surrounded the field at inception. Specifically, Connell's concept of 
hegemonic masculinity-a cluster of traits that defines an ideal masculinity 
men are expected to aspire to, but a concept grounded in eighteenth century 
concepts of breadwinning-is often used extensively to explain the way mas- 
culinity functions in both history and the history of gender relations. However, 
if one considers the articles in this issue, it becomes immediately clear that 
many of the questions that characterized that deba t e the  proper subjects of 
historical analysis; the politics of studying men; the role of gender, race, class, 
and sexuality in the conception of masculinity-have not been fully answered, 
and the goals of masculinity studies are still highly contested. While all of the 
articles here agree that the study of masculinity is important, together they take 
issue with the usefulness of hegemonic masculinity, of Connell's emphasis on 
"masculinities" (as opposed to "masculinity"), and the efficacy of studying 
masculinity in general. Each takes a different approach to resolving the issues, 
yet they all question the way in which we interpret the study of masculinity. 
The problem with masculinity studies, as many projects under that rubric 
have been conducted, seems to be twofold. First, the novelty of masculinity 
studies has often been mistaken for radicalism. While the feminist critique of 
the field is certainly relevant here-that returning men to the centre of histori- 
cal study is not really radical at all-the problem is more complex. If social his- 
torians of the New Left have often criticised the growing hold of the new cul- 
tural history upon the discipline, we might ask why, of all cultural forms of his- 
tory, the study of masculinity has remained relatively exempt from that partic- 
ular debate. The answer is not so elusive, given that the study of masculinity 
tends to repeat the kinds of structural class analysis popular in the 1970s. The 
workingmen who were the focus of New Left social history become the 'men' 
of the cultural turn; the bourgeoisie or capitalist class are replaced with 
Connell's idea of hegemonic masculinity. While the scenario of historical 
analysis might be moved from the union hall to the billiard hall, the interpreta- 
tion is interested in finding the structural manifestations of class consciousness, 
even as it embeds and obscures the role of class and capitalist enterprise in 
vague notions of power emblemized by Connell's problematic concept. 
Which is not to suggest that the goal of masculinity studies is to obfuscate 
the role of class, or that gender is separate from class or race-far from it. But 
the second problem with this approach is that, while recognizing that masculin- 
ity should only be considered as a relational category of gender, the study of 
8 
0 Left History 
1 1.2 (Fall 2006) 
Left History 11.2 9 
masculinity often ignores the specific relationships that produce notions of gen- 
der in the first place. Consider: if hegemonic masculinity-a way to exist as 
man-is simply another false promise of the dominant, capitalist, male order 
that structures society and ensures the power of the patriarchy, then any 
attempts to exert manhood are, if not justified, at least explained by systemic 
oppression. Certainly, that may well be the case, insofar as every individual is 
affected by a patriarchal capitalist racist heterosexist consensus-to expand on 
DuBois, the "wages of white heteronomative masculinity''-but this emphasis 
on the oppressive demands placed upon men tends to ignore the arguments of 
theorists like Antonio Gramsci or Michel Foucault: that any hegemonic struc- 
ture owes its power to the complicity of its subjects. 
If we believe Joan Scott that the very language of social history is gen- 
dered, then the problem with the study of masculinity is not just that it mas- 
culinizes cultural history; it also culturalizes masculine social history. In the 
process, masculinity is reified as a stable, normative, culturally embedded 
benchmark for the field. Here, masculinity studies faces the same challenge 
that 1980s radical feminism and women's history faced from post-structuralist 
writers such as Scott, Denise Riley, and Judith Butler. Their works challenged 
the conception of a feminist framework resting upon the unstable and false cat- 
egory of woman. The instability of this category was especially apparent when 
feminism attempted to include non-white, non-middle class women in the 
broader emancipatory feminist cause. Class and race disrupted conceptions of 
the feminist 'woman' who was, in part, able to express her desires for equality 
because of privileges granted through her own race and class position. 
Historians such as Antoinette Burton studying the white English women in 
colonial India have noted the ways in which women both served and produced 
colonial rhetoric about their inferior brown sisters in order to advance their own 
political cause both in India and England. Yet, even in that framework, there is 
a sense of two victims being produced at the hands of the colonial endeavour 
embodied by white upper class men. Masculinity studies, in turn, has also tried 
to produce multiple victims, by granting a greater role to the perils of the bread- 
winner ideal. In many ways, masculinity studies offers a renaissance to labour 
history by emphasizing the multiple strains upon the working man as he 
engages with the ideological and physical machinery of capitalism. 
What masculinity studies ultimately suffers from is the inability to grapple 
with one of Scott's most powerful arguments: "we need to replace the notion 
that social power is unified, coherent, and centralized with something like 
Michael Foucault's concept of power as dispersed constellations of unequal 
relationships, discursively constituted in social 'fields of force."' These fields 
of force have never sat well with historians needing to identify the movement 
of an oppressed class or caste against their oppressor, and even when authors 
have attempted to engage with Gramsci's notion of hegemony it is seldom to 
10 Editorial Note 
acknowledge their subject's place at the hegemonic top, exerting power down- 
ward. In the study of masculinity, the effort to understand a historical subject 
has also become one to explain and partly absolve the multiple pressures that 
were exerted upon men in the face of capitalism. Yet those pressures must be 
acknowledged for what they were, and often still are: the effort to maintain and 
preserve power, power over women, power over other races, power over 'nor- 
mative' notions of gendered bodies and sexual practice, and power over money. 
While putting this issue together we hoped articles would respond to Bryce 
Traister and Toby Ditz's similar critiques that studies of masculinity have been 
wary of examining gendered narratives of power. This is a major concern for 
those of us on the left who want to see social, cultural, and institutional sites of 
power named and challenged. Happily, a number of articles included in this 
issue grapple with the institutional construction of masculinity, particularly 
Francis Shor's piece on the Wobblies and Joseph Lapsley's study of the 
National Institute of Mental Health, as well as JeErey Vacante's work on 
Quebec liberalism. 
Two articles take particular issue with the concept of hegemonic masculin- 
ity and its failure to adequately theorize the role of non-white, non-middle class 
men. Malinda Alaine Lindquist's article on the writings of Anna Julia Cooper 
seeks an intervention in the historiography of masculinities in order to add the 
voice of a black American feminist who has been active in the debate about 
masculinities since the turn of the twentieth century. Lindquist argues that we 
need a black "womanist voice" alongside that of Freud, Connell, and others, in 
order to understand the interrelationship between masculinity and other forms 
of power. She argues that through Cooper we can understand how "racial 
supremacies, imperialism, internal colonialism, and patriarchy were transmitted 
through, what [Cooper] termed, a 'predominant man-influence."' Cooper's 
role in defining a particular spectrum of masculinity affected by race is all the 
more important for highlighting how women, and not just men, articulated, 
lived within, and negotiated this scale. 
Susannah Bredenkamp's theoretical musings about the phallus provides an 
additional space of debate with the work of Connell and his theory of hegemon- 
ic masculinity. Bredenkamp's article poses the theoretical, lived, and historic 
disjuncture between men's bodies and social views of masculinity. One of the 
problems with some studies of men is their focus on male bodies instead of 
masculinity, thereby failing to "account for and address the feminization of 
black men, Jewish men, and other "adjectival masculinities" throughout histo- 
ry." Bredenkamp traces the "origins of masculinity in nineteenth-century stud- 
ies of biological difference" arguing that there is in fact only a single masculin- 
ity in western culture which "is at once the signifier of race, class, sex, ability, 
etc. and that any attempt to analyze one aspect without reference to the others 
obscures the processes of differentiation, signification, and the distribution of 
Left History 11.2 
power as they relate to all bodies." 
One striking instance of institutional regulatory power acting under the 
guide of 'hegemonic masculinity' is seen in Joseph Lapsley's article on the 
1969 National Institute of Mental Health Task Force Report on Homosexuality. 
In a fascinating unpacking of the NIMH report, Lapsley shows how liberal 
ideals of companionate marriage and the free market came together at the heart 
of a debate around homosexuality. Lapsley finds that this report, which has 
largely been depicted "as a groundbreaking, positive development" contains a 
nefarious undertone of free-market measures intended to promote "heterosexu- 
ality at the expense of homosexuality." Homosexuality was promoted by the 
report as a way to establish a difference against which heterosexual masculini- 
ty could be defined. 
In his work on the Industrial Workers of the World, Francis Shor finds that 
"[glender constructions . . . during this period [the first two decades of the twen- 
tieth century] were reconfigured by the insistent militancy of syndicalism in 
ways that instantiated an oppositional masculinism" or what Shor refers to as 
"virile syndicalism." While the Wobblies benefited from cohesion brought 
about by this oppositional stance, Shor finds that they ultimately failed by 
downplaying the role of women and fostering gender division. Shor's article, 
which arguably falls into line with Connell's definition, still recognizes the lim- 
its of Connell's model in enabling descriptions of power. 
Vacante's provocative article suggests that Quebec's narrow definition of 
masculinity and sensitivity at being outed as different from the rest of North 
American society is intimately related to Quebec's past and their own particu- 
lar liberal project. Picking up on currents within a series of political watersheds 
in Quebec since the 1960s, he follows his own work and other scholars in 
revealing how a particular notion of masculinity has arisen in the province. 
Vacante's own argument, is that this notion of masculinity, developed with sig- 
nificant help from historians, has prevented the development of masculinities 
studies in Quebec, seeing it as a "threat to the very state apparatus that is alleged 
to be at the centre of French-Canadian identity. In the same way that Jean 
Charest's efforts to downsize the state are described as "foreign" to Quebec sen- 
sibilities, so too are efforts to portray the state as a heteromasculinist or misog- 
ynistic entity seen to betray the spirit of the Quiet Revolution." In this manner, 
Vacante directly engages with Traister's suggestion that we evaluate the prac- 
tice of masculinity studies as well as the politics. 
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Geoff Read, former editor 
and retiring book review editor who has contributed significantly to the journal 
over recent years. At the same time, we welcome Left History's new book 
review editor, Tarah Brookfield, to the staff. 
The Editors - October 2006 


