Leading Men

It’s no secret that there is a wide—and growing—gender gap in American presidential politics. Over the past thirty years, Democrats have made major gains with women, while Republicans have been doing far better with men —especially white working class men. The question is why? In Leading Men, Jackson Katz argues that racial politics and economic anxieties are not enough to explain the dramatic gender divide in American voting patterns. Cutting against the grain of typical analyses of the gender gap that have focused almost exclusively on women, Katz trains his focus the other way around: on the male side of the equation. He offers stunning evidence that American presidential campaigns have evolved into nothing less than quadrennial referenda on competing versions of American manhood. And in the process, he never takes his eye off what this development means for women—as both candidates and citizens. Written in