Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950

Abstract

In Creating the Modern Man, Tom Pendergasttraces a transition in ideas about men and masculinity in American magazines from what he calls “Victorian manhood”—based on property ownership, character, hard work, selfrestraint, and duty—to “modern masculinity”—based on selfpresentation, consumer choices, personality, sexuality, and leisure. Pendergast situates his project as an intervention into two fields of scholarship: histories of consumption and masculinity studies. He illustrates that consumer culture was not a topdown imposition of values on men whose gender identities were in crisis from changes in the structure of work and in women's roles, but was instead a product of choices made by a variety of participants in the American magazine market—writers, editors, readers, advertisers. In addition, the transition from Victorian manhood to modern manhood was uneven, permeating the pages of mainstream white magazines long before it touched African American publications or the pulp magazines directed at workingclass readers. Situating his account as a middle ground between narratives of a tragic fall into consumerist ways from a more “authentic” past and narratives of modern men liberated from yesterday's more constraining gender roles, Pendergast argues that ideas about gender are created and maintained by many actors occupying different social positions, a view that places ag ency and the capacity to transform ideas about manliness and consumption in the hands of men themselves.