Editorial Note

Heron, Craig

Left History 11.2 149 
and enforcement of the sexual offences laws, detailed in Part One. As 
Houlbrook describes in Part Two, London also provided the freedom, anonymi- 
ty, and convivial public and private spaces in which men met and loved. It was 
in these spaces, Houlbrook argues in Part Three, that the fluctuating identities 
of queer and normal, of trade and queens were explored, defined, dissolved, and 
reformed. And finally in Part Four, London is revealed as the site of the shift- 
ing bureaucratic and legal reactions to queer urban culture that would culminate 
in the 1967 Sexual Offences Law which privileged a new privatized form of 
male homosexuality, even as it sought to exclude the public expressions of sex- 
uality that had formed the basis of so much queer urban culture. The city of 
London was not just the backdrop for these individual and historical events, but 
profoundly influenced male sexual practices and identities, and they in turn 
helped to shape the physical and cultural forms of modem urban life. 
Matt Houlbrook's book is a landmark in queer history, much as George 
Chauncey's Gay New York was ten years ago. Although occasionally marred by 
impenetrable prose, Houlbrook's work provides a detailed map of the complex 
spaces and patterns of class, sex, gender, and identity that constituted queer 
urban culture in London between 19 18 and 1957. 
Amy Bell-Huron University College 
Brad Beaven, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850- 
1945 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005). 
This is an ambitious book. Some of the material discussed here may seem old 
hat to historians familiar with the huge body of literature on working-class pop- 
ular culture in Britain in the century before the end of World War Two, but Brad 
Beaven has undertaken to work back through much of that writing to extract 
some key debates and, by adding new evidence or re-examining older findings, 
to challenge some facile or overly simplistic perspectives. His re-interpretation 
is thoughtful and compelling. 
Beaven is interested in one central question: how did working-class men 
respond to the 'civilizing' projects directed at them by a dominant order intent 
on turning them into acceptable material for 'citizenship?' He notes that the 
greatest anxieties that began to emerge in bourgeois circles by the second half 
of the nineteenth century were about what men got up to in their 'free time' after 
work. Consequently, a series of cultural projects in 'rational leisure' were 
launched to tame and shape them into self-disciplined, responsible actors capa- 
ble of participating appropriately in public life. There was particular concern 
about the destructive impact of commercial pleasures that more and more work- 
ing men bought into over the century, and that, according to critical commenta- 
tors, were turning them into dull, passive, poorly motivated creatures. As a 
150 Reviews 
result, various social engineers tried Bank Holidays, Penny Readings, working- 
men's clubs, temperance societies, Boy Scout troops, bicycle clubs, company 
recreation outlets, and eventually the BBC to distract and uplift. Along the way, 
much was learned about the futility of preachy instruction and the greater 
attractiveness of purposefully controlled play or amusement. This book assess- 
es whether working men paid much attention to these incursions into their 
recreational time and space. 
Beaven realizes that he is not the first to tackle these issues, and notes how 
much theoretical and historiographical ink has been spilled since the 1970s over 
how to interpret the impact of these schemes. He wants to leave behind blunt 
conclusions that emphasize successful manipulation by cultural elitists or 
leisure-industry capitalists, as well as too-easy assumptions about class struggle 
through popular culture. He accepts that it is no longer possible to talk about a 
single British 'working-class culture' without acknowledging gender and gen- 
erational differences, and therefore carefully limits his discussion to men and 
notes the particular experiences of male youth. 
He has the advantage of coming to this study of leisure from a long immer- 
sion in the history of work and industry, specifically the new mass-production 
industries (bicycles and autos) in Coventry in the half century before World War 
Two. The large number of semi-skilled workers in that economically upbeat 
city, who, he rightly notes, have too often been ignored in favour of those in 
more desperate circumstances in the North of England, remain the focus of this 
book, though his analytical reach extends across the country. Hence much of 
his discussion involves men who were comparatively well off and able to afford 
the main commercial pleasures on offer. 
In many cases (though not all), Beaven finds they flocked to the new 'civi- 
lizing' cultural activities, but the critical factor was "the extent to which the val- 
ues and social mores that ran through the entertainment were received, under- 
stood, and adopted by the working-class audience" (21). In fact, as he looks at 
how working men engaged with workingmen's clubs, music halls, cinema, 
commercial sports, and even radio listening, he repeatedly points out how they 
adapted the new cultural activities to their own needs and generally managed to 
keep a good distance from the control of the cultural creators. In the late nine- 
teenth century, the Penny Readings got subverted by the rowdiness and aggres- 
siveness of audiences who insisted on manipulating the performances to suit 
their own cultural preferences. Male wage-earners also took control of the 
working men's clubs and even allowed the sale of alcohol. They largely 
ignored projects of cultural colonization like the elegant People's Palace in East 
End London, as well as the Salvation Army's counter-attractions and the social- 
ists' earnest tee-totalling programs. He makes a similar case about schemes to 
tame working-class boys, who dragged much of their transgressive street cul- 
ture into the Boys' Clubs and kept their distance from the more militaristic Boy 
Left History 11.2 15 1 
Scouts until after the war. 
The preference of the working class for the musical hall, pub, cheap novel, 
cinema, and football pitch, all heavily commercialized, did not mean they were 
merely passively absorbing mass-produced cultural products. Audiences in all 
these cultural arenas loudly and aggressively intervened to shape the perform- 
ance, demanding familiar songs and routines in the music halls, hooting, jok- 
ing, and socializing through movies, and surging onto the field to influence the 
outcome of games in favour of a beloved home team. Mass culture for work- 
ing men, Beaven argues, should be seen "less as replacing an authentic work- 
ing-class culture and more as a successful imitator of it" (81). 
Unlike many other studies, he does not stop this argument with the Great 
War, but confronts the issues of the new leisure patterns that emerged as British 
working-class families relocated to new suburbs. There, he insists, married 
working men turned somewhat more towards privatized pursuits in and around 
the household (like gardening or hobbies), but not to the complete exclusion of 
collective, homosocial h n  in local pubs and in extremely popular company- 
sponsored recreation programs (where, once again, they tended to slip out of the 
paternalistic control of employers, who had become the new "moral guardian[s] 
of popular leisure pursuits" [141]). Ultimately, Beaven concludes, "notions of 
'good' citizenship offered from above were largely rejected or sidestepped by 
workingmen preferring a more immediate frame of reference located within 
their own culture" (2 13). 
There is a lot to like in this argument. It is a particularly helpful way to 
think about how workers engaged with the new cultural forms of the twentieth 
century and negotiated their way into a reconstituted class identity in the midst 
of 'mass culture7-in Beaven's words, how "they imposed their own layer of 
meaning and enjoyment" (206). In that sense, his book closely parallels Liz 
Cohen's perspective on American workers in Making the New Deal: Industrial 
Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. That said, there are some silences or issues 
not adequately addressed. Aside from a brief discussion of the Salvation Army 
and some church-based Boys' Clubs, the place of religion and the churches in 
the 'civilizing' project and male workers' response gets no attention. Also, the 
constant identification of the labour movement with prim socialists, many of 
them middle class, leaves out the possibility that other voices and tendencies 
within workers' movements were more attuned to different discourses that res- 
onated with the male wage-earner's cultural preferences (on drinking or foot- 
ball, for example-did not unions sponsor some of these activities them- 
selves?). 
Conceptually, there are two more serious questions. First, Beaven's brief 
introductory remarks on citizenship touch on relatively little of a large, complex 
literature. Second, while he proclaims a preference for a gendered analysis of 
popular culture, he never engages in a sustained discussion of how the class- 
152 Reviews 
based responses to projects to reform working men contributed to the construc- 
tion of working-class masculinities, or what they meant for the younger wage- 
earning women who were also visible in public spaces and popular pastimes. In 
part, this reflects an avoidance of sexuality as a point of cultural confrontation. 
There is now a growing body of historical scholarship and theoretical literature 
on masculinities that could have helped here. 
I am nonetheless glad that Beaven wrote this book and like the general 
thrust of his argument. He is challenging us to rethink now deeply ingrained 
assumptions about working-class cultures, and he makes a convincing case. 
That makes this book well worth reading. It is, however, a shame that at $84.95 
(Canadian) it is beyond the reach of most people (and libraries). 
Craig Heron-York University 
Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood 
(Balitimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 
Chnstopher Forth's much needed book is a stellar example of a gendered his- 
tory of politics as well as a political history of gender, sexuality, and the body. 
Following in the footsteps of such ground-breakers as Edward Berenson and 
Robert Nye, Forth adds a significant contribution to not only masculinity stud- 
ies, but also a major corrective to political histories of one of the most pivotal 
events in modem French history: the Dreyfus Affair. Like his fellow Dreyfus- 
era historians Venita Datta and John Cerullo, Christopher Forth sees the 
Dreyfus Affair in a much larger cultural context; the event became a prism 
through which the anxieties of modernity were reflected and refracted through- 
out French society and culture. While one can argue that the 'crisis of mas- 
culinity' began earlier than the 1890s, Forth convincingly shows that cultural 
concern about the manliness and its expression through the male body-both its 
physical appearance and actions- became a mainstay of the debate launched 
by the Affair. 
One of the impressive features of the book is that its central event is both 
everywhere and nowhere; we get fleeting descriptions of what happened to 
Captain Alfred Dreyfus and some inklings of the ensuing uffaire, but the story 
that concerns Forth is that which played out in the cultural arena. According to 
him, the polemical debate that ensued between the republican Dreyfusard camp 
and the ultra-nationalist 'antis' revolved around three interrelated areas of con- 
cern: modernity, medicine, and manhood (8). The resulting discourse about 
manhood became wrapped up in existing anxieties about the cultural and social 
dislocation brought on by modernity and a growing concern with the body due 
to the advent of modem medicine. In a debate that became increasingly vitri- 
olic and laced with overt and covert anti-Semitism, attacks on the opposition's 


