He finds mostly middle-class men trying to cope with the legacy of fathers who gave little emotional sustenance and with a competitive society they find unsatisfying, who sympathize with many of women's complaints about men and sexism (though Schwalbe also finds that many joined as a reaction to what they saw as feminism's blanket indictment of men), and who are searching for an alternative to the traditional image of a man as rational, tough, ambitious, and in control.

This major study of the father of modern sociology explores the intimate relationship between the events of Max Weber's personal history and the development of his thought. When it was first published in 1970, Paul Roazen described The Iron Cage as ""an example of the history of ideas at its very best""; while Robert A. Nisbet said that ""we learn more about Weber's life in this volume than from any other in the English language.""Weber's life and work developed in reaction to the rigidities of familial and social structures in Imperial Germany. In his youth he was torn by irreconcilable tensions between the Bismarckian authoritarianism of his father and the ethical puritanism of his mother. These tensions led to a psychic crisis when, in his thirties, he expelled his father (who died soon thereafter) from his house. His reaction to the collapse of the European social order before and during World War I was no less personal and profound. It is the triumph of Professor Mitzman's approach that he convincingly demonstrates how the internalizing of these severe experiences led to Weber's pessimistic vision of the future as an ""iron cage"" and to such seminal ideas as the notion of charisma and the concept of the Protestant ethic and its connection with the spirit of capitalism. The author's thesis also serves as a vehicle for describing the social, political, and personal plight of the European bourgeois intellectual of Weber's generation.In synthesizing Weber's life and thought, Arthur Mitzman has expanded and refined our understanding of this central twentieth-century figure. As Lewis Coser writes in the preface, until now ""there has been little attempt to bring together the work and the man, to show the ways in which Weber's cognitive intentions, his choice of problems, were linked with the details of his personal biography. Arthur Mitzman fills this gap brilliantly.

In this first comparative analysis of men's and women's prisons, Dana Britton identifies the factors that influence the genderization of the American workplace, a process that often leaves women in lower-paying jobs with less prestige and responsibility.

When first published in 1975, Him/Her/Self was a pathbreaking book. At a time when scholars were just beginning to explore women's history, Peter Filene expanded his inquiry to include both both genders. He was the first to claim the men, too, had a history grounded in gendered experience. Since then much has changed, not only in the lives and attitudes of American men and women, but in the ways that historians think about gender. But Him/Her/Self remains the only book that analyzes the interactions between American men and women comprehensively during the past century. In this third edition, Filene brings his concise and forceful analysis of 20th-century gender history up to the present. He describes the new men's movements of the 1980s and 1990s, ranging from pro-feminist to anti-feminist. He expands his discussion of the gay and lesbian experience, especially in the years since AIDS. He assesses the women's movement, weighing both its achievements and the antifeminist reactions of the past quarter-century. Finally, he enlarges the conceptual scope of the book, focusing not only on social roles of men and women but also on their dynamic sense of identity—of self in historical time. "When Him/Her/Self first appeared, women's history was in its infancy. Gender as a category of analysis was barely a glow on the scholarly horizon, and the idea that manhood was a topic of historical investigation was practically unimagined. In that early dawn of feminist scholarship, Peter Filene's pioneering work was a godsend. It was essential reading for both undergraduate and graduate students eager to understand the workings of gender in history and desperate for models of scholarship that broke the mold of 'traditional' historical writing. Peter Filene's path breaking study did both."—Elaine Tyler May, from the Foreword

During the last three decades of the twentieth century there has been widespread controversy over, and alteration of, gender roles in the United States. To a large extent the ferment originated in, and was influenced by, the general social upheaval of the sixties. A major result has been a well-publicized transformation in the options, social status, and perception of American women. But what affected women also affected men, and a similar movement among American males therefore accompanied the feminist movement. In Uneasy Males, Edward Gambill provides an historical overview of the American "men's movement". The book covers pro-feminist and anti-feminist responses, and the organization and activities of men's rights, father's rights, "mythopoetic", religious, and black male groups. While much of the focus is on the development and operation of formal organizations, there is also coverage of changes apart from these structures. Uneasy males thus provide readers with an understanding of, and thought-provoking question about, gender roles in the United States.

A much-needed, often startling debate on the personal and political dimensions of masculinity.

The powerful case for a society of mutual respect. As various forms of social welfare were dismantled though the last decade of the twentieth century, many thinkers argued that human well-being was best served by a focus on potential, not need. Richard Sennett thinks differently. In this dazzling blend of personal memoir and reflective scholarship, he addresses need and social responsibility across the gulf of inequality. In the uncertain world of "flexible" social relationships, all are troubled by issues of respect: whether it is an employee stuck with insensitive management, a social worker trying to aid a resentful client, or a virtuoso artist and an accompanist aiming for a perfect duet. Opening with a memoir of growing up in Chicago's infamous Cabrini Green housing project, Richard Sennett looks at three factors that undermine mutual respect: unequal ability, adult dependency, and degrading forms of compassion. In contrast to current welfare "reforms," Sennett proposes a welfare system based on respect for those in need. He explores how self-worth can be nurtured in an unequal society (for example, through dedication to craft); how self-esteem must be balanced with feeling for others; and how mutual respect can forge bonds across the divide of inequality. Where erasing inequality was once the goal of social radicals, Sennett seeks a more humane meritocracy: a society that, while accepting inequalities of talent, seeks to nurture the best in all its members and to connect them strongly to one another.