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A pioneering study of Victorian and Edwardian fatherhood, investigating what being, and having, a father meant to working-class people. Based on working-class autobiography, the book challenges dominant assumptions about absent or 'feckless' fathers, and reintegrates the paternal figure within the emotional life of families.

From the bawdy audience of a Victorian Penny Gaff to the excitable crowd of an early twentieth century football match, working-class male leisure proved to be a contentious issue for contemporary observers. For middle-class social reformers from across the political spectrum, the spectacle of popular leisure offered a view of working-class habits, and a means by which lifestyles and behaviour could be assessed. For the mid-Victorians, gingerly stepping into a new mass democratic age, the desire to create a bond between the recently enfranchised male worker and the nation was more important than ever. This trend continued as those in governance perceived that 'good' leisure and citizenship could fend off challenges to social stability such as imperial decline, the mass degenerate city, hooliganism, civic and voter apathy and fascism. Thus, between 1850 and 1945 the issue of male leisure became enmeshed with changing contemporary debates on the encroaching mass society and its implications for good citizenry. Working-class culture has often been depicted as an atomised and fragmented entity lacking any significant cultural contestation. Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary source material, this book powerfully challenges these recent assumptions and places social class centre stage once more. Arguing that there was a remarkable continuity in male working-class culture between 1850 and 1945, Beaven contends that despite changing socio-economic contexts, male working-class culture continued to draw from a tradition of active participation and cultural contestation that was both class and gender exclusive. This lively and readable book draws from fascinating accounts from those who participated in and observed contemporary popular leisure making it of importance to students and teachers of social history, popular culture, urban history, historical geography, historical sociology and cultural studies.

This book offers an innovative account of manliness in Britain between 1760 and 1900. Using diverse textual, visual and material culture sources, it shows that masculinities were produced and disseminated through men’s bodies –often working-class ones – and the emotions and material culture associated with them. The book analyses idealised men who stimulated desire and admiration, including virile boxers, soldiers, sailors and blacksmiths, brave firemen and noble industrial workers. It also investigates unmanly men, such as drunkards, wife-beaters and masturbators, who elicited disgust and aversion. Unusually, Manliness in Britain runs from the eras of feeling, revolution and reform to those of militarism, imperialism, representative democracy and mass media, periods often dealt with separately by historians of masculinities.

Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 explores the experiences of men who desired other men outside of the capital. In doing so, it offers a unique intervention into the history of sexuality but it also offers new ways to understand masculinity, working-class culture, regionality and work in the period.

01 02 The new histories of love and romance within this edited collection illustrate changes (and indeed continuities) in understandings of affection, intimacy and sex from the First World War until the beginning of the Women's Liberation movement. Both established and emerging scholars contribute to understandings about the power, knowledge and pleasure of love and romance within twentieth century Britain. Together, the essays in Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-1970 problematize notions of a 'golden age' of romance in the 1950s, and received periodisations that plot a rapid 'rise' and 'fall' of modern love. They expand our notions of what was modern about romantic love, and reveal the complex sources, spaces and times in which love was made in twentieth-century Britain. 02 02 The new histories of love and romance offered within this edited collection illustrate the many changes, but also the surprising continuities in understandings of love, romance, affection, intimacy and sex from the First World War until the beginning of the Women's Liberation movement. 04 02 Introduction: Historicizing 'Modern' Love and Romance; Timothy Willem Jones and Alana Harris PART I: IDENTITIES AND THE SPACES OF THEIR ARTICULATION 1. Love and Romance in British Women's Autobiography; Barbara Caine 2. The Perfect Man: Fatherhood, Masculinity and Romance in Popular Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain; Laura King 3. Love, Sex, Work and Friendship: Northern, Working-Class Men and Sexuality in the First Half of the Twentieth Century; Helen Smith 4. 'A Certain Amount of Mush': Love, Romance, Celluloid and Wax in the Mid-Twentieth Century'; Stephen Brooke PART II: LOVE ACROSS THE LIFECYCLE: GENERATIONAL EXPERIENCES OF MARRIAGE, SEX AND SOLE PARENTHOOD 5. Love Beyond the Frame: Stories of Maternal Love Outside Marriage in the 1950s and 1960s; April Gallwey 6. Love, Honour and Obey? Romance, Subordination and Marital Subjectivity in Interwar Britain; Timothy Willem Jones 7. Love in Later Life: Old Age, Marriage and Social Research in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain; Charlotte Greenhalgh PART III: LOVE AND THE 'EXPERTS': SCIENCE, MORALITY AND THE STATE 8. 'The Love of a Pitiable Dog': Gregariousness, Reciprocity and Altruism in Early Twentieth Century British Psychology; Gillian Swanson 9. Love Divine and Love Sublime: The Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, the Marriage Guidance Movement and the State; Alana Harris 10. Nova 1965-1970: Love, Masculinity and Feminism, But Not As We Know It; Hera Cook Afterword; Claire Langhamer Index List of Figures 13 02 Alana Harris is the Darby Fellow in History at Lincoln College, Oxford, UK. Her research interests encompass diverse areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, including gender, religion, migration and material culture. Timothy Jones is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia and Lecturer in History at the University of South Wales, UK. His research is at the intersection of the histories of religion and sexuality in modern Britain and Australia.

Martin A. Danahay's lucidly argued and accessibly written volume offers a solid introduction to important issues surrounding the definition and division of labor in British society and culture. 'Work,' Danahay argues, was a term rife with ideological contradictions for Victorian males during a period when it was considered synonymous with masculinity. Male writers and artists in particular found their labors troubled by class and gender ideologies that idealized 'man's work' as sweaty, muscled labor and tended to feminize intellectual and artistic pursuits. Though many romanticized working-class labor, the fissured representation of the masculine body occasioned by the distinction between manual labor and 'brain work' made it impossible for them to overcome the Victorian class hierarchy of labor. Through cultural studies analyses of the novels of Dickens and Gissing; the nonfiction prose of Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris; the poetry of Thomas Hood; paintings by Richard Redgrave, William Bell Scott, and Ford Madox Brown; and contemporary photographs, including many from the Munby Collection, Danahay examines the ideological contradictions in Victorian representations of men at work. His book will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of English literature, history, and gender studies.

No detailed description available for \"Leisure, citizenship and working-class men in Britain, 1850-1940\".

This article compares the racially heterogeneous, privately-owned American telephone industry, and the relatively homogeneous, publicly-owned British system, to examine how race and gender constructions implicit in the national identities of the two countries influence employment opportunities. For all the differences in the histories of the two telephone industries and variations in the construction of racial, national, and gender identities, blacks in the United States and Britain had remarkably similar experiences in obtaining employment as telephone operators. This leads to the conclusion that the power of national identity in the workplace is strongly based on “whiteness”. Despite their limited access to national identity, white women experienced advantages that were denied to black women, which illustrates how race modified the impact of gender on the privileges of national identity.