While life-course studies can trace their origins to the early 20th century, most of the important large cohorts are still young. While not forever young, birth to death analyses of cohorts born after the 1940s are decades away. Until then, and for cohorts recruited later in their own lives, the analytical promise of full life-course studies requires marrying historical data collection methods – documents and interviews – with a life-course theoretical framework. The promise of that marriage is amply delivered in Living on the Edge. Studying the parents – born themselves around 1900 – of the Berkeley Guidance Study children, Living on the Edge draws on original study interviews in the 1920s and 1930s, retrospective data on parents’ early lives, and later-life (1970s) interviews with surviving parents. The study makes two important and related contributions to life-course studies and social science history. First, it models how a complete life-course analysis can be done and the types of insights we may reap. Second – and the focus of this review – the provocative conclusion about how the twentieth century affected the cohort should spur life-course scholars to useful debate comparing the life courses of different generations, or the same generation in different places.
When done well historical and life-course analyses both pull off the trick of telling an uncertain story moving forward while benefiting from the scholarly privilege of knowing the ending. In short, they avoid the teleological fallacy or what historians call “whiggish” interpretations. Living on the Edge meets this high standard describing and analyzing the lives of 400+ men and women in the twentieth century. Unusually for three sociologists, they reveal their conclusion gradually. The conclusion, both believable and a cause for productive skepticism, is that “the 1900 generation experienced a uniquely disruptive sequence of social change” (p. 223).
A strength of Living on the Edge is that this conclusion is no surprise. The 1900 generation came to adulthood around World War I, had at least one child in the prosperous 1920s, and suffered the lengthy uncertainties of the Great Depression and World War II, before a period of greater affluence and certainty from the late 1940s on. The book uses quantitative evidence effectively to show the range of experiences through these years and the uncertainties they brought to family life. By the standards of modern cohort studies, the sample size is modest, 420 at the start, but around 100 for the group analyzed more intensively. Frequencies and regression are the main methods. Qualitative evidence from contemporary and retrospective interviews amplifies the quantitative analyses. The qualitative evidence tends to reflect the average experience and gives less sense of variation in experience. But within the tight confines of 307 pages, Living on the Edge models good mixed methods research. Mixed methods are particularly important for addressing an inherent tension in life-course research. One goal is understanding regularities and relationships in how lives unfold. A second goal is understanding how individuals see and face the constraints and choices confronting them and make decisions about next steps. The first goal can be seen as quantitative: describing frequencies and sequences of events, common patterns of choices, and statistically relating events across time. The second goal can be seen as qualitative, describing how individuals tell the story of their own lives both prospectively and retrospectively. This blended evidence makes Living on the Edge a significant contribution to life-course research. Collective quantified biographies and historical panel data are important (and central to my own work!) but when we can hear or read what people thought we can learn much more.
The achievement of Living on the Edge in conveying the cohorts’ uncertainties is amplified when one considers the 20th century in retrospect. There is a whiggish story to be told of material progress and narrowing social inequalities after World War II. The decline of infant and childhood mortality, compression of morbidity, and mortality shifting to older ages meant health shocks and loss were less common than for the 1900 generation’s parents. But this arc of progress is much clearer in retrospect to scholars than it was to people living through it. The uncertainties of the Great Depression were central to how the cohort understood their lives.
The uncertainties of the Great Depression were particularly destabilizing for this cohort following the prosperous 1920s. While it is clear in historical time that the 1930s immediately followed the 1920s, it is not often so clear in American historiography. Scholars of British, European, Canadian, or Australasian history refer succinctly to the “inter-war era,” establishing the 1920s and 1930s as decades to consider together. Americans are apt to ask quizzically “which wars?” A significant amount of American social and political history is told around either “Progressive era” continuities foundering in the Great War and terminating in the 1920s or Depression-centered continuities beginning in October 1929. The effect on the historiography is to break the continuities that surely existed. Though probably not their intention, the authors of Living on the Edge demonstrate persuasively that American historians would benefit from applying an “inter-war era” framework to their scholarship.
