The interwar period continues to attract considerable attention from economic and social historians. The draw is not just the huge macroeconomic fluctuation known as the Great Depression, but also the many new, budding trends that shaped American life in subsequent generations. The emergence of mass consumption is one of these trends. In her book, Household Accounts, Susan Porter Benson seeks to find out how consumption patterns changed in working-class families and whether—and to what extent—they were affected by the emerging mass consumption. She concludes, perhaps too gloomily, that for working-class families, the 1920s were not quite so roaring and that the 1930s were quite depressing.

The book's sources are studies conducted by the Women's Bureau in the 1920s and 1930s, including the primary materials—interview schedules, field reports, and personal accounts—that underpinned them (p. 16). Originally, individual studies were designed by the bureau to capture aspects of working women's lives in a particular industry (e.g., meatpacking) or in a specific area (e.g., Philadelphia) or of a specific demographic (e.g., immigrant women). Benson skillfully uses this variation in design to draw conclusions across sectoral, geographic, and ethnic categories while also discerning what is particular in each case.

It is a book written genuinely from a woman's point of view—and here I do not just mean the author but also, and mainly, the dramatis personae: the mothers and wives on whose decisions the balance of family budget usually depended and, of course, the Women's Bureau agents who conducted the interviews. That women played a crucial role in the day-to-day management of a household, particularly a working-class household, has been known for some time. In her first chapter (“Living on a margin”), Benson brings this point home yet again and illustrates very vividly how, in many families, the wife's or mother's dexterity and savvy were by far the most valuable assets. The men's contribution is more problematic. With all the desertions, failures to provide support, less-than-strong work ethic, and unpredictable spending patterns on the part of working-class men, it almost seems as if getting a husband was like entering in a lottery—except that in a lottery, you might win from time to time (p. 56). It is obvious from the household accounts that such husbands introduced much more volatility and insecurity into their families' living standards than was called for. Benson is very lenient with these working-class husbands, willing to interpret their idiosyncrasies generously as rebellions against their employers, against the whole breadwinner ethic or against “the rigors of the labor market and industrial work discipline” (p. 20). Yet, given that the burden of such rebellion was borne not by the labor market or the breadwinner ethic but rather by the deserted and neglected wives and children, this male reviewer tends to agree with the Women's Bureau field agents who had one apt, if stern, label for such rebelling husbands: “n.g.,” no good (p. 49).

The second chapter, “Cooperative Conflict,” discusses how the intrahousehold bargaining between parents and children had different implications for sons and for daughters. In terms of a family's living standards, Benson argues that the sons' standing rested on how much they were able to bring in while daughters were perceived and evaluated more in terms of how much (how little) they spent (p. 75). Clothing was the most contentious item of consumption but it seems that even when daughters' expenditures were modest, their net contribution to the family budget was negative (p. 67). This is as much a reflection of different consumption needs of sons and daughters as of the male-female wage differential. Yet it also highlights the transformation that young women must have undergone when they got married: from net spenders as daughters to net providers and managers as wives in the many cases when they were the primary breadwinners. It is unfortunate that Benson's sources were not quite suitable to answer the question of how exactly that transformation occurred.

Chapter 3 on the “mutuality of shared spaces” looks at the fluidity of living arrangements among working-class families. Women again had the decisive influence because in cases when two or more related nuclear families shared living quarters, the kin relationship ran through the women (p. 84). The arrangements usually involved some implicit transaction, such as an exchange of living space for domestic work. In this way, Benson provides a powerful illustration of the wide range of activities that involved simple barter. The same aspect reappears even more strongly in Chapter 4 where it is stunning to see just how much economic activity went completely under the radar of official national income accounting, from laundry services to child care to exchange of second-hand goods. As its title—“What goes 'round, comes 'round”—suggests, the reciprocity among working-class families was based on a delicate mixture of motives: partly mutual aid, partly a “credit transaction” where a unilateral favor today was expected to be repaid in kind at some point in the future.

In her fifth and final chapter, on the family economy in the marketplace, Benson argues that the spread of mass consumption was something in which the working-class families participated only marginally (pp. 6, 169). A large fraction of the newly marketed consumption goods were only purchased on second-hand markets or through credit. Yet it seems, reading between the lines of individual accounts, that the trickle down was more than a trickle, and that the installment credit, even if viewed with suspicion, did actually open new consumption opportunities for working-class families. Of course, the 1920s could not stand comparison with the postwar era but to say that working women joined consumer society “amidst cries of deprivation more often than amidst cries of exultation” (p. 169) seems an unnecessarily gloomy appraisal.

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.