Artigo Revisado por pares

The Boys and Their Booze: Masculinities and Public Drinking in Working-class Hamilton, 1890-1946

2005; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/can.2005.0126

ISSN

1710-1093

Autores

Craig Heron,

Tópico(s)

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Resumo

Working-class boys learned the expectations and practices of their gender identities through the course of growing up. They had to adapt to their subordination as wage-earners but also to their patriarchal privileges within their families and communities. Central to their masculinities was a tension between the obligations owed to family economies and the commitments to the independence and pleasures of bachelor lifestyles, which allowed men to be 'boys' well into adulthood. In early-twentieth-century working-class Hamilton, as elsewhere, public drinking places – first saloons, then post-Prohibition beverage rooms – were homo-social sites of consolation and retreat from family, work, and prim morality and forums for consolidating two distinct expressions of working-class masculinities: explosive, bachelor-driven expressiveness and more restrained sociability. Prohibition disrupted these processes of gender formation, and the post-Prohibition regulatory regime tried, with limited success, to keep them under control. Perhaps more important, however, were the arrival of women in the sites of public drinking and the integration of alcohol consumption into courtship and companionate marriage, which prompted new masculine practices among working men in coexistence with older homo-social forms. Les garcons de la classe ouvriere apprenaient les attentes et les pratiques relatives a leur identite sexuelle au cours de leur passage vers l'âge adulte. Ils devaient s'adapter a leur statut de subordonnes, a titre de salaries, mais egalement a leurs privileges patriarcaux au sein de leur famille et de leur collectivite. Un element central de leur masculinite etait la tension entre leurs obligations envers l'economie familiale et leur engagement envers l'independance et les plaisirs du celibat, qui permettait aux hommes de rester des enfants bien apres leur entree dans l'âge adulte. Au debut du vingtieme siecle, dans les milieux ouvriers de la ville de Hamilton, comme ailleurs, les lieux publics de consommation d'alcool (d'abord les tavernes, puis les debits de boisson apres la prohibition) constituaient des lieux homosociaux ou l'on pouvait obtenir de la consolation et oublier la famille, le travail et la moralite guindee, ainsi que des tribunes ou l'on pouvait consolider deux expressions distinctes de la masculinite de la classe ouvriere : l'expressivite explosive, fondee sur le celibat, et une sociabilite plus contenue. La prohibition a bouleverse ces processus de formation de l'identite sexuelle, et le regime de reglementation posterieur a la prohibition a tente, avec un succes mitige, de garder le controle sur ceux-ci. Cependant, une chose peut-etre plus importante encore, a ete l'arrivee des femmes dans les lieux publics de consommation d'alcool ainsi que l'integration de la consommation d'alcool dans les relations de seduction et de cohabitation, ce qui a donne lieu a de nouvelles pratiques masculines, qui se sont ajoutees a des formes homosociales plus anciennes, chez les hommes des classes ouvrieres.

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