A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England
Tosh (history, Univ. of North London) uses primary sources to explore the contradictions inherent in 19th-century British masculinity. Many tensions lay beneath the British male's well-known veneration of home, family, and motherhood. Marriage was a prime factor in self-worth, but men were reared at elite public (i.e., private) schools to ignore or even despise women. Husbands were publicly seen as masters and the spiritual leaders of their homes and families, yet once married, men often sequestered themselves in dens and clubs, and whole categories of decisions (like child rearing) were left solely to wives and servants. Tosh traces the evolution of these tensions through the century, as the idealization of domesticity gradually decreased and marital and parental hierarchies evolved. Particularly interesting are the sections on child rearing, in which the father's role often led to estrangement and generational discord. Tosh convincingly defends his thesis that the era, instead of just being "the climax of masculine domesticity," was actually more complex. Not entirely exciting, but the scholarship is solid; for academic collections.ARobert Persing, Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib., PhiladelphiaCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.