Content area
Full text
Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness Alan Derickson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
The cover of Dangerously Sleepy shows a frightening picture of a team of seemingly exhausted construction workers taking a nap, positioned in line on a steel beam without any safety devices, high above Manhattan during the building of a skyscraper in 1932. The book's title, however, refers to a broader range of dangers than fatigue (as the picture suggests), which are associated with sleeplessness and drowsiness among workers. For millions of men and women untenable work schedules have been the major factor leading to sleep loss, newly recognized ailments such as shift work sleep disorder, and related diseases and mortalityIn
focusing on the fraught historical relationship between sleep and work in America, health and labor historian Alan Derickson sheds light on a fundamental cultural influence that has operated to extend wakeful working time excessively, particularly among men. In the United States, sleep has frequently been framed as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility have been overvalued at the expense of health and safety. In conflating manliness with lack of sleep, the dangerous realities of exhaustion were minimized and even glamorized. Throughout American history, prominent men have developed and promoted a number of sleepless work habits, each with a variety of attributes, most of which have carried masculine features. In explaining the rags-to-riches formula, business leaders and their admirers repeatedly have commended sleep deprivation as a significant asset in personal strategies of upward mobility. For men at all levels of society, resisting sleep became a challenge and demonstration of masculine strength.
The standards of sleepless commitment to work that were established long ago under the very different circumstances of the breadwinner-homemaker model have created even...