Brad Beaven — Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850-1945

Kennedy, Sean

Left History 11.2 159 
1909 to 1938 and discusses some important alterations that illustrate the 
changes in the industry. The new Fite of 1909 was organized by mill-owners, 
not workers, and cast women workers in central symbolic roles. These changes 
conveyed both the feminization of the knitting trade as well as the power of the 
mill-owners and their interest in creating an industrial trademark for the town. 
There is less on the image of workers in national popular culture. The book 
has a short section on film that only addresses one example, and the discussion 
of books and theatre is similarly limited. Chenut does capture the different con- 
sumer roles of men and women, particularly the divergent ways that male and 
female workers chose to proclaim (or not) their membership in the working 
class. Men seemed to be more political in their fashion choices-wearing the 
cap (casquette) as a symbol of their class and masculinity-whereas the 
women's fashions of the interwar years afforded working-class women the 
opportunity to dress more like the bourgeois consumers of the knitted goods 
they produced (298-303). 
The interwar years, particularly the 1930s, would test the workers of Troyes. 
As owners cut wages and created part-time work the knitters of Troyes suffered 
unemployment and wage decline within the larger context of declining union 
membership and power. While Chenut sees the victory of the Popular Front and 
the strikes of 1936 as a triumph of worker mobilizations as well as a victory 
against fascism on both the local and national level, she emphasizes that these 
successes were ephemeral. 
Chenut clearly cares deeply about the place and people she has researched 
and that interest in their political, consumer, and work lives is infectious. She 
has written a book that can be read as a local history as well as a larger story of 
the social, political, and cultural transformations of the French working class. 
Daniella Sarnoff-Fordham University 
Raymond Jonas, The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War 
(Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005). 
At the core of Raymond Jonas's succinct and engrossing book is the story of a 
young peasant woman from the Vendte who, from the age of three, claimed to 
have visions of Jesus in which he spoke to her, showing her his wounded heart. 
In late 1916, at the age of 21, Claire decided she would try to convince the 
President of the Third Republic to consecrate France to the Sacred Heart, there- 
by ensuring the nation's spiritual regeneration and its victory over Germany. 
Claire's mission would end in failure, meeting with rejection from the republi- 
can authorities and disapproval from the Vatican. As Jonas demonstrates, how- 
ever, it provides an excellent vantage point from which to explore the evolution 
of French Catholicism and the political culture of France during the First World 
160 Reviews 
War. 
However distinctive Claire's visions may have been to her-by her own 
account Jesus first appeared to her during a brief confinement in the family 
wine cellar after she refused to greet a young cousin with a kiss-under the 
guidance of local clergy they became identified with the Cult of the Sacred 
Heart. As Jonas demonstrated in his previous, impressive book, France and the 
Cult of the Sacred Heart (2000), this Catholic tradition had by the late nine- 
teenth century become firmly associated with counter-revolutionary politics. In 
the period leading up to her meeting with President Raymond PoincarC in 
March 1917, this dimension of Claire's outlook had been relatively muted; she 
had instead emphasized the need to restore France's Catholic faith and have the 
government include the image of the Sacred Heart on the national flag. But as 
it became obvious that Poincare would do no such thing, and after Claire 
returned home from Paris, her message became more ominous; "[ilt amounted 
to a charge of treason on the part of France's highest officials" (126). 
Claire was hardly alone in her desire to have France consecrated to the 
Sacred Heart. Individual cities and towns had been consecrated in the 1890s; 
such activities had eventually been banned by the government, but as the war 
got undenvay new initiatives were launched at the parish and diocesan level to 
organize a call for a national consecration. There were also extensive efforts to 
reach out to French soldiers; volunteer chaplains proselytized among them, 
petitioning campaigns for consecration were directed at front-line troops, and 
millions of Sacred Heart insignia, including tens of thousands of national flags 
adorned with the symbol, were sent to them. 
While these campaigns can be regarded as an intensive effort to re- 
Christianize public life in France, one of the key themes of Jonas's book is that 
the Church hosted diverse opinions on these matters. Claire certainly had sup- 
porters, but some elements of the church were more cautious in their attitude, 
or even downright sceptical. The commission which first questioned Claire 
about her visions-in Poitiers, the city where Joan of Arc had been interrogat- 
ed in 1429--did not reject her but would not fully endorse her either. The bish- 
op of Perigueux objected to the idea of adding the Sacred Heart to the national 
flag because it challenged religious pluralism in France. A French cardinal sta- 
tioned in Rome openly questioned the Sacred Heart-oriented campaigns in the 
influential daily Le Figaro in May 19 18, wondering how a symbol of peace and 
love-capable of being utilized by German Catholics just as easily as their 
French counterparts--could be appropriated to achieve victory in war. That 
same month the Vatican publicly discouraged Catholic activism centered upon 
the Sacred Heart flag. Two years later Rome made clear that it disapproved of 
Claire's mission as well. 
The fate of Claire Ferchaud also sheds light on wartime politics. In 1914, 
President PoincarC had proclaimed a union sacrke, whereby France's varying 
Left History 11.2 161 
and often sharply opposed political cultures, ranging from the Catholic right to 
the Socialist left, were asked to set aside their differences for the sake of patri- 
otic unity. The President's agreement to meet with Claire can be regarded as 
part of his ongoing efforts to preserve that union. But the secular republican 
state's tolerance soon reached its limits, and it began to crack down on the cam- 
paigns. In 191 7, for example, the Archbishop of Tours was charged for display- 
ing a tricolour flag carrying the Sacred Heart. 
But while Jonas's study displays the limits of the wartime reconciliation 
between Catholics and the Third Republic, he also makes clear that there were 
points of contact between the secularist republican elite and elements of the 
church hierarchy. Certainly that proved to be the case with Claire herself. After 
the war both anticlerical medical doctors and clergymen concerned about the 
church's being discredited by a fraud, dismissed Claire's troublesome visions as 
the likely product of hysteria. This diagnosis facilitated her sequest~ation in a 
religious community after the condemnation from the Vatican, which was not 
lifted until 1964. Claire died in 1972 in relative obscurity. 
The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud complicates and thus enriches our 
understanding of France during the First World War. There are points in the 
book where Claire herself disappears from view, and Jonas could develop com- 
parisons between her and other Catholic visionaries in a bit more detail than he 
does. But he has located fascinating material and mined it to great effect; in 
addition to the themes highlighted in this review he makes perceptive remarks 
about religious imagery and spectacles, and writes in an engaging, accessible 
style. This thought-provoking book deserves a wide readership; it could be 
used with profit in courses dealing with modern France or the cultural history 
of the Great War. 
Sean Kennedy-University of New Brunswick 
Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and 
National Identity in the Kinsey Reports (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 
University of California Press, 2005). 
Back in November 2004, the New York Ernes published an article by Benedict 
Carey entitled "Long After Kinsey, Only the Brave Study Sex." In it Carey 
noted that in George W. Bush's America, scientists who want to ask questions 
about human sexuality risk losing their funding if they ask those questions too 
openly. The parallels with Cold War America when zoologist Alfred Kinsey 
and his team were conducting their research are obvious. Thankfully historians 
of American sexuality are subjected to less scrutiny than researchers of sexual- 
ity itself (perhaps due to the relative lack of funding), and the field continues to 
flourish even when the subject itself is the controversial Kinsey Reports. 


