Retiring Men: Manhood, Labor, and Growing Old in America, 1900-1960

by Gregory Wood

Overview

As life spans expanded dramatically in the United States after 1900, and employers increasingly demanded the speed and stamina of youth in the workplace, men struggled to sustain identities as workers, breadwinners, and patriarchs—the core ideals of twentieth-century masculinity. Longer life threatened manhood as men confronted age discrimination at work, mandatory retirement, and fixed incomes as recipients of Social Security and workplace pensions. They struggled to somehow sustain manliness in retirement, a new phase of life supposedly defined by the absence of labor. Ironically, retiring men pursued ways to stay “productive”: retirees created new daily routines of golf and shuffleboard games, tinkered with tools in garages, attended social club meetings, armed themselves for hunting and fishing excursions, and threw themselves into yard work. Others looked for new jobs or business ventures. Only unending activity could help to ensure that the “golden years” would be good years for older men of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761856795
Publisher:	University Press of America
Publication date:	01/18/2012
Pages:	274
Product dimensions:	6.49(w) x 9.43(h) x 0.89(d)

About the Author

Gregory Wood is assistant professor of history at Frostburg State University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Journal of Social History, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, Labor History, Pennsylvania History, Essays in Economic & Business History, Michigan Historical Review, Labour History (Australia), and The Jim Crow Encyclopedia.

Table of Contents

List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Manhood and Its Discontents
Chapter 1 - Growing Old at Work during the Early Twentieth Century
Chapter 2 - Old Age Poverty, Pension Politics, and Gender during the 1920s
Chapter 3 - Older Men and the Boundaries of Manhood during the 1930s
Chapter 4 - Postwar Manhood and the Shock of Retirement
Chapter 5 - Work, Play, and Gender: The Making of Retirement Culture
Beyond the Masculinity of Youth?
Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Retiring Men explores the history of men, manhood and growing old in a rapidly changing industrial society. Wood illustrates how male gender anxieties helped shape government retirement programs and helped forge a post-war retirement culture around the concept of productive manhood. This is a much-needed and important study that effectively uses gender analysis to expand our understanding of ageing and retirement in the twentieth century. —Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, professor of history, West Virginia University  

…Unique in the growing cottage industry on the history of masculinity, this important work considers older men and their connections to manhood and work rather than the more typical studies that deal with the manly ideals of either aggressive youth or paternalist middle-class fathers….Through the book he explores the fate of older men prior to rapid industrialization, the impact of mass production on the ideal working age, the initial efforts to address old age poverty, the impact of joblessness during the Great Depression on notions of manhood and old age policy, the shock of retirement on the ethic and ideal of work, and the creation of a post WW II retirement culture of activity. —Steve Meyer, emeritus professor of history, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.