‘So nobly struggling for their manhood’: masculinity and violence among steelworkers in the wheeling district, 1880–1910

ABSTRACT

Between 1880 and 1910, new technologies and managerial schemes undermined skilled steelworkers’ ability to control production and demand high wages, which also threatened their sense of manhood. The steelworkers in the Wheeling District of northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio remained a union stronghold until the 1909–1910 steel strike. Steelworkers defined manhood in terms of their family wage, a manly bearing toward their bosses, solidarity with fellow workers, and their rights, all closely associated with union membership. Faced with the loss of their union, they turned to violence – not just out of frustration or to win the strike – but also to defend their rights and freedoms and reclaim their masculine identity.

KEYWORDS:

• masculinity
• manhood
• Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel, and Tin Workers
• wheeling
• violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The author would like to thank Ken Fones-Wolf, Jessie Ramey, and Elaine Parsons for their insightful feedback, which greatly improved this article and Kari Smith for her help with the research. Also, part of the idea for this article came from Gregory Wood’s research on Aliquippa steelworkers’ manhood during the 1930s.

2. John Hennen (1996) found a similar dynamic, arguing that West Virginia authorities mobilized during World War I to manufacture consent for monopoly capitalism, establishing the state police after the war. Americanization of West Virginia: Creating a Modern Industrial State, 1916–1925 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).

3. Hoganson observes that one of the sources of anxiety over American manhood was the women’s suffrage movement and their demands for equality. Fighting for American Manhood. Also, Stearns, 45.

4. The headstone still stands in Riverview Cemetery in Martins Ferry.

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Lou Martin

Lou Martin is an associate professor of history at Chatham University. He is author of Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia and a founding board member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. His latest project examines the decline of the coalfield economy of West Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s.