Living on the Edge investigates only the experience of white Americans who settled in Berkeley before World War I, owing to the absence of Latinos/as, Asians, and Black Americans in the city’s population at that time. However, that limitation actually makes differences in the experience of the middle class vs. the working class men and women more salient. From the mid-20th century until today, various social movements have sharpened our sensibilities, and we now seek, felicitously, to include diverse racial and ethnic groups in our institutions as well as our research. However, had several racial and ethnic groups also been incorporated in the sample of Living on the Edge, the differences among them would inevitably have been interpreted as cultural differences.
My comments focus on the differences in social classes and gender that Living on the Edge highlights for us when the time span they analyzed involved two World Wars and the Great Depression and social life underwent remarkable changes. In a study based both on quantitative and qualitative evidence, I particularly enjoyed the attitudes expressed by the participants. As one of them succinctly expressed it: “Never again will history equal the rate of change of this period: from covered wagon to the moon!” (p. 239).
Living on the Edge particularly focused on the changes that took place during three eras: before family formation (before 1930), during the Great Depression (the 1930s), and during World War II (1940–43), periods that involved great swings of economic prosperity and depression, affecting the lives of middle-class and working-class men and women in different ways. Living on the Edge gives us an American story and a California story. Immigrants came to this country in search of the American Dream. People migrated internally, to California, from Europe, the East Coast, and the Midwest in search of a California Dream. Less than 20% of the sample were born in California. It is a story of enormous progress and real setbacks. Before the Depression, in 1929, 3 out of 5 families were in the middle class. Yet in 1933, 25% of the workforce was unemployed, living through the hardships of the Great Depression. A decade later began the affluence of the postwar years. How these economic swings affected middle-class vs. working-class men and women underpins the book.
As throughout the US, educational attainment shaped occupational position and income levels – trends that were particularly visible in this California sample. Here nearly 60% of the men managed to complete High School (twice the national average), and fully one-third of the men graduated from a college or university (with UC-Berkeley, Stanford, Dartmouth, and the University of Michigan quite often among them); however, one-fourth of the men had little education – 9th grade or less. Thus, California was a particularly good state to witness the difference social class origins made. Using the social class measure developed by Hollingshead (Reference Hollingshead1949), which took both occupational and educational status into account, the authors distinguished five status groups, which most often were combined into the middle-class vs. the working-class.
Working-class families (industrial workers and construction workers) had the largest number of children, with those at the bottom often living on the margin of economic subsistence, with few savings. These families were more dependent on kin and community and often shared household living arrangements. Middle-class families (professionals, managers, sales and office workers, foremen, and the self-employed) had the largest incomes and the fewest children. Among them, the highest status families were able to hire domestic help and to live an affluent lifestyle.
Social class clearly shaped women’s lives. Among all social classes, the culture opposed the idea of married women working. Work was understood as temporary and secondary to what society expected of women: that they should become good wives and mothers. Home was a woman’s domain; work was a man’s domain – separation that was nearly total then. Most women derived their lifestyle and markers of status (the house, car, furniture, appliances, and neighborhood club) from their husband’s income. Strong norms, training, and values regarding women working outside the home shaped family life. Working-class and immigrant women worked outside of the home when they had to – when their husbands were unemployed, ill, or poorly paid. Work in a factory or in domestic service was often their only option. Middle-class women often hired working-class women to help with housework and childcare while middle-class women engaged in volunteer (unpaid) work outside the home in charitable and civic institutions or artistic endeavors. Particularly in the middle-class and the upper-middle-class, women’s role often became ornamental – a status marker. Middle-class women worked in just a few areas: teaching, nursing, arts, or languages. Many felt their aspirations curtailed by the social norms that expected women not to work after marriage – especially not when they had young children.
The authors stress the importance of “respectability”— following Kahl’s (Reference Kahl1957) notion of respectability as lifestyle investments in homeownership, churchgoing, and children’s education – in guiding people’s lifestyle choices. Yet, respectability is vaguely defined in the study. We would have benefitted from hearing the study participants express, from the interviews, the standards involved in what they considered respectable with respect to their homes and neighborhoods as well as the work women engaged in. While home ownership was a widely shared value, as it provided security and independence, it also expressed status (as it does today) in the size and quality of the homes as well as their neighborhood location. Was a small home in a working-class neighborhood respectable when the front of the home, though modest, was well tended – surrounded by flowers, say? Was a neighborhood respectable when many people looked after their homes and they were freshly painted – even though the median neighborhood income was low?
