Mary Ann Clawson

Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism

Despite the persistence of the fraternal form of association in guilds, trade unions, and political associations, as well as in fraternal social organizations, scholars have often ignored its importance as a cultural and social theme. This provocative volume helps to redress that neglect. Tracing the development of fraternalism from early modern western Europe through eighteenth-century Britain to nineteenth-century America, Mary Ann Clawson shows how white males came to use fraternal organizations to resolve troubling questions about relations between the sexes and between classes: American fraternalism in the 1800s created bonds of loyalty across class lines and made gender and race primary categories of collective identity.British men had symbolically become stone masons to express their commitment to the emerging market economy and to the social value of craft labor. Clawson points out that American fraternalism fulfilled similar purposes, as fraternal organizations reconciled individualism and mutuality for many who were discomfited by the conflict of egalitarian principles and capitalist industrial development. Fraternalisms extraordinary appeal rested also on the assertion of masculine solidarity in the face of feminine claims to moral leadership. Nevertheless, visions of solidarity were contradicted when fraternal organizations became increasingly entrepreneurial, seeking to maximize their own growth through systematic marketing of membership.Originally published in 1989.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

WHEN WOMEN PLAY THE BASS Instrument Specialization and Gender Interpretation in Alternative Rock Music

Drawing on interviews with women and men musicians, this study examines womens overrepresentation in an instrumental specialty, the electric bass, in alternative rock music. Structurally, this phenomenon may be explained by the instruments greater ease of learning and lesser attractiveness to men, yet women bassists frequently advance an alternative theory of “womanly” affinity. The entrance of women into rock bands via the bass may provide them with new opportunities and help legitimate their presence in a male-dominated site of artistic production, yet it may simultaneously work to reconstruct a gendered division of labor and reproduce dominant gender ideologies.

Fraternal Orders and Class Formation in the Nineteenth-Century United States

In 1884, Belleville, Illinois, a midwestern town of fifteen thousand, possessed numerous voluntary associations, including organizations like the Pecan Club, the Liederkranz Society, and the Widows and Orphans Mutual Aid Society. But by far the most common kind of organization was the fraternal order, a type of secret society which used elaborate rituals to unite its members in bonds of brotherhood. The nineteenth-century fraternal order possessed a strong appeal for American men; in Belleville, for example, lodges such as Pride of the West, No. 650, International Order of Odd Fellows and Cavalier Lodge, No. 49, Knights of Pythias comprised thirty-five of the fifty-five organizations listed in the city directory of that year. At about the same time, a much larger industrial city, Buffalo, New York, had seventeen local lodges, with over 1,500 members, of the Knights of Pythias alone.1 Historians have increasingly recognized the American fraternal order as a numerically massive and widely distributed presence in late nineteenthcentury urban life, with special relevance for the study of social relations, institutionalized friendship patterns, and the formation of community and subgroup identities.2 The fraternal orders litany of equality and its often

Klansville, U.S.A.: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-Era Ku Klux Klan

leads me to question whether there would be similar problems in areas I know less well. A book this broad in scope must necessarily be superficial in its treatment of most topics. No reader should rely on this book alone for understanding all the diverse fields of research it pulls together, especially given the sparse coverage of the relevant sociological work. But the authors are right that people need to be aware of how other disciplines are treating common problems, and they are right to unpack the complexity of the problem of cooperation and distinguish the problems of interest conflicts from the problems of coordination. This book can serve as a good introduction to these issues.