© Columbia University Press
Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform
Paper, 320 pages, 13 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-12997-8
$26.50
/ £18.50
May, 2008
Cloth, 320 pages, 13 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-12996-1
$35.00
/ £24.00
"An engaging historical investigation into the negative application of homophobic rhetoric against those deemed political enemies . . . A must read." — Jay Hatheway, Journal of American History
"This is an important book. Kevin P. Murphy has brought Progressivism, gender history, and the history of sexuality together in a new and entirely original manner. Various authors have tried to understand the gender components of Progressivism, but by bringing in themes and methodologies from the history of sexuality and queer theory, as well as from gender history, Murphy has brought this scholarship to a new level. Nobody that I know of analyzes the way sexuality inflects politics as Murphy does." — Gail Bederman, University of Notre Dame, and author of Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race, 1880-1917
"Murphy makes a major intervention in the historiography of gender and sexuality in the United States of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries. There have, for some time now, been a few fine historical studies of the emergence of male-male sexual communities in American metropolises. Murphy synthesizes their findings and much more recent historical work to produce what is to my mind the first entirely successful study of the complex relations between male sexual desire and sexual behavior and shifting models of 'manhood' or masculine gender identities in Americanist historiography." — Michael Moon, author of A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol
"A beautifully written, provocative interpretation of urban America at the turn of the twentieth century. Murphy presents an intellectual history of urban reform with a compelling and persuasive narrative, offering new insights into the labyrinthine world of New York City politics a century ago." — Timothy Gilfoyle, Loyola University Chicago, author of A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York
"Political Manhood offers a major reinterpretation of American political culture and progressive reform. Murphy's close examination of the contested language of masculinity reveals a central theme in turn-of-the-century politics, bringing into focus a homosocial norm of manhood that nourished a cross-class social politics and challenged the strenuous masculinity represented by Theodore Roosevelt. Brilliantly original, this deeply researched book is marked by fluid prose and clarity of argument. All the historiographical advances of the past generation are melded with earlier scholarship to produce a work of extraordinary freshness and importance." — Thomas Bender, New York University, author of The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea