Abstract
In the 1920s and 1930s, the young men who worked in welfare and child protection were among the first to negotiate professional environments in which women wielded considerable authority. This article uses their descriptions of encounters with clients to examine the ways in which these men understood manliness in such a context, and the kinds of anxieties they dramatized in their case files. It argues that many defined and defended a form of masculinity that continued to depend upon the subordination of women—identified as “naggers”—and the rigorous rescue of boys from effeminacy.
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