Across the Great Divide: Cultures of Manhood in the American West

Abstract

As Joan Scott predicted in 1985, women's historians' exploration of gender has opened up terrain for scholars interested in the ways in which ideas about masculinity have shaped all kinds of histories. Such ventures are not new to the history of the American West (Henry Nash Smith's 1950 Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth comes to mind), but in recent years western historians have embraced the study of manliness with the excitement of a Montana fly fisherman fondling a brand new Orvis rod. Matthew Basso, Laura McCall, and Dee Garceau have assembled here a sampler of recent work on the topic, intriguing both for what we can learn about the history of masculinity and for the ways in which familiar western chronologies and mythologies continue to shape historical scholarship. Following an erudite and illuminating introduction by McCall, the volume leads with three previously published, groundbreaking pieces: a chapter from Ramón Gutiérrez's When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991), Susan Johnson's acclaimed “Bulls, Bears, and Dancing Boys” (1994), and Gunther Peck's nuanced piece on “Manly Gambles” on the Comstock Lode (1993). The volume's concluding piece, Jose E. Limon's “Tex-Sex-Mex: American Identities, Lone Stars, and the Politics of Racialized Sexuality,” was published in 1997. The other nine essays appear in print for the first time, and they are, as is to be expected in such editorial projects, uneven in quality. Durwood Ball's elegant piece on public hangings sheds new light on western codes of justice and vengeance, and Basso's wonderfully detailed discussion of the class and race politics of manliness in World War II Butte opens up new ways of thinking about struggles over manliness among men caught in the tension between wartime industrial work and military service. Karen Merrill's brilliant piece on ranchers and their animals vividly demonstrates the ways in which the use of gender as a category of analysis has transformative potential for the practice of environmental history.

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