Dissertation Information for James Lynn Mallery NAME: - James Lynn Mallery
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1999)
ADVISORS: - Eric H. Monkkonen
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Janice L. Reiff - David Halle
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: From a dangerous to a dependent and defective group of men: Social policy, urban space, and the masculinity of hoboes in San Francisco, 1849-1917
Abstract: This study explores how constructions of masculinity in San Francisco between 1849 and 1917 affected understandings of urban "slums," social policies for homeless men, and the identities of transitory males. To access these ideas and practices I researched numerous sources: journals of tramping men, studies of contemporary social scientists, San Francisco's local newspapers, private relief and reform institutions, San Francisco's municipal agencies, and California State departments.
Between 1880 and 1910 San Francisco's privileged classes reformulated the masculinity of homeless men. While the hobo of 1880 acted out of natural and manly passions (if primitive or dangerous), the hobo of 1910 tramped for pathetic and unmanly reasons. California progressives used the essentially un-masculine rubric "hobo" to confirm their own manhood amid the turn-of-the-century "crisis of masculinity." Alternatively, the nation's tramps constructed their manhood to validate their own disadvantaged status.
The shift in hobo masculinity affected both notions of urban space and relief. In 1880 San Francisco's "slum" seemed ripe of masculine dangers, reflecting the belief that men apart from "civilization" were dirty, violent, and sexually aggressive. However, by 1910 the slum appeared less threatening as San Francisco's preeminent male capitalists and "respectable ladies" tamed and reformed the district. Feminine relief organizations--which in the 1880s generally avoided the hazardous streets altogether--by 1900 extended their influence throughout the cityscape; simultaneously boosters skirted the issue of male danger by putting the slum's men to work.
San Franciscans of 1880 generally considered homeless men as willfully malevolent and, having neglected their duty of familial support, unworthy of charity. For such "dangerous" men "correction" offered the best solution. However, by 1900 relief models modified from avoiding "dangerous" men, to manipulating and monitoring their faulty lives directly. The depression of the 1890s shifted attention from male "danger" to male pauperization. Women's reform groups claiming the right to correct faulty household environments placed dependent men under their authority. By 1913 state progressives (often male) codified environmental, eugenic, and Freudian notions of manhood, further casting underemployed, unsheltered males as benign, pathetic, and unmanly.
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MPACT Scores for James Lynn Mallery A = 0
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calculated 2008-09-22 11:34:30
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