Raymond Jonas — The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War

Johnson, Eric A.

Left History 1 1.1 153 
Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, Mass.: Haward University 
Press, 2004). 
Can one write a fair and balanced book on any important aspect of the Third 
Reich given the emotionally charged and hotly contested terrain involved? 
Certainly Michael Kater makes a strong effort to do just that in his new book 
on the history of youth in Hitler's Germany. Michael Kater is probably in a bet- 
ter position than almost anyone else in the world to do this since he has already 
established himself over the past several decades as one of the world's leading 
authorities on Nazi society, publishing well-regarded studies on Nazi Party 
membership, jazz and music, medicine, and a variety of other topics crucial to 
the understanding of how the Third Reich ticked. Arguably, however, none of 
his former works are of more salience in this regard than this one. Not only was 
the Nazi movement in many ways a very youthful one, with comparatively 
young leaders, new ideas, and bold and reckless plans for the future, but its very 
success depended largely on its ability to capture the hearts and minds of 
German youth. 
According to Kater, the Nazis were highly successful most of the time with 
the majority of German youths in this endeavor, but not all of the time with all 
youths. To show this he employs a wide variety of published and unpublished 
sources, and provides many evocative vignettes along the way of individual 
German youth in many different types of situations based often on their own 
memoirs and letters and other personal materials. Thus Kater takes us into the 
world of the militaristic Hitler youth organization that both German boys in the 
Hitler Jugend (HJ) and girls in the Bund Deutscher Made1 (BDM) were com- 
pelled to join as well as into that of the small minorities of German youth who 
became involved in resistance organizations such as the working-class 
Edelweiss Pirates and the more middle-class swing youth and White Rose cir- 
cle. He also pays attention to both the beginning and largely happier years of 
the Reich in peacetime during the 1930s, and to the ultimately devastating peri- 
od of the later war years when the crimes the Reich had committed finally came 
home to roost and the price that German youths were compelled to pay was 
enormous. 
Fair and balanced as Kater is, he certainly does hold strong views at times. 
Particularly strong is his dlsdain for the Hitler Youth organization, which he says 
was not only militaristic but also imperialistic and anti-Semitic, and which 
"encouraged individual and group sadism, physical and mental torture, and 
peer-group hazing" (3 l), and was in sum "full of incompetence, abuse, and cor- 
ruption" and was seen by both insiders and many on the outside as well as "cor- 
rupt and diseased to the core" (58). Given his fklly negative view of this organ- 
ization, however, whch after all was the major Nazi institution for German 
youth, one wonders how the Nazis were so very successful in gaining the alle- 
154 Reviews 
giance of most German young people. Kater himself does admit that despite its 
many flaws, the Hitler Youth organization was very popular, by and large, and 
he provides a number of possible explanations-it provided youth with a sense 
of freedom from parents and schoolmasters; it was not weighed down by tradi- 
tion and taboos and was much more modern and forward looking that other 
institutions; and, probably above all in Kater's depiction, it "allowed liberal rela- 
tions with girls" (78). While Kater's argument about the sexual dimension of 
the HJ's popularity might well be true, even though the Nazi youth organization 
has often been portrayed as rather prim and proper in the past, his account still 
reads as a blanket condemnation of the Hitler Youth organization and the very 
negativity of his tone might prevent him from providing an accurate sense of the 
palpable enthusiasm that so many young Germans obviously felt for the Nazi 
movement. 
But these issues are perhaps still rather minor in comparison with the 
lengthy discussion Kater provides of the wartime experiences of German youth 
in his fifth and penultimate chapter. In this chapter especially, Kater tries hard 
to be fair and balanced. Obviously, however, at this point in time Kater believes 
that to be fair and balanced the historian needs to recognize not only the crimes 
that German soldiers and civilians committed during the war but also the suf- 
fering that they endured. Indeed, while he pointedly reminds the reader that 
Germans were responsible for much pain and suffering, he often devotes more 
space to the pain and suffering of the German soldiers and the German civilians 
than that of Jews, Russians, and others. In this chapter he dedicates numerous 
pages, for example, to the hardships and privations of German troops, particu- 
larly on the eastern front and to the horrifying if well known mass rapes com- 
mitted against German girls and women near the war's end by enemy soldiers 
coming mostly, but not completely, from the east. 
Some years ago many scholars would probably not have been very recep- 
tive to Kater's insistence that "the chronicle of this suffering must also find its 
place in the history of youth under Hitler" (240) and many would have been 
quite uncomfortable even with ostensibly neutral statements like that which 
Kater makes at the end of his fifth chapter: "In the end, it is impossible to weigh 
the inhumanities perpetrated by Nazis on the one side and Soviets on the other" 
(246). Indeed, in the last decades of the twentieth century, the scholarly debate 
about the Third Reich mostly focused on the issue of the complicity of ordinary 
Germans in perpetrating mass murder and other crimes. Is it possible that the 
twenty-first century is already beginning to witness a paradigm shift in the 
study of German history with Michael Kater out in front of the profession once 
again? 
Eric A. Johnson-Central Michigan University 


Michael H. Kater — Hitler Youth

Shor, Francis

Gender and Labour/Working Class History in Comparative Perspective: The Syndicalist and Wobbly Experience in the USA, Australia, and New Zealand

