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Men and masculinities provides an engaging, accessible and provocative introduction to histories of masculinity for all readers interested in contemporary gender politics. The book offers a critical overview of ongoing historiographical debates and the historical making of men’s lives and identities and ideas of masculinity between the 1890s and the present day. In setting out a new agenda for the field, it makes an ambitious argument for the importance of writing histories which are present-centred and politically engaged. This means that the book engages head-on with ferocious debates about men’s social position and the status of masculinity in contemporary public life. In establishing a critical genealogy for the proliferation of this crisis talk, it sets out new ways of understanding how men’s lives and ideas of masculinity have changed over time while patriarchy and male power have persisted.
An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.
'Men and Masculinities in Modern Britain brings together a fascinating cross section of the high-quality research being undertaken examining historical masculinities as well as useful reflections on doing the research. Fundamentally, this book should be, and likely will be, a staple for those studying and researching masculinities in the past and in the present for a long time to come.'
Linsey Robb, Journal of British Studies (2025), 64, e52, 1–2
'Two years later, the edited collection’s stated mission of “undoing” masculinity makes this book a more prevalent history for the present than ever. It is an essential read for gender historians and a useful
guide for academics who aspire to use their research to challenge established norms in favour of a more equal society.'
Emma Carson, Social History
Matt Houlbrook is a Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham
Katie Jones is an Independent Scholar living in Birmingham
Ben Mechen is a Lecturer of Modern British History at University College London
Introduction: Histories for the present
Matt Houlbrook, Katie Jones, and Ben Mechen
Part I: INSTITUTIONS
1: Male breadwinners of ‘doubtful sex’: Trans men and the welfare state, 1954-1970
Adrian Kane-Galbraith
2: Reading colonial masculinity through a marriage in Burma
Jonathan Saha
3: ‘Crutches as weapons’: Reading Blackness and the disabled soldier body in the First World War
Hilary Buxton
Reflection: Male historians explain things to me: Masculinity, expertise, and the academy
Charlotte Riley
Part II: HISTORIES
4: ‘Formal qualifications for full masculine status’? Challenging the fragmentation of the male lifecycle through the First World War pension archives
Jessica Meyer
5: Reimagining working-class masculinities in the twentieth century
Helen Smith
6: Perceptions of crisis in the history of masculinity: Power and change in modern Britain
Ben Griffin
Reflection: Masculinities and history for the present
John Tosh
Part III: EVERYDAY LIVES
7: Gender, locality, and culture: revisiting masculinities in the Liverpool docklands, 1900-1939
Pat Ayers
8: Struggling ‘heroes’: Everyday masculine encounters in the public library, c. 1890s-1920s
Michelle Johansen
9: Fathers, sons, and ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ family life, 1945-1974
Richard Hall
Reflection: Doing gender history and the history of masculinity
Michael Roper
Part IV: BODIES
10: Dirty magazines, clean consciences: Men and pornography in the 1970s
Ben Mechen
11: ‘It’s more what me and my partner feel comfortable with’: Gay masculinities, safer sex, and Project Sigma, 1987-1996
Katie Jones
Reflection: Writing the history of male sexuality in the wake of Operation Yewtree and #MeToo
Hannah Charnock
Conclusion: Histories, historians, and the politics of masculinity
Lucy Delap and John Tosh, in conversation