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Gilbert, James. Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 279 pp. $39.
Like Tom Pendergast's Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950, this book, by a University of Maryland history professor, tells us a great deal about die history of masculinity based on how it was constructed mosdy in a period's mass media. But while Pendergast only wrote about magazines, James Gilbert uses a series of case studies about major books, various magazine articles and one magazine {Playboy), the Rev. Billy Graham (seen on television and covered by news media), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (a play and a movie), "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" (entertainment television), and others to illustrate masculinity issues in the 1950s and Gilbert's arguments about them.
The book's stated purpose is to disprove a claimed widespread or deep-seated masculinity "panic" or "crisis" in the 1950s. A secondary purpose, which is most obvious in its second chapter and conclusion (called "Getting Used to Women"), is diat U.S. male anxiety is perpetual, not only predating the 1 950s but continuing until today and being manifested...