Editorial Note 
Conceived of by recently departed editor Ian Hesketh, the symposium that 
forms the core of this issue of Left History concerns the question, "What is 
Left History?" Ian, inspired and prompted by a similar symposium mounted 
in Critical Inquiry on the state of critical theory, drafted a letter to our edito- 
rial board which was sent out a year ago. We must offer our thanks both to 
Ian for the concept (and his tireless work during his three-year tenure as edi- 
tor) and our always-busy board members for their thoughtful and varied con- 
tributions. Clearly, this question was one in which they all had investment. 
The results of the symposium provide an interesting snapshot of the state 
of left history at the outset of the 21st century. One can see continued pres- 
ence of old debates between historical materialism and post-structural cultur- 
al histories, as expected, alongside relatively new debates on the validity of 
"left history" in today's arguably inclusive scholarly climate. These debates 
manifest themselves both as preliminary answers to perceived problems for 
the contemporary practice of left history as well as reflections on the person- 
al relationship of left historians to their past, to other disciplines, and to the 
societies in which they live, work, and debate. 
The subjects of these debates could preoccupy the journal for another 
generation; they grant licence to numerous approaches for practitioners of 
left history. William Pelz puts it simply, writing, "Left history is more than 
being about the truth since there are always many truths." This encompass- 
ing style is advocated by a number of our contributors. Craig Heron writes 
that "any field-including the study of the state and politics, which so many 
of us have abandoned over the past quarter century-is a legitimate area of 
study for left historians, and not simply the blue-collar wage-earner.. . ." 
Molly Ladd-Taylor agrees, arguing that "Left history can and should be 
methodologically inclusive, encompassing culture as well as politics, the 
local and the global, the subaltern and the ruling class." Franca Iacovetta also 
elaborates this notion of expanding the horizons of left subjects, even while 
reaffirming her own commitment to theorizing from the bottom up: "While 
it is not the only way to write left history, I remain particularly attuned to 
tracing the complex conflicts and negotiations between the powerful and 
those who occupied the margins." 
The definition of the margins in this symposium is a wide-ranging and 
occasionally contradictory one. While class remains a central subject for left 
history, many contributors suggest class has become a central category for 
history, and that the margins are defined predominantly through gender and 
race. Heron suggests that "the tried-and-true historical materialism that has 
always grounded my own studies of working-class life can be fruitfully 
8 
0 Left History 
l l.  l (Spring 2006) 
infused with newer theoretical currents about gender, race, and cultural for- 
mation" and that "left historians need to maintain an openness and flexibili- 
ty in developing and applying our analytical frameworks and methodologies." 
In practical terms, Linda Kealey's survey of the gendered bias of Left 
History indicates that gender has literally occupied our margins. Kealey's 
discussion of the "slow pace of achieving gender equality in the academy" 
and the "slow death" of the National Action Committee on the Status of 
Women, as well as Franca Iacovetta's personal account of her own experi- 
ences as a feminist historian in the halls of labour history, indicate that the 
study of gender and the very practice of engaging in and with feminist histo- 
ries places one outside the middle ground. Similarly, while race is mentioned 
consistently by various contributors, with the exception of Vijay Prishad's 
work and current work by Karen Dubinsky, practical discussions of race as a 
category of analysis are sadly under-represented in the symposium. Prashad's 
discussion of Marxism as practice and philosophy in India is a provocative 
look at what left history means in the non-western world. Here we can see 
how the meanings of "left" extend beyond the traditional interpretations set 
for them, and how left history, and indeed Left History, can only benefit from 
exposure and interaction with work being done on and in the non western 
world. 
Other contributors, however, argue that gender, race, and class are too 
comfortably ensconced in current scholarship to be considered left history 
any more. Using the history of sex as an example, Bryan Palmer argues that 
"left history is threatened by its subtle incorporation into a homogenized 
mainstream, in which liberal (and undeniably good) values of multicultural- 
ism, tolerance, and respect for the much-vaunted differences of our political 
age-skin colour, sexual orientation, biological and altered bodies-eviscer- 
ate the very possibility of an oppositional history." Here Palmer points out 
what he sees as a hndamental difficulty: "any history conceived as dissent 
. . . is being trapped in the conventions of thought so thoroughly familiar and 
insidiously pervasive in contemporary bourgeois culture that they overwhelm 
what is fundamentally contentious and challenging." Palmer's left history, 
then, can only be conceived as such if it possesses adequate distance from the 
middle, centrist ground. While Palmer's approach is at odds with many of his 
fellow board members, his basic contention that left history must be opposi- 
tional is one that is echoed throughout the symposium. 
Even if Geoff Eley mourns the fact that "there are no parties any more to 
join. Or, at least, there are no national movements of the Left any more with 
the kind of social and cultural reach . . . that might be capable of drawing Left 
intellectuals into their circumference," the personal accounts of political 
activities engaged in by our board indicate that gender, race, and class are 
still very vital categories of identity outside of academic scholarship. Women 
still feel threatened even within the ivory tower, non-whites still have little 
representation both in that same tower and beyond it, and members of the 
working class are still being used, as Karen Dubinsky points out, as fodder 
for guns in Iraq. Thus while certain histories may be in vogue within acade- 
mia, what is in vogue in the non-academic world should likely be more 
important for conceptions of left history. It is the challenge of left history to 
look outwards, rather than inwards, to recognize what it must oppose. Jeet 
Heer's recommendation to "know thy enemy" through a study of the religious 
right in America seems prescient. The age-old debate about the relationship 
between the scholarly community and the wider world is for many of our edi- 
torial board a site that needs to be reimagined. 
In kind, Ladd-Taylor's submission offers the strength of the current right- 
wing political climate as a caution to historians to fascinated with debates 
over practice: "No single methodology or theoretical approach can capture 
the diversity and vitality of left history, and in the current political context, 
we cannot afford to be divided by battles over theory or sectarian political 
debates." In this climate, the multi-pronged approach of left history does not 
merely seem like a mirror to the scattered and disorganized left of the US, but 
rather speaks to the possibility of resistance on multiple levels. Liza Piper's 
discussion of the potential of environment history's sweeping approach to the 
impact of capitalism seems particularly relevant as it asks us to consider its 
impact on multiple spaces but also across multiple time periods. 
In these approaches, as well as others, we can see that left history has a 
wide-ranging future, and one that in part involves "staying the course." The 
symposium, above all else, warns us that the emergence of left history as a 
fashionable subject does not mean there is room for comfort; it is clear that 
staying the course means continuing to embrace different approaches to left 
histories of left subjects, while continuing to pay homage to the foundations 
of left history and the intellectual and activist ferment of the 60s. Happily, 
the other contributions to this issue look in that direction. Car1 Mirra's arti- 
cle on Staughton Lynd's turbulent career provides an interesting look at the 
difficulties faced by early left historians in the US. Mirra brings up many of 
the problems that scholars continue to face as they seek to pursue research 
and engage in activism on topics that fall outside the academy's chosen 
trajectory. 
Jeet Heer's interview with Tariq Ali, although now almost a year old, 
presents the thoughts of one of the most renowned critics of our time on sub- 
jects that are central to the symposium. The American right, the war in Iraq, 
and the troubled state of the left since its collapse in the west in the 70s 
inform the malaise of both pieces while a command to stay true to Pelz and 
Eley's "good scholarship" is echoed by Ali when he demands a "hardheaded 
and realistic" approach in the face of significant challenges. 
Heeding the issues raised throughout, we hope Left History will contin- 
ue to play an important role in presenting a variety of left histories, theories, 
and activism. We hope to chart a line between publishing labour and radical 
history while opening the journal to new debates and controversies. As edi- 
tors, we believe in the maintenance of the tradition of opposition. 
The Editors 
March 2006 


