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Ontario Boys

Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945--1960

by (author) Christopher J. Greig

Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Initial publish date
Feb 2014
Category
Social History, History, Post-Confederation (1867-)
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781554589005
    Publish Date
    Feb 2014
    List Price
    $41.99

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Description

Ontario Boys explores the preoccupation with boyhood in Ontario during the immediate postwar period, 1945–1960. It argues that a traditional version of boyhood was being rejuvenated in response to a population fraught with uncertainty, and suffering from insecurity, instability, and gender anxiety brought on by depression-era and wartime disruptions in marital, familial, and labour relations, as well as mass migration, rapid postwar economic changes, the emergence of the Cold War, and the looming threat of atomic annihilation. In this sociopolitical and cultural context, concerned adults began to cast the fate of the postwar world onto children, in particular boys.
In the decade and a half immediately following World War II, the version of boyhood that became the ideal was one that stressed selflessness, togetherness, honesty, fearlessness, frank determination, and emotional toughness. It was thought that investing boys with this version of masculinity was essential if they were to grow into the kind of citizens capable of governing, protecting, and defending the nation, and, of course, maintaining and regulating the social order.
Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Ontario Boys demonstrates that, although girls were expected and encouraged to internalize a “special kind” of citizenship, as caregivers and educators of children and nurturers of men, the gendered content and language employed indicated that active public citizenship and democracy was intended for boys. An “appropriate” boyhood in the postwar period became, if nothing else, a metaphor for the survival of the nation.

About the author

Christopher J. Greig is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor. His research has been published in international refereed journals such as Educational Review, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, and the Alberta Journal of Educational Research. He is co-editor, with Wayne J. Martino, of Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (2012).

Christopher J. Greig's profile page

Excerpt: Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945--1960 (by (author) Christopher J. Greig)

Excerpt from Ontario Boys: Masculinity and the Idea of Boyhood in Postwar Ontario, 1945-1960 by Christopher J. Greig

From the Introduction: Approaching Boyhood in Postwar Ontario

“The world is so full of boys. ”

Leamington Post and News, 28 August 1947

“Today we find that the social, economic and political climate generates intense fears, gnawing anxieties in millions of people. ”

– Dr. Julius Schreiber, Globe and Mail, 28 March 1949

As these observations suggest, in country town as in burgeoning metropolis, among local commentators and highly trained professionals alike, the early post–Second World War years saw Ontarians much preoccupied with the nature and potential of boyhood. Ontario Boys explores these public discourses during the so-called Baby Boom years, from roughly 1945 to 1960. In the aftermath of a second world war little more than a generation after the first, during which a nation still reeling from the Great Depression had again mustered its forces to contribute mightily on home front and on battlefield, it is no surprise that many Canadians should have longed to return to “the normal”—the familiar, in its every sense. Yet much of the Reconstruction program, as the Mackenzie King Liberal government called its postwar plan, was an attempt to recover what two world wars and a prolonged economic depression had changed irrevocably. Among these changes were reconfigurations of gender and familial roles, with their necessary socio-cultural implications. 1

During these opening decades of what was seen to be a “new age”—variously the Atomic Age, the Cold War, even the TV Age—a population dealing with “gnawing anxieties,” as Dr. Julius Schreiber aptly described them in the Globe and Mail in 1949, looked to “reconstruct& rduqo; itself by means of its best hope: children and youth. Canadians confronted a profoundly gendered insecurity, instability, and anxiety brought about by Depression era and wartime disruptions in marital, family, and labour relations, rapid postwar economic changes, mass migration from countryside to city as well as renewed overseas immigration, the emergence of the Cold War, and the looming threat of atomic annihilation. Shaped by these historic developments, and motivated by an understandable desire for normality, stability, and security, public defenders of the traditional gender hierarchy resisted shifts in the roles and relations that underpinned it. 2 In their ongoing quest to head “back to normalcy,” an assortment of public intellectuals, political leaders, psychologists, physicians, youth workers, and educators, along with concerned social commentators, projected their gendered fears about the postwar future onto discussions of boyhood development. Despite the shifts wrought by depression and war, Canadian society remained fundamentally patriarchal: “The world,” a small-town newspaper columnist noted affectionately, was, after all,”so full of boys. ”“ And these boys became the focus of future-oriented postwar discourses whereby heteronormative definitions of masculinity were reasserted to define an appropriately “masculine” character formation for Ontario boys. 3

Under the conditions of the postwar period, social commentators routinely produced public narratives that normalized boys who demonstrated a particular “ideal” of masculinity. In the decade and a half immediately following the Second World War, the “new” version of boyhood was one that harkened back, in this rapidly changing, expanding, modern urban-industrial environment, to a traditional historic form, or at least one that had been nostalgically rendered as the “norm” before the transformations of the early twentieth century. This ideal stressed teamwork, selflessness, eagerness, honesty, fearlessness, and emotional toughness. While such traits had long typified ideal boyhood, in a postwar world where, in the view of many observers, democracy was under constant threat by communist forces, and the ongoing struggle was that between freedom and tyranny, the need for all boys to develop and internalize such traits gained in importance as a vital foundation of modern democratic nationhood.

Editorial Reviews

Ontario Boys represents a valuable contribution to the literature on boyhood.... It not only provides scholars with several strong arguments on how masculinity shapes our understanding of boyhood, but it does so in an engaging and well-written manner.

Historical Studies in Education, 26, 2, Fall 2014

"Christopher Greig sheds fresh light on our understanding of the making, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, of a recurrent crisis in boyhood. Greig sees this as an illusionary extension of the wider ‘crisis in masculinity,’ ubiquitous in popular media and professional discourse since the end of the Second World War. Ontario Boys presents a lucid and insightful examination of ideal boyhood models based on simplistic and neoliberal notions in the postwar era of togetherness, teamwork, loyalty, physical health, and boyhood heroism. He contrasts these with popular fears of delinquent juvenile males, who often sought the leadership provided by boys' clubs and Boy Scout movements as an alternative to gang associations. This book offers thoughtful critique of the fears every era manufactures for the overall well-being and vigour of its boyhood-to-manhood maturation processes. It will provoke us to consider that the alarm sirens ringing today for the so-called ‘forgotten children’ of our schools and local communities, boys failing to succeed according to standards others set, are part of a continuing angst across Ontario and throughout modern societies generally."

Robert Rutherdale

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