Includes bibliographical reference and appendix.

few years ago, in my undergraduate Sociology of Gender course,1Iasked the students to sit in small groups and identify gender-Arelated problems that they were currently facing and that were nottoo personal to discuss with the class. I then asked them to assess the extentto which their problems were private troubles, that is, specific to them-selves as individuals, or public issues, reflective of wider issues in the socialorder and experienced by many people.2 When the groups reported back,two men responded, "We were raised never to hit girls, and now with thewomen's movement, we want to know whether or not that's OK."Theirquestion was serious, and the class exploded. Many women in the roombecame very upset and started yelling at the two men. (I later learned thatat least a third of the women in the room had been raped.) I was caught offguard and realized that the course was not designed to effectively addressthe various issues embedded in the men's question. I did not have nearlyenough material on men's socialization and behavior. I was particularlyconcerned about providing students with enough information to help thembegin to make sense of the high rate of men's violence toward women andtoward each other.
In my search for better materials about men's socialization, I found agrowing literature on men's studies to accompany thealready huge litera-ture on women's studies and the sociology of gender. But my favorite arti-cles were scattered among a wide range of sources. Although some excellentanthologies are available about women and men separately,3 no one volumeavailable at that time and appropriate for use in a social science course gavesubstantial attention to both genders. Two excellent anthologies were andstill are available on race,class, and gender, (and a third has recently beenpublished), but the articles do not consistently address gender.4 Thus, thisbook is designed to meet the needs of faculty who want to cover bothwomen and men from a multicultural perspective but want to use oneanthology instead of two. I define multicultural broadly to include the per-spectives and experiences of a wide range of people within the context ofpower and inequality.
The creation of this book was made possible by the explosion of work byand about people of color, people of various ethnicities, gay men, lesbians,bisexuals, transgendered people, people with disabilities, and working-classpeople. Most of the readings included here are ones that colleagues and I