Household Accounts - by Susan Porter Benson (Paperback)

About the Book

Susan Porter Benson takes readers into the budgets and the lives of working-class families in the United States between the two world wars.

Book Synopsis

With unprecedented subtlety, compassion and richness of detail, Susan Porter Benson takes readers into the budgets and the lives of working-class families in the United States between the two world wars. Focusing on families from regions across America and of differing races and ethnicities, she argues that working-class families of the time were not on the verge of entering the middle class and embracing mass culture. Rather, she contends that during the interwar period such families lived in a context of scarcity and limited resources, not plenty. Their consumption, Benson argues, revolved around hard choices about basic needs and provided therapeutic satisfactions only secondarily, if at all.Household Accounts is rich with details Benson gathered from previously untapped sources, particularly interviews with women wage earners conducted by field agents of the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor. She provides a vivid picture of a working-class culture of family consumption: how working-class families negotiated funds; how they made qualitative decisions about what they wanted; how they determined financial strategies and individual goals; and how, in short, families made ends meet during this period. Topics usually central to the histories of consumption--he development of mass consumer culture, the hegemony of middle-class versions of consumption, and the expanded offerings of the marketplace--contributed to but did not control the lives of working-class people. Ultimately, Household Accounts seriously calls into question the usual narrative of a rising and inclusive tide of twentieth-century consumption.

Review Quotes

Household Accounts contains a wealth of everyday stories from the lives of wage-earning women and their families. It successfully documents the complexity of relationships that these families were part of and the numerous obligations and demands that this web of relationships imposed on them.

A poignancy infuses this book by Susan Porter Benson. The human stories of struggle, in steady succession, not only offer convincing evidence of scarcity as an abiding theme of working-class life in interwar America, but they are moving: the woman who cared for and fed her neighbor's two children for the modest sum of three dollars per week, because 'we got to help each other, ' or the Italian wife of an unemployed printer, depressed and ashamed to leave the house in her ragged clothes. Benson's work shakes up our understanding of working-class America in the interwar years and reminds us to keep our sights on the material realities of everyday life as 'step one' in historical understanding.

Benson's love of and care with women's economic and personal lives leap from every page. The result is a work bursting with insights on how women negotiated constraints on their economic and family lives and altered those constraints by means of negotiation, redefining obligations both within the immediate family and its extended kinship counterpart, and by facing the marketplace on their own unique terms. Highly recommended.

The late Susan Porter Benson has left us with a fascinating account of the consumption patterns of working class women and their families in the interwar United States.

About the Author

The late Susan Porter Benson was Director of Women's Studies at the University of Connecticut and the author of Counter Cultures: Saleswoman, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. The late David Montgomery was Farnam Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and the author of several books, including The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925.