Reid, Jason

154 Reviews 
even argue that such accusations of effeminacy have much more power and are 
more politically wounding when hurled by the right at the left; the lefdcenter- 
left's attempts to the do same are and were meet with ridicule. This pattern is 
easily discernable in multiple national contexts, particularly in Europe and the 
United States. As Forth's book insightfully shows us, the crisis of modernity 
and its ineluctable ties to the ongoing 'crisis of masculinity' may have had their 
genesis in the late nineteenth century but possess amazing staying power in the 
early twenty-first century. 
Cheryl A. Koos--California State University, Los Angeles 
Rachel Devlin, Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and 
Postwar American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 
Press, 2005). 
American culture after World War 11 was greatly affected by two phenomena: 
the growing popularity of psychology and psychoanalysis, as well as the emer- 
gence of teenagers as a distinct group or subculture. Rachel Devlin's book, 
Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American 
Culture, examines how these two phenomena intersected in the 1940s and 
1950s with particular emphasis on how the father-daughter dynamic was envi- 
sioned by psycho-analysts, novelists, playwrights, advertisers, and the legal 
community. 
Devlin begins by discussing how one prominent psychoanalyst, Helene 
Deutsch, re-imagined the debate concerning the development of adolescent 
girls in the 40s and 50s. Whereas the development of teenage boys was always 
defined as a quest for independence from most forms of parental authority, 
Deutsch argued that the developmental arc of teenage girls was intimately tied 
to a strengthening relationship with their fathers. Adolescent girls were expect- 
ed to remove themselves from their mothers in order to properly make the tran- 
sition from dependent child to independent adult, but they were also expected 
to rediscover their father and embark upon a relationship that frequently took 
on erotic overtones, ranging from abstract father-daughter fantasies to incestu- 
ous acts. As unseemly as all this sounds, Deutsch and her followers, most 
notably Phyllis Greenacre and Peter Blos, concluded that adolescent girls who 
were denied a healthy paternal relationship were more likely to encounter prob- 
lems on the road to adulthood. 
In chapter two Devlin examines the public debate over perhaps the most 
talked about adolescent developmental problem of all: juvenile delinquency. 
Devlin points out that Deutsch and company saw the denial of the Oedipal rela- 
tionship as a contributing factor in the rise of criminal behaviour among teenage 
girls during the postwar years. As in previous eras, female delinquency during 
Left History 11.2 155 
the 40s and 50s was framed along sexual lines, but with a twist: psychoana- 
lysts, many of whom were being hired as advisors by the country's emerging 
juvenile court system, pointed to paternal neglect, rather than socio-economic 
conditions, as the primary cause of delinquency. Teen girls, in short, were get- 
ting in trouble because daddy was not paying them enough attention. 
Chapter three finds Devlin switching gears somewhat by discussing how 
the father-daughter relationship played out in consumer circles. Devlin has dug 
through a number of interesting sources (including magazine advertisements, 
advice columns, and even stage plays) to illustrate how the father-daughter rela- 
tionship was often seen as a defining aspect of the consumption habits of 
teenage girls in the early postwar years. The formula was simple: daughter 
wants a dress, daddy consents and provides her with the money to buy the dress, 
thus strengthening their relationship through an odd mix of consumerism and 
paternal approval. Here Devlin offers one of her most intriguing arguments 
insofar as historians of adolescence are concerned-the idea that affluence did 
not necessarily lead to independence or 'separateness' for teenagers, but rather 
that it reinforced teen dependence by reinventing the breadwinner ideal. 
Ultimately, Devlin argues that spending patterns for teen girls may have been 
contingent on the economic power of their fathers. 
Devlin devotes chapter four to looking at how adolescent rituals such as 
debutante balls and marriages were affected by the emerging father-daughter 
dynamic. Central to this chapter is her reading of Father of the Bride, Edward 
Streeter's best-selling 1948 novel about a confused father in the weeks leading 
up to his daughter's wedding. The book and the movie that followed were 
immensely successfhl, and Devlin uses this to support her argument that Father 
of the Bride and its many imitators represent the ritualistic presentation of the 
father-daughter ideal through popular culture. The most interesting part of the 
chapter, however, deals with how African-Americans presented such rites of 
passage in magazines such as Jet and Ebony. Devlin has found that black debu- 
tantes, unlike their white, middle-class counterparts, were often featured alone 
in pictorials, their fathers nowhere to be found. Devlin argues, quite convinc- 
ingly, that mainstream views of the father-daughter dynamic could not be repli- 
cated in African-American circles due to the fear of black male sexuality. 
Relative Intimacy ends with an examination of the father-daughter relation- 
ship in literary circles. Here Devlin makes a number of interesting points that 
will appeal to students of both history and English literature. Her most intrigu- 
ing argument concerns the works of Hugh Hubert, an American novelist whose 
humorous, yet sexually-charged short stories may have influenced Vladimir 
Nabokov's masterpiece Lolida and William Styron's critically-acclaimed first 
novel Lie Down In Darkness, among others. Although difficult to prove in any 
definitive manner, Devlin claims that the characters and plot developments in 
both novels are strikingly similar to those found in Hubert's wildly popular 
156 Reviews 
short stories (Devlin even goes so far as to suggest that Hugh Hubert's name 
may have been the inspiration for Humbert Humbert, the hapless widower in 
Lolita who lusts after his twelve-year-old stepdaughter). However, the ultimate 
argument in this chapter is that these somewhat scandalous novels, all of which 
featured incest as a central plot element, failed to provoke outrage amongst lit- 
erary critics and academics because the father-daughter relationship had 
become such a common trope in American culture after the war. Outrage was 
impossible because "the stage had already been set for such an intellectual 
endeavour by the relentless eroticization of the father-daughter relationship on 
all levels of culture.. ."(l70). Tales of incest, if we are to believe Devlin, had 
become old hat by the time Lolita and Lie Down In Darkness found their way 
into American bookstores. 
While I am intrigued by many of the arguments presented by Devlin in 
Relative Intimacy, a number of questions seem to go unanswered. For instance, 
I was left wondering just how ubiquitous this new view of father-daughter rela- 
tionships really was--did the views of Deutsch, Greenacre, and Blos represent 
consensus within the social scientific community or were they merely the views 
of a very vocal minority? Unfortunately, Devlin does not really discuss their 
ideas within a larger disciplinary context. Renowned sociologist Talcott 
Parsons is mentioned as a friendly supporter of Deutsch's theories, but the read- 
er is left wondering whether these views were greeted with acceptance, deri- 
sion, or indifference by her friends in academia. Devlin's arguments, in other 
words, may have been strengthened with a discussion of how this new approach 
to adolescent development was received by Deutsch's peers. 
Similarly, Devlin fails to contextualize the impact of Deutsch's theories on 
the discussions ofjuvenile delinquency. My objection here is not that these the- 
ories were not part of that discourse, but rather that they may have made a much 
smaller dent on the discourse than Devlin would like to admit. A simple glance 
at any popular magazine or newspaper during the 1940s and 1950s tells us that 
poverty and a lack of leisure facilities, not paternal neglect, were most often 
quoted as the number one contributor to juvenile delinquency, be it of the male 
or female variety. The Oedipal interpretation certainly played a role in the 
debate over juvenile delinquency, but I would argue that Devlin has exaggerat- 
ed its importance. 
The final chapter concerning literary representations of the father-daughter 
relationship is also problematic. Devlin's claim that novels with story lines 
involving incest failed to provoke outrage is overstating things somewhat. For 
instance, how do we explain the scathing review of Lolita by renowned literary 
critic Edmund Wilson, a good fiiend of Nabokov's, who dubbed it "repulsive," 
"unreal," and "too unpleasant to be funny?" (Erica Jong, New York Time, 5 
June 1988.) Or how about author Kingsley Amis, who dubbed it a "moral fail- 
ure," or John Hollander, a contributor to the Partisan Review, who referred to 
Left History 11.2 157 
it as a "tremendous perversity?'(Frederick Smock, The Courier-Journal, 15 
May 2005.) Even the ultra-liberal Ellage Voice described Lolita as "three hun- 
dred pages of sex in the head," declaring in the end that it was simply "too 
many, and too much." (Jerry Tallmer, fillage Voice, 3 September 1958.) 
Despite all this, Devlin's work is quite fascinating and very readable. She 
has a keen eye for popular culture and she has done an excellent job explaining 
how psychoanalysis seeped into many areas of American culture after World 
War 11, be it in legal discourse, advertising, the stage, or the world of letters. 
Unfortunately, I cannot help but think that the father-daughter psychoanalytic 
paradigm, while certainly a unique and colourfUl feature of postwar American 
culture, was not as pervasive as Devlin would have us believe. 
Jason Reid-York University 
Helen Harden Chenut, The Fabric of Gender: Working Class Culture in 
Third Republic France (University Park: Penn State Press, 2005). 
Helen Chenut's The Fabric of Gender is both a chronological and thematic his- 
tory of the knitters of Troyes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 
While the title might make one envision a piece almost entirely focused on the 
dynamics of gender, it is, in fact, a full history of the life of the knitters in the 
proper spirit of both gender and class history. Gender is just one thread of this 
book, which is a balanced and thorough look at the social, political, and con- 
sumer lives of these industry-specific French workers in the Third Republic. 
The book is actually slow to get to gender, spending time setting up the con- 
text of workers' lives in the Aube, explaining the growth of the knitting and cot- 
ton hosiery industry (bonneterie), the history of family work on a local level, 
and the transition from merchant to industrial capitalism, particularly as prac- 
ticed by the mill-owners of Troyes. 
Looking at the knitting industry most intensely from 1900 through the 
Popular Front, Chenut touches on a number of themes, including: the political 
leanings and engagement of the knitters, employers' and workers' concerns, the 
feminization of the industry, and prevailing ideas of skill, technology, and con- 
sumer practices. She returns to each of these topics a number of times through- 
out eight chapters, and while the format is highly organized (as noted, convey- 
ing both a chronological tale and thematic telling) Chenut's format does, on 
occasion, mean the repetition (or re-setting up) of ideas addressed in previous 
chapters. 
Beginning with the strike of 190&generally perceived as a failure as 
workers' wage and hour demands were not met-Chenut explains the intenvov- 
en nature of working-class politics, class consciousness, and the local politics 
of Troyes and the Aube. It is not that gender or women were marginal to the 


