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Teaching gender history to high school students requires a level of explanation that is usually absent in history survey courses and texts. Thus, students and faculty are unlikely to view the enterprise as basic or necessary knowledge. Although the scholarly world has come a long way toward recognizing gender as a central category of historical analysis, popular attitudes and the consciousness of adolescents lag far behind. So, each time we have taught gender history (and each time we have argued to keep it in the curriculum), we have had to make a case for why gender matters. We argue that gender as a cultural category affects a person's life chances, values, earning power, likelihood of committing or being a victim of crime, chance of being killed in battle, opportunities for education and professional advancement, and even life expectancy. We urge students to question gender prescriptions that they have been taught ("girls are . . . boys are . . ." statements), whether they come from teachers, family members, or public experts. We also invite them to look closely at the variety in gender populations and the motivation behind gender prescription. Though biological determinism in many forms, especially sociobiology, has won new popular audiences since the 1 970s in the United States, high school students can look at the several sides to current debates and compare them to debates that surrounded biology's "just so stories" of the late nineteenth century. They can examine the debates among equality feminists and difference feminists and critics of feminism to explore what they have been taught and what remain their unanswered questions about gender. A basic requirement for making gender studies a presence in a high school is to convince curriculum planners and students that gender systems may be as powerful in shaping people's lives as are economic or governmental systems.1 We take it for granted today that history departments offer courses on gender as a basic element of their curricula. That is, we take it for granted if the departments in question are college or university departments. At the secondary level, such offerings

No Man's Land: Men's Changing Commitments to Family and Work. Kathleen Gerson. New York: Basic. 1993. 355 pp. ISBN 0-465-06316-0. $25 cloth. Men, Work, and Family. Jane C. Hood (Ed.). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. 1993. 294 pp. Hardcover ISBN 0-8039-3890-X (cloth). $44 cloth, $19.95 paper. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. E. Anthony Rotundo. New York: Basic. 1993. 364 pp. ISBN 0-465-01409-7. $25 cloth. Growing Up Male: The Psychology of Masculinity. B. Mark Schoenberg. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. 1993. 144 pp. ISBN 0-89789-3441. $49.95 cloth. How Fathers Care for the Next Generation: A Four-Decade Study. John Snarey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. 1993. 394 pp. ISBN 0-674-40940-X. $35 cloth. Men, masculinity, and fathers are "hot" topics in the social sciences, as any casual perusal of academic (and popular) bookshelves will demonstrate. But it's not just the quantity of books that is striking. The emerging diversity, depth, and level of scholarship exemplify the intellectual growth of this important field of study. In this review, we discuss five new scholarly books that focus in part or fully on men in families, and highlight how scholarship has matured in this area. Yet, despite the maturation, there is room for further development. Thus, we also include our personal concerns with current scholarship and hopes for future work on men in families. John Snarey's book, How Fathers Care for the Next Generation, is one of the finest examples of how studies of men in families have progressed. Snarey draws from a four-generation, four-decade study of men to assert that "good fathering ... really does matter. It matters over a long time, over a life time, and even over generations" (p. 356). Snarey, a developmental psychologist, firmly grounds his research on fathering in Erikson's theory of human development. This book is now the finest empirical test and the strongest support for Erikson's concept of generativity--caring for the next generation. With both rigorous quantitative methods and a number of in-depth, intergenerational case studies, Snarey documents that generative fathering significantly affects children's future well-being. Snarey found links between both sons' and daughters' educational and occupational mobility (the fathers in the sample were working-class men) and various measures of their fathers' involvement in their lives in early childhood and in adolescence. (Unfortunately, familial and relational outcome measures for adult children were unavailable in Snarey's study, thus limiting the scope of his work.) In addition, generative fathering also increased fathers' own well-being at midlife in terms of occupational success and marital happiness. Furthermore, more generative fathering behavior was related to fathers' psychosocial generativity beyond the family sphere at midlife, supporting Erikson's idea that parental experience is an important foundation for healthy development at midlife. The involved fathering that Snarey measured fits within the scope of traditional male parenting rather than the less gender-stereotyped parenting often called for today. Snarey's research should encourage more researchers to study men and fathering with developmental lenses in addition to the sociological lenses that have provided the focus for so long (Hawkins, 1993) . Both the intergenerational, longitudinal design of Snarey's study and the rich theoretical tools he used to frame his data are evidence of significant maturation in the study of men and fathers. E. Anthony Rotundo's book, American Manhood, also shows how current scholarship is maturing. Rotundo, a social historian, gives us a vivid portrait of how our cultural conceptions of manhood and masculinity have evolved over the last 250 years. Together with Griswold's (1993) history of fatherhood in 19th-and 20th-century America, scholars now can place contemporary conversations on men, masculinity, and fathers within a well-documented historical context, a much needed and valuable achievement. …

These volumes, though not a matched set, have much in common. Neither charts extensive new ground but both are valuable in providing pioneer surveys of literature in men's studies. Because they are working in a comparatively recent era of gender studies, where much spadework remains to be done, their scope must be limited, both with regard to the range of sources consulted and the time span covered. Each author fails to benefit from a comparative approach, however, which would examine how masculine roles are defined in other cultures. To a degree, the books reveal a common sense of male American development. They see a change in roles around the end of the eighteenth century and again in the latter part of the nineteenth. They suggest that the current definition of male roles is in flux, if not outright turmoil. Oddly, neither points to one clear reason for the identity problems of American men, which is obvious from reading the volumes: the definition of American manhood is increasingly at odds with the expectations of American fathers. E. Anthony Rotundo teaches history and develops programs in race and gender at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Although his book is titled American Manhood, Rotundo sets out to deal only with patterns in the northern United States. He explains this in the appendix on the basis that the field of men's history is too large and uncharted to cover in one volume. For the early period, the eighteenth century background and the opening decades of the nineteenth century, Rotundo relies heavily on New England sources. He then adds material from what he calls the area of the "Yankee diaspora" through New York and the Westem Reserve into the upper Midwest, as he discusses the remaining decades before 1900. In addition, the author deals