Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840. By Joshua R. Greenberg. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. xxvi, 254 pp. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-231-13542-9.)

Abstract

Soon after moving to New York City in 1809, the printer Theophilus Eaton found himself amid the city's emergent labor movement. He joined the New York Typographical Society and went on strike, although neither prevented his rapid descent into debt, poverty, and early death. As his future dimmed, Eaton wrote poems, including one that lamented a journeyman's “pang of grief” over his inability to provide “for those who were/dependent on his work and care” (p. 32). According to Joshua R. Greenberg, Eaton's story was characteristic of organized workingmen in early nineteenth-century New York. Trapped in the eye of the hurricane that was the market revolution, skilled journeymen did not neatly divide home from work but “turned to collective labor organizations in order to face threats to their household responsibilities and roles” (p. xi). Thus Greenberg puts another nail in the coffin of the ideology of separate spheres by demonstrating how labor organization and political activism were grounded in men's ability—or inability—to be breadwinners. To make this argument, Greenberg skillfully employs several modes of analysis (gender, class, and politics) and utilizes a variety of source material including legal filings, workingmen's newspapers, and political cartoons. Because Advocating the Man is available through the Gutenberg-e series, readers should go online to view the rich collection of full-color images and documents not available in the print edition.