I recently asked my students if they would add any new core readings to the bibliography of their special subject on gender in the Second World War. They unanimously chose this publication, and with good cause. This co-authored monograph is both accessible and thought-provoking. It addresses the threefold under-representation of civilian men in Britain in the Second World War: in wartime sources, in commemoration, and in historiography. It fills a gap which historians have only recently begun to address, and in so doing offers a fascinating insight into one of the most complex gender identities of the war.

Reserved status was a faceted status to negotiate because of the tension it created between the identification of military service as the hegemonic male role in wartime and the evidence it provided that an individual was “vital to the war effort” in his civilian role. Juliette Pattinson, Arthur McIvor, and Linsey Robb set themselves up in opposition to an overstated “coherent grand narrative of emasculated reserved workers,” offering instead “plural histories and multiple, shifting and competing constructions” (13). As their more nuanced subsequent engagement with the existing historiography shows, however, the plurality of experiences of civilian men and the spectrum of self-perception from humiliation to pride is already well established. What Men in Reserve explores in greater breadth and depth are the inflections of age, locality, marital status, and specific role. For example, dock workers, trade unionists, and agricultural laborers could each draw upon different prewar and wartime discourses to make sense of the contribution of their roles to the war effort—creating weapons of war, representing labor, or feeding the nation—in environments more or less affected by the influx of female labor.

Pattinson, McIvor, and Robb address these facets in the course of seven chapters that address the development and meanings of reserved status, its intertwining with constructions of masculinities both experienced and perceived, working-class men's working lives and leisure activities, and the reserved male viewed in retrospective renditions of the war in popular culture and memorialization. The primary source base is as wide ranging as we have come to expect in this series by Manchester University Press, the Cultural History of Modern War. Of particular interest are the extracts from oral history interviews conducted at the beginning of this century. We read, for example, of Jack Jones, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a trade union official in the Transport and General Workers Union, who reminds us of the range of roles from which men drew their sense of self-worth, as well as the significance of locality. He concludes, “I think we did more for the war in Coventry than many of the workers who went from Coventry into the Forces!” (179). These interviews necessarily capture the memories only of those alive sixty years after the war, who were commonly single or childless, and without memories of the First World War and its rhetoric of wartime service. We can be grateful, however, that at least these young men's memories were captured just in time. They sit alongside a wide range of personal testimony, oral and written, including Mass Observation diaries and file reports; parliamentary debates, trade union records, and visual sources from propaganda campaigns and war art; films, songs, poems, and novels. The postwar period is explored through radio and television programs, and also physical memorialization. The outcome is a thorough analysis of the experiences of working-class men within the civilian war effort and in official and popular representations at the time and since.

There is one dimension about which I remain curious. In December 1941, the system of block reservation as established in the Schedule of Reserved Occupations changed to individual deferment. As the authors argue, by 1943 more men had been released into military service from the shift than had entered military service on reaching the age of conscription. Deferment is an interesting theme in the testimonies of the BBC People's War archive, suggesting both exploitation and resistance, themes significant to civilian status throughout the war. Once deferment was a matter for an individual case to be made, however, it was more vulnerable to challenge or manipulation by both employers and employees. We thus find evidence in that archive of relentless and imaginative badgering campaigns by men eager to be released into uniformed service, stoic, or strategic decisions to prolong deferment, and suspicion that an individual's indispensability to the war effort owed less to vital skills and more to strategic willingness to take on the boss's fire-watching duties or make him cups of tea. The ending of the official policy of reservation is clearly a milestone in the history of the negotiation of wartime male employment and one on which further reflections by these authors would have been most welcome given their interest in both experience and perceptions.

The main contribution of this volume is firmly to instate the working-class male's experience into the narratives and analyses of the British war effort and to offer a sensitive analysis of these masculinities in war. I concur with my students. This is a vital read for anybody interested in gender identities in wartime; the negotiation of masculinities, military or civilian; and the retrospective constructions of the Second World War.