Abstract
In his fourth book on public health, historian Alan Derickson, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, tells how sleep was valued, devalued, and reconsidered among U.S. male workers (and their bosses) during the twentieth century. He digs into critical topics like flexible schedules, night work, and irregular shifts, particularly among certain categories of workers scheduled for late hours, such as railroad workers and truck drivers.
While Derickson does not discuss health issues in this book, at least not in medical terms, he does show that there is a general agreement that good-quality sleep is indispensable and the constant lack of sleep can cause accidents at work. This has been proven by numerous reports and U.S. Supreme Court decisions, some of which took place a century ago.
Derickson focuses on two main dimensions: first, how sleep loss has always been a debated and contested issue in the United States, and second, how most men have wrongly considered their personal capacity to endure the lack of sleep a tangible sign of their masculinity (see chapter 1, titled “Sleep Is for Sissies”). The author explains how new research on sleep has changed in its approach and perspective: “wakefulness as a measure of masculinity is a facet of the history of gender in America that has received no attention at all” (p. x). However, the traditional perceptions related to sleep have to be questioned and reconsidered: “after all, American employers tend to treat their employees’ sleep problems as disciplinary, not medical, matters” (p. 146). Despite its main focus on males at work, this book includes as well various cases of women workers, reminding us that in many cases women workers have had the additional task of overseeing a family (p. 27).
Divided into five chapters, Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness begins with a review of various false discourses and misguided publications that have contested the need for eight hours of sleep, often celebrating some “great men of the past” who forged a reputation of (apparently) sleeping just a few hours per night (p. 17). The chapter that follows recounts many catastrophes in which sleep-deprived employees played a role (e.g., the “Three Mile Island incident” and the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion), all of which contributed to the creation of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research in 1988. Chapter 3 concentrates on the consequences of a standard twelve-hour shift for steelworkers, which is followed by a chapter discussing sleep denial in various forms. The final chapter investigates “the men engaged on long-haul trucking” who even today are still working mostly in deregulated conditions. Inevitably, sleep problems are sometimes mixed with the use of stimulants, amphetamines, or other drugs.
Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness is a significant milestone in work studies because it confirms the complexity of an old social problem that goes beyond basic health issues. Although Derickson’s historical approach focuses on the first half of the twentieth century, both the good and bad patterns he identifies to explain political inaction (like the “common pattern of dynamics without change” among governments) could be applied to more recent periods and possibly transposed to other countries.
Recent theoretical frameworks such as men’s studies allow academics to reconceptualize these overlooked issues related to “the human cost of lost sleep” (p. 146). Apart from university libraries, it would be most useful to find this book in public libraries, hoping some night worker or truck driver coping with somnolence will find the accurate words matching his or her symptoms.