Abstract
For long periods of history military service, war and fighting were central to masculine identities in Britain. Physical force, heroism, honour and self-sacrifice were the currency of military masculinities. But what about working men who were prevented from fighting and who played their part during war as civilians on the home front? How was their gender identity represented by the media and what can this tell us about masculinities? This is the objective of Linsey Robb in her book Men at Work.
This cultural history of masculinity is structured around four occupations of civilian men during the Second World War: farming, industry, the merchant navy and the fire service. The main sources include familiar ones such as filmic and visual culture both official and non-official. But they also include more unusual material, such as the scripts of BBC radio broadcasts. It is a useful addition to the history of masculinities in a number of ways. It focuses on working class men, rather than the middle classes that have dominated this field. The focus on civilian men adds much to the existing work on war and masculinity, explored by historians such as Sonya Rose and Penny Summerfield. Equally Robb's book does what many other studies of war and masculinity do not: it engages with the combined presence (or absence) of men and women, thus exploring gender relations rather than merely studying men and manhood.
The main findings of Robb's research are illuminating. They are framed by two interpretative starting points which are Connell's concept of ‘hegemonic masculinities’ and Sonya Rose's interpretation of the hegemonic type of masculinity in the Second World War: the ‘temperate hero’. Rose's hegemonic type, was a mix of the ‘soldier hero’, inherited from the period of ‘high imperialism’ between the late nineteenth century and the First World War, and the team-playing home-loving domestic husband and father, more dominant in the interwar period. The fighting uniformed solder was at the pinnacle of this hierarchy during war, a status that civilian men, Rose argued, could not reach.
Robb nuances this duality by showing that the hegemonic hierarchy was fragmented in a more complex way. The context of total war radically altered conceptions and representations of masculinities so that some civilians could inhabit spaces closer to the hegemonic type. The nature of the occupations, the spaces in which they were conducted and the presence of women played a central role in the proximity of these occupations to the ideal type. Agricultural and industrial workers were lower in the hierarchy because they were more distant from the ‘front line’ of danger and risk. Passive victims rather than active combatants, their workplaces saw an influx of female workers and they were, thus, emasculated by the popular media despite government attempts to shore up their status through propaganda. By contrast, fire fighters and members of the Merchant Navy were represented as far more heroic. They were in harm's way and they were actively ‘fighting’, doing heroic deeds and sacrificing themselves for a greater good. Women were less conspicuous in these representations although they were sufficiently present to allow these workers to be considered ‘temperate’. Two occupations that were widely criticized before the fighting war as (respectively) ‘darts players’ and drunken debauched sailors were promoted to heroic status as a result of wartime conditions and cultural representations of the war.
Men at Work thus recovers the history of civilian men during the war for the benefit of historians of masculinity and illustrates the way that the war changed popular representations of men. In this sense it makes a valuable contribution to the history of masculinities and war. Less certain, however, is the contribution this can make to masculinity studies more widely. As Robb frequently points out, these were quite exceptional conditions of total war in which propaganda reached new levels of production. Whilst there is an attempt to reach wider conclusions about the history of masculinity, perhaps more could have been extrapolated in this sense. What does all of this say more widely about chronological change in masculinities? What happened to these men after the War? What impact did this have on postwar masculinities and are there any implications for understanding men in peacetime? Given Robb's focus on class and work these seem to be candidates for this wider set of conclusions. In the wider world of masculinity studies this study also suffers from a perennial problem identified in 2005 by Alex Sheperd and Karen Harvey that has not gone away, which is the focus on representations rather than experiences. Throughout the book one wondered what these men themselves were thinking, how they processed their experiences, where they placed themselves on the masculine hierarchy and how this shaped their social actions and interactions. Perhaps the sources are not available for this type of research and Linsey Robb can hardly be held to account for the wider shortcomings of the subject area but there is no doubt much more work lies ahead for historians of war and masculinity.