There is an arguable case that the 1900 generation centered in the book were more affected by these decades than others were. Socioeconomic shocks and reversals of fortune between the ages of 20 and 40 come early enough in life that their effects will reverberate for decades, but also late enough that people have much at stake. But the way this sample was formed – parents with children born in 1928/9 – makes it possible the Living on the Edge subjects had a worse experience of the inter-war decades than same-aged peers without children, or children born significantly earlier or later. Indeed, nearly a quarter of women in the 1900 generation had no children, and a further 20% just one (Rowland 2007). Conversely, and acknowledged at several points, a sample drawn in urban Berkeley may be quite advantaged compared to cohort peers elsewhere in the United States. But the intersection of these broad generalizations tells us something important: even with Berkeley’s social advantages the inter-war decades were turbulent and stressful. Moreover, the findings about growing acceptance of women’s paid work, increasingly intensive parenting, and halting steps toward “companionate marriage” are all echoed in Ernest Burgess’ Chicago-centered studies of engaged and married couples in the same era (1920s–40s) (Burgess and Wallin Reference Burgess and Wallin1953; Burgess and Cottrell Reference Burgess and Cottrell1939; see also Celello Reference Celello2009).
However, were the inter-war decades part of a “uniquely disruptive sequence of social change”? One interpretation of “uniquely disruptive” is that every generation has a distinct intersection of age with historical time, and cohorts cannot be compared because they are just all different. An alternative interpretation is that some cohorts’ sequences are more disruptive. From the perspective of both life-course theory and American history, the claim about this cohort is well made. Yet for the future of life-course scholarship, we should take the claim skeptically and compare other cohorts’ experience. Over time, consider the American 1840 generation coming of age and fighting the Civil War. If they survived, they lived through Reconstruction, labor unrest, and the long Depression of the 1890s. On reaching 65, they had seen the development of railroads, photography, the telegraph, automobile, and flight – challenges that can be seen in Costa and Kahn (Reference Costa and Kahn2008) who called them heroes and cowards. Or consider Millennials (1981–96), many of whom entered early adulthood in the Great Recession from 2008 on. If Millennials, like the Berkeley sample, are parents, they are grappling with parenting in the COVID-19 pandemic. Finalizing this review on January 6, 2022 – a year after the US capitol insurrection – perhaps we will see Millennials as living through the end of America’s brief post-1965 experiment with full democracy following the Voting Rights Act. We do not know, and it is the ongoing task of life-course scholars to find out.
Whether a sequence of events in a life course is uniquely disruptive is a question that can only be answered in comparative perspective. Since none of us can study all the cohorts, this is a collective challenge to take up this provocation and interrogate it. Experiences will vary within cohorts, so comparisons of cohorts across time and space should focus on how disruption was distributed. The material and economic progress described in Living on the Edge has been broadly shared in other high-income countries like Europe and Australasia. Yet the social and political history of other countries has been distinct in important ways. The life-course disruptions of war, whether on one’s soil (Europe) or more distant (Australasia and Canada), must have been considerable. While Living on the Edge makes a persuasive case for the utility of the “inter-war years” concept in American history, the actual trace of the Great War on this cohort may have been comparatively small. If one studied the “1890s cohort” from Europe, Australasia, or Canada, you would find a large share of men serving in war. Many returned injured to countries professing appreciation for their service but unable to heal all their wounds. Many women had marriages delayed or disrupted by war. The 1920s in Britain, Australasia, and parts of Europe too had slower economic growth than America’s “Roaring Twenties.” For this 1890 cohort with lives already more disrupted by the Great War than the same American cohort, World War II may have layered on trauma. We may never really know because the expectations and interpretations of ordinary men and women from this cohort were not scientifically sampled, an important limitation but not an impossible one. Perhaps the external events we can place on the life history calendar of the 1890s cohort came early enough that the historical events described were not experienced as disruptions but as the normal challenges of adulthood.
The point is that the life course is not merely the intersection of historical time and age. It is how people, in their web of family and other relationships, act within the world shaped by those historical events and understand them. Great life-course scholarship puts all those elements together over the longest sweep of life possible. Living on the Edge demonstrates what is possible with even a relatively small cohort for which data have been collected over many decades. It is in many ways a model of what life-course scholarship should aspire to: more books about longer sweeps of time. But that work will not come easily. Panels are hard to sustain and books are hard to write. While Living on the Edge is a fine book, it also feels too short at many points. More details from interviews and on the quantitative analyses would have been welcome. Inevitably, these omissions reflect the tradeoffs of how long a university press book can be and keep up sales at an economical price point. Internet appendices are a possible, though slightly awkward, solution. These small laments reflect the considerable strengths of this work. For members of the life-course community and social science historians, our bonds of obligation to our scholarly family should lead us to build on these achievements asking questions that place the Berkeley subjects in comparative perspective.
