Modern men: Taking risks and making masculinity in the postwar years

Postwar Canadian culture explained the predicament of modern men in two contradictory ways. One response suggested that men were the ideal moderns. Traits such as reason, technical ability, and self-discipline were labelled as masculine, and Canadians turned to a variety of male-dominated fields of expertise, including engineering, automobile safety, urban planning, psychiatry, and psychology, to manage modern forms of risk. The other main approach was to suggest the exact opposite, to claim that modern life sapped men of the traits that made them manly. From this perspective, such modern processes as bureaucratization, suburbanization and white-collar work threatened the very basis of masculinity. In "Modern Men" I demonstrate how these two conflicting attitudes resulted from a widespread postwar attempt to "modernize" masculinity, to establish a form of gendered modernity that I call "manly modernism."; "Modern Men" examines how those in one city, Vancouver, responded to various forms of modern risk and the ways in which they connected masculinity with risk-taking and risk-management. Vancouverites' mixed response to the question of what it meant to be a modern man reflected manly modernism's ironic effects. Even as men became the main symbols of postwar modernity, they also became the objects of new forms of discipline and regulation. Although modern expertise was gendered as masculine, many men just as often found themselves the target of discipline from these new professions that, for example, sought to discipline male aggression and restrain overly daring and risky behaviour. Manly modernism justified men's privileges in uneven ways, benefiting some men and some types of masculinity above others and creating unintended consequences by the new ways in which men's social privileges were delivered.; In "Modern Men" I suggest that the unexpected predecessors to 1960s criticisms of modernity were the men from the 1940s and 1950s who themselves found much to criticize in modern notions of masculinity and the modernist project with which it was associated. Rarely gender radicals themselves, their criticism of the manly modern ideal nonetheless helped set the stage for the more sustained criticism which followed.