Man the Guns: Race, Masculinity, and Citizenship from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement
Title | Man the Guns: Race, Masculinity, and Citizenship from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement |
Publication Type | Book Chapter |
Year of Publication | 2014 |
Authors | Estes, Steve |
Editor | Hagemann, Karen, and Sonya Michel |
Book Title | Gender and the Long Postwar: The United States and the Two Germanys, 1945–1989 |
Pagination | 185–203 |
Publisher | Johns Hopkins University Press |
City | Baltimore, MD |
Abstract | This essay examines the intersection of race and masculinity in the United States in the post-war period. It argues that World War II influenced the development of the civil rights movement of Afro-Americans in three ways. First, African American men who served in the military gained a new sense of themselves as men and altered white perceptions of black manhood, particularly outside of the South. Second, the baby boom that accompanied the war, created a new emphasis on fatherhood that gendered the fight over school integration in ways that scholars have only recently begun to acknowledge. Third, the gender assumptions underpinning the GI Bill reinforced the ideal of white fatherhood, subsidized white flight, and underwrote the de facto segregation that continues to define American housing patterns to this day. |
URL | https://www.wilsoncenter.org/book/gender-and-the-long-postwar-the-united-states-and-the-two-germanys-1945-1989 |
Type of Literature:
Keywords:
Time Period:
Major Wars:
Regions:
Countries:
Chapters:
Library:
- WorldCat