Spurred by economic necessity, working-class women worked outside the home at higher rates than middle-class women did. Was it not respectable for middle-class women to work outside the home but respectable for working-class women to do so? We can be certain that women who were teachers and nurses – the two major occupations open to middle-class women – were considered respectable. But other occupations? The authors point out that when the white-collar class emerged in the 1920s, women were a large part of it. We can feel certain that women who were office workers, receptionists, and telephone and telegram operators were considered respectable. But were women who were service workers, factory workers, nannies, and waitresses considered respectable?
Living on the Edge is at its best, in my view, when it highlights the pain and changes the hard times of the Depression forced. Here also the authors could have fleshed out the concept of respectability. We are given the example of a man who during the Great Depression lost his job or his wages fell drastically, so that, feeling defeated and humiliated, he had to sell the house and move to a less desirable neighborhood. Was it then respectable for his wife to work, out of need? Or did the family move to a less desirable neighborhood rather than have the wife work outside the home?
The hardship of the Great Depression lasted at least a decade. Some families made bad times worse, as the authors expressed, by their lack of marital support when they incurred financial loss. For a man, whose traditional role was that of provider, the humiliation of joblessness and the acceptance of welfare cut to the bone of how others saw him and how he saw himself. For a woman, whose traditional role was that of nurturer, the authors tell us that her role expanded and took on new meaning. How did respectability guide her new role in the community and at work?
The authors underscore that the standard of respectability was particularly important for the lower-middle class and working-class because, as Kahl (Reference Kahl1957) emphasized, it was they who were truly in the middle – on the fence – and because it was respectability that made people in the middle feel superior to people at the bottom. Given the centrality of this concept for our understanding of men and women’s behavior at the time, more examples from the interviews would have been worthwhile. The authors tell us that the “fallen” middle-class families were more sensitive to the financial insecurity and the status implications of heavy economic loss than were families in the working-class, even when their incomes hardly differed. We can understand that the pain of losing status was particularly sharp among the “fallen” upper-middle-class families, but what adjustments did it, in fact, force them to make?
Moreover, the authors underscore that as incomes plummeted, many husbands and wives lost their ability to support each other and often became lost in conflict. Looking at marital quality, the authors found that emotionally healthy men who were in strong marriages were best equipped to deal with the Depression, to cope; conversely, those who were emotionally unstable, and were more irritable and explosive, could cope less well with family hardship. Yet at the time divorce was not an acceptable option, one very seldom used even by those couples who were caught in the web of conflicts. What options did men and women then have? More details from the interviews would have been instructive.
We can understand that lost status spurred the women to seek work outside the home, though having a wife at home that did not have to work was a status-marker at the time. But was this invariably a negative experience? Did the deep, economic necessity that pushed women out of their domain in the home into the domain of men not bring greater autonomy and independence to women, despite their husbands being crest-fallen? In studies of contemporary immigrant families, a consistent finding is that the experience of immigration is more positive for women than for men. Many immigrant women come from traditional cultures where women were also expected to remain at home. However, the hardship of immigration allows women to break with traditional gender norms that women should not work outside of the home while providing a rationale that is compatible with traditional values that a woman’s place is to help her husband and children. Today’s immigrant women more often than not work outside of the home to help their husbands and children – a contemporary expression of a traditional value.
How long the hardship of the Depression lasted also depended on social class. The authors show that the upper-middle-class families were able to recover quickly from their economic loss; however, helping needy relatives was a burden they were often reluctant to bear. By contrast, the working class often engaged in helping their less fortunate relatives, though for them “the heavy hand of prolonged hardship persisted into the 1940s and industrial mobilization for World War II” (p. 158). The authors underscored that while the Depression had turned families inward, facing their private troubles, the War turned them outward, as people banded together against a common enemy.
The authors note that already a shift was taking place that made women more interested in personal fulfillment. A new ideal was beginning to guide marriage: that marriage was to be an expression of companionship and partnership. However, it would be quite a long time before the women’s movement of the 1970s and 1980s was able to articulate this as women’s need for self-actualization. While the feminist movement as such is way outside the historical range of this study, Living on the Edge helps us realize why it, indeed, came out of the lives of the white middle-class and upper-middle-class women. It also enables us to understand why the movement never paid much attention to the lives of working-class women, especially women of color and immigrant women who had a more consistent attachment to work.
In sum, Living on the Edge is a wonderful blend of sociology and history – a longitudinal study that shows us how white Americans experienced historical time and place: how two World Wars and the Great Depression deeply influenced their lives in California. There is much here that could guide a future longitudinal study of white and ethnic minority families in America as we traverse the 21st century.