Rachel Devlin — Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture

Weijerman, Jeremy

166 Reviews 
Farberbock, might do as good a job, or better, of raising similar themes in an 
approachable, semi-fictional way. 
In the end, it matters little whether Grynszpan was gay or not, just as it mat- 
ters little that he was the particular man who shot vom Rath. The diplomat's 
death may have been a tragedy, but its importance lies not in the details, but in 
what happened afterward. The murder was just the excuse for Kristal2nacht, 
not the cause, and the question of Grynszpan's sexuality mattered little to that 
event, if at all. 
Julia Torri-St. Thomas University 
Dagmar Herzog. Sex afer Fascism: Memory and Moraliw in Twentieth- 
Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 
Dagmar Herzog's Sex after Fascism is a detailed re-evaluation of the history 
and memory of sexuality in Germany since the Third Reich. Herzog categori- 
cally rejects the idea of Nazism as anti-sex. She argues that Nazi sexuality was 
marked by simultaneous "incitement and disavowal" (27). Specifically, while 
the Nazis rejected a supposedly libertine Weimar sexuality and harshly con- 
trolled the sexuality of those considered racially unfit, they also emphasised 
sexual emancipation and pleasure for those considered racially fit, encouraging 
condom use, women's sexual freedom, and pre and extra-marital sex. 
Before the Sexual Revolution, Nazism was remembered in West Germany 
as sexually inciting, and this sexual liberalism was linked causally to Nazi 
genocide. With the post-war Christianisation of German politics, sexual con- 
servatism came to dominate the West as a postfascist way of renouncing link- 
age to, complicity with, and pleasure under the former Nazi regime, for the peo- 
ple, the new state, and the churches. Yet the Bundesrepublik Deutschland 
(BRD) exhibited continuities with the Third Reich, including a eugenic, 
volkisch, and socially-if not politically-anti-Semitic worldview, and the con- 
tinued criminalisation of abortion, pornography, and homosexuality (the latter 
two under the guise of protecting youth). Yet because most West Germans liked 
the sexual liberality they gained during Weimar to the Third Reich, conserva- 
tive theory and liberal practice did not line up, with pre- and extra-marital sex, 
pregnancies, and abortion remaining common. 
West Germany's Sexual Revolution depended on four main elements: the 
New Left; the 'sex wave' (i.e. the commercialisation of sex and the spread of a 
sexual consumer culture including pornography and sexualised advertising); 
the government's willingness to liberalise its policies vis a vis abortion, pornog- 
raphy, and homosexuality; and the advent of the pill. Arguing that the person- 
al is political, the small but ever important New Left viewed sexual politics as 
inseparable from other politics, leading to their idea that the defeat of sexual 
Left History 11.2 167 
conservatism would simultaneously defeat political conservatism. Borrowing 
not least from Wilhelm Reich, New Leftists revised the popular memory of 
Nazi sexuality to the now dominant idea of Nazism as anti-sex, arguing that 
Nazis' sexual self-repression led to them acting out their repressed desires by 
committing genocide. Moreover, New Leftists saw their parents' generation as 
anti-Semitic, nationalistic, and unrepentant for Nazi-era crimes, and were dis- 
gusted with the Christian view that sexuality was a greater crime than genocide. 
Within this context, the New Leftists falsely concluded that the BRD's sexual 
conservatism was a relic of the Nazi past, and through this accusation managed 
to pre-emptively de-legitimate their opponents. In rejecting a sexual conser- 
vatism that was itself postfascist, this New Left activism was less antifascist, 
Herzog argues, than "antipostfascist" (7). 
The Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) developed a different post- 
fascist sexual culture that was initially conservative but gradually liberalised. 
Thus, Herzog posits that where the West experienced a Sexual Revolution, the 
East saw a "Sexual Evolution" (1 92). After tolerating abortion in the late 1940s 
(due in part to the mass rape of German women by Soviet soldiers), the DDR 
re-criminalized it in 1950. In this and other aspects of a generally unpopular 
sexual conservatism, the ruling Sozialistische Einhatspartei Deutschlands 
(SED) had to constantly distinguish its own conservatism from Nazi and 
Christian varieties, as its professed aim was to create a distinctly "socialist 
morality" (1 85). Partly to negotiate this difficult issue, and partly to compen- 
sate for the unpopularity of the re-criminalization of abortion, the SED tried to 
cast socialism as the ideal system for romantic and sexual fulfilment. They took 
extensive steps to guarantee not just legal, but also social and economic equal- 
ity for women. They promoted female independence and male acceptance of it, 
argued that women's sexual pleasure was as important as men's, and helped to 
foster an egalitarian culture that included male participation in domestic duties. 
This ultimately meant that, unlike in the BRD, women were not locked into 
marriage for reasons of economic independence or social pressure, and mar- 
riage became something that was supposed to last only as long as love and hap- 
piness did. Moreover, abortion and homosexuality were legalised earlier and 
more comprehensively than in the BRD. In large part because DDR women 
had most of what BRD feminists were demanding, no substantial feminist 
movement developed in the DDR. After 1990, the DDR's unique and liberal 
sexual culture was ridiculed and ultimately destroyed by that of the BRD. 
Indeed, 'Wessies' now generally consider the 'Ossies' to have been sexless and 
bland, yet the DDR's sexual culture has, for the Easterners, become an impor- 
tant site of Ostalgie. 
Sex after Fascism does have its weak points. Organizationally, I found the 
comparative aspect to be somewhat unbalanced. Of six chapters, four are 
devoted primarily to the BRD, one to the Third Reich, and one to the DDR. 
168 Reviews 
Given that Nazism is a reference point in all chapters, it ends up being much 
better covered than the DDR. Thus, the East-West comparison suffers. 
Moreover, I occasionally found the rhetorical structure a bit weak, with some 
repetition, partly due to some temporal and structural jumping hither and thith- 
er. Some sections (for instance Herzog's interesting examination of Theweleit's 
Mannerphantasien in the context of New Left intellectual tradition) seemed 
rather disconnected from the rest of the text, and not integrated into the larger 
arguments. Finally, I was frustrated by the lack of a bibliography, though that 
is likely the fault of the publisher. Many of these minor flaws can be explained, 
no doubt, by the fact that a 70-year history of sexuality in three states is a huge- 
ly ambitious undertaking for just one volume, and must necessarily leave gaps. 
Despite these few problems, Sex after Fascism is an excellent book. 
Besides her complex re-evaluations of German sexuality-particularly in 
Nazism and the Sexual Revolution-I found Herzog's treatment of memory 
very interesting. Highlighting changing conceptions of past sexualities, she 
shows how important these memories-and, thereby, sexuality-have been to 
the political history of Germany since Weimar. This focus on memory is one of 
Herzog's main goals and achievements with this impressive book. 
Jeremy Weijerman-Universitat Konstanz 
Bettina Bradbury and Tamara Myers, eds., Negotiating Identities in 19th- 
and 20th Century Montreal (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005). 
Magda Fahrni, Household Politics: Montreal Families and Postwar 
Reconstruction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 
Les categories d'analyse que sont le genre et l'iige, la classe sociale, l'origine 
ethnique et la religion se croisent et se conjuguent dans ces deux ouvrages 
recents sur Montreal qui renouvellent de manikre fort stimulante I'historiogra- 
phie quebecoise en mettant en lumikre des dimensions meconnues des rapports 
sociaux dans cette ville de contrastes. Sans structurer explicitement et de 
maniere centrale les deux lines, le concept de masculinite oriente leurs propos. 
Le lecteur y decouvre la diversite des expkriences de vie des homrnes, 1'8mer- 
gence de nouvelles valeurs, la valorisation croissante de certains comporte- 
ments, de m&me que les contraintes et I'anxiCtC que gCn&rent les normes 
sociales dominantes envers ceux qui ne correspondent pas au modgle ideal. Les 
deux ouvrages s'inscrivent au nombre des etudes critiques de la notion de 
sphkres separkes. 11s soulignent la fluidit6 et la porosite des frontikes entre 
l'une et l'autre et mettent l'accent sur les lieux et les moyens d'expression a la 
portCe des femmes et, aussi, des hommes de conditions modestes, a premiere 
vue exclus des instances officielles de pouvoir. Attentifs aux conditions 


