![]() without a fuller picture of the role of women in these years, the argument about the fundamental misogyny of the moment feels less convincing. Why did their demands seem so threatening in this moment?. ![]() Women had, after all, been openly agitating for their rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. Hochschild’s goal, it seems, is to emphasize how far the anti-Red crusade was an expression of what we might now call toxic masculinity, the urge to assert racial and gender dominance by those who felt their authority and virility fading.The appeal of war, with its rigid reinforcing of the gender binary, is therefore obvious.It’s also somewhat reductive. The story of uprising and repression that American Midnight tells is overwhelmingly a story of men: of industrial workers, politicians, secret agents, soldiers, vigilantes, protesters, and prisoners. And, as the book lays out in stark and relentless detail, there was repression. ![]() an enraging, gruesome, and depressingly timely story about the fragility of American democracy, as both institution and concept. ![]()
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