SCA Proceedings, Volume 25 (2011) Walker, p. 1 “MANLINESS IS THE BACKBONE OF OUR NATURE”: MASCULINITY AND CLASS IDENTITY AMONG NINETEENTH-CENTURY RAILROAD WORKERS IN WEST OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA MARK WALKER ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDIES CENTER, SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, changing, and sometimes conflicting, ideas of masculinity played out in how working class men formed common identities among themselves, and how they interacted with others, on both the shop floor and in their neighborhoods and homes. These gendered identities form a basis for both solidarity and exclusion. In this paper I consider the relationship between gender and class identities in the late nineteenth-century U.S., focusing on skilled male railroad workers in West Oakland, in the San Francisco Bay area of California. During this period the craft unions to which these workers belonged articulated a vision of “respectable masculinity” for their members that was intended to replace prevailing notions of masculinity centered on homosociality and hard drinking. This paper examines the impact of these conflicting visions. The archaeological study of gender has focused primarily on women. While necessary in the context of dominant androcentric interpretations of the past, the emphasis on women leaves the impression that maleness is the absence of gender—a default setting of human nature, in much the same way that whiteness often seems to the absence of race or ethnicity (Voss 2006:114-115; Williams 2008:53). As Bryn Williams (2008) notes in his study of Chinese masculinities in California, the study of male gendering is not the study of men, but the study of the social construction of men, of the ideologies of masculinity and how they are enacted in everyday life. As gendering, masculinity is embodied practices, “constantly enacted and re-enacted through the movements, expressions, thoughts, and adornments of daily life” (Williams 2008:55). These practices are constructed in dialectical relation with other social processes and constructions, such as race, class, occupation, and ethnicity (Voss 2006:114- 115). A society, especially one as complex as the U.S., will have multiple contested and negotiated notions of what constitutes “masculinity” (Kessler-Harris 1993). This paper is a beginning effort in identifying the relation between class identities and masculine identities among late nineteenth-century railroad workers in West Oakland, California. The dataset I use derives from the Cypress Freeway Archaeological Project, which was conducted by the Anthropological Studies Center of Sonoma State University between 1994 and 1998 as part of the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, on behalf of the California Department of Transportation (Praetzellis 1994; Praetzellis and Praetzellis 2004). This paper builds on earlier research conducted by the author on the interplay of nativist ideologies and forms of labor organization in the construction of working-class identity among these railroad workers, looking at how the divisions of craft-skill and immigration played out in housing, diet, and dining (Walker 2004, 2008). This work emphasized how the idea of a uniquely American standard of living was deployed by U.S. workers in their struggles both with managers, in arguing for a family wage, and against immigrants, who, supposedly having fewer civilized needs, undercut the ability of U.S. male breadwinners to support their families in an appropriate American manner. While barely touched on in the 2008 article, the role of masculine gender identities in these arguments should be obvious. In the later nineteenth century, the discourses of masculinity were part and parcel of class consciousness, creating solidarity against capitalists certainly, but also against other workers, including women. In this paper I follow on from this early research to focus in on the idea of the American Standard of Living and how it was part of changing and conflicting ideas of working class masculinity in the late nineteenth century.