Dagmar Herzog — Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany

Penfold, Steve

Ian McKay, Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Lefi History 
(Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005). 
Reading this book is a humiliating experience. You spend a few years of your 
scholarly life exploring some seemingly important topic. You read, research, 
write, take account of comments from friends and colleagues, re-write, research 
more, revise and re-revise. In the end, perhaps, you are reasonably happy with 
the result. You just may have figured something out, and maybe you convince 
yourself that you are pretty smart. Rebels, Reds, Radicals will soon disavow 
you of this notion. Here is an historian working at a different level than the rest 
of us, combining intense theoretical engagement and intellectual imagination 
with astonishingly wide historical reading and deep empirical research (any one 
of these would be impressive enough on their own!). The book will make you 
feel like the plodding, boring, myopic moron that you are, burrowing away at 
your pathetically narrow topic, and will produce a profound academic weight- 
lessness, perhaps the closest you will come, while sitting down in your office 
chair or library cubicle, to the sinking feeling that early moderns described 
when they first rode an elevator. At least McKay's earlier articles on this topic 
had the saving grace-in the last refbge of a scoundrel sort of way--of being a 
bit dense and hard to decipher. No such luck here: the prose is light, lively, 
accessible, and the book is filled with easy to understand but analytically pow- 
erful metaphors. (At one point, he shows that left ideas and institutions were 
not fixed essences by comparing the way the Queen of Spades has one mean- 
ing in Hearts and another in Gin Rummy). 
No left intellectual should have such a self-centred reaction to a book, so I 
should say that it provokes an inspiring and challenging kind of humiliation. 
Rebels, Reds, Radicals is a small book with a big purpose, meant to introduce 
a much longer, multi-volume history of the Canadian left. As such, it is broad 
and synthetic in approach, sweeping across the twentieth century, drawing 
together analytic frames from international literature with some empirical dis- 
cussion of Canadian events, parties, and movements. It reminds me of what was 
attractive about meta-narrative before it fell out of favour-the wide sweep, the 
bringing together of discrete events into a broader whole, the sense of setting up 
an intellectual agenda that can be collectively followed, revised, re-considered, 
and perhaps eventually displaced-but proposes to use "the strategy of recon- 
naisance" to avoid the pitfalls of such bold and overly dramatic analyses. 
(McKay also adopted this approach in his earlier article on the "liberal order 
framework" [Canadian Historical Review, 81, no. 4 (December 2000): 617- 
6451). 
Moreover, Rebels provides (again, like much of McKay's work) a promis- 
140 
0 Left History 
1 1 . 1  (Spring 2006) 
Left History 11.1 141 
ing way of seeing history, examining Canada from politics to culture, social to 
institutional, top to bottom, small to large, low to high-from fenceposts to fed- 
eralism, if you will-with refreshing disregard for the established sub-discipli- 
nary boundaries that we wasted so much energy delineating and defending over 
the last few decades. He does this by immersing himself in this very literature 
but rejecting its premises and self-conscious historiographical positioning. He 
reads and re-reads dusty classics (too often dismissed as simplistic by later gen- 
erations) and groundbreaking new work, appreciating what each book adds 
while dispensing with the flaws of their reasoning. He disagrees with many 
established arguments, but he reads the work of many other scholars for its 
value rather than its position in some arcane historiographical debate-at sev- 
eral points, he explicitly rejects a book's overall thrust while recognizing that 
the author has much of use to say. In this sense, Rebels, Reds, Radicals needs 
to be read partly as an analytic lens or blueprint rather than a specific history. 
McKay's more specific purpose is to present the history of the Canadian 
left in terms of changing attempts to "live otherwise," to conceive of ways of 
being and living that were opposed to the liberal capitalist order. This is a broad 
and inclusive definition, and McKay traces this analytic thread through five 
basic formations of left thinking, intentionally skating over sectarian disagree- 
ment in each era to seek out deeper similarities of language and assumption. 
"Living otherwise" allows McKay to trace many paths to leftist thinking. All 
significant left formations, in his view, engaged in some sort of dialogue with 
Marx, but leftists could take many routes to their vision of living otherwise. 
Class-based thinking was certainly one starting point, but there were others 
(including gender liberation movements, religion, global awareness, and gener- 
ational experience). From this perspective, McKay wants to loosen (but not 
fully sever) the links between working class history and the history of the left. 
"Even in legendary sites of struggle . . . the socialists were, more often than not, 
in the minority," he writes (making a surprisingly uncommon point). 
"Individualistic liberalism, in all its guises, has always had a much larger work- 
ing-class base . . . than socialism" (37). 
Readers will no doubt find much to disagree with in Rebels, particularly in 
McKay's desire to mute sectarian and ideological differences at specific 
moments, and perhaps most of all with the broad nature of the "living other- 
wise" idea, though both approaches add much more to our thinking about left 
history than they subtract. Others may find the introductory quality of the book 
a bit frustrating-there is lots of information here, but substantive discussion 
obviously awaits the main volumes of the work. The synthetic power of Rebels 
might sometimes be hard to appreciate without a fair bit of knowledge of 
Canadian history. (If you do not already know a lot about, say, the national pol- 
icy, being told that it was a key moment in putting "capitalist priorities at the 
centre of the liberal vision" in Canada will probably not resonate very strongly 
142 Reviews 
[52]). But there is plenty of political and intellectual insight and challenge here 
for non-historians, and the broad synthetic canvas simply whets the appetite for 
the more substantive volumes. Rebels is an astonishing book by any measure, 
and should be read for both its take on the left and for the way it re-thinks ossi- 
fied categories in Canadian history. 
Steve Penfold-University of Toronto 
Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (New York: 
Columbia University Press, 2004). 
In his extended essay, An End to Poverty? Gareth Stedman Jones provides a 
novel account of the origins of social democracy and its prescriptions for deal- 
ing with poverty. Rather than tracing the evolution of the nineteenth and twen- 
tieth century welfare state and the ideas that sustained it, Stedman Jones depicts 
Thomas Paine and the Marquis de Condorcet as the intellectual progenitors of 
modern social democracy. Responding to the American and French 
Revolutions, Paine and Condorcet sought to apply enlightenment ideas about 
education and actuarial probability to the problem of mendacity through univer- 
sal education and social insurance schemes. They reasoned that such contribu- 
tory social programs would help develop a republican social citizenship; that 
the social, political, commercial, and moral were all interconnected and the pos- 
sibility of eliminating chronic economic deprivation could be accomplished 
within the parameters of civic life. Drawing on the initially optimistic response 
of liberals to the American and French Revolutions, Paine and Condorcet 
offered a reading of Adam Smith that allowed them to combine his embrace of 
commercial society with an egalitarian project of democratic community build- 
ing. 
The fierce monarchial and anti-republican reaction to the revolution in the 
1790s, and the conservative nationalism and evangelicalism that followed, how- 
ever, buried these moderate republican proposals by appropriating and re-inter- 
preting Smith in entirely different directions. Indeed, in a sense this book is all 
about how rival authors fought over the legacy of Smith's ideas. Paine and 
Condorcet are Stedman Jones's heroes because they recognized that Smith's 
economic analysis was entirely compatible with liberal, moderately egalitarian 
republican politics. Malthus is one of the chief villains because of the way in 
which he redirected later political economists away from such social democrat- 
ic ideas with his heterodox Christian views about the origins of poverty. 
Further, Stedman Jones sees early political economists, like Jean-Baptiste 
Say, splitting the social and political realm, and pushing political economy to 
concern itself with economic freedom and markets rather than with democratic 


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Mary Gluck — Popular Bohemia: Modernism and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Editorial Note

Brad Beaven — Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850-1945

Raymond Jonas — The Tragic Tale of Claire Ferchaud and the Great War

Michael H. Kater — Hitler Youth

Gender and Labour/Working Class History in Comparative Perspective: The Syndicalist and Wobbly Experience in the USA, Australia, and New Zealand

Editorial Note

Rachel Devlin — Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture

Dagmar Herzog — Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany

Ian McKay — Rebels, Reds, Radicals: Rethinking Canada's Left History

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