Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar United States (review)

Benson, in this posthumously published monograph, argues convincingly that consumer culture made only the slightest inroad into the American working class before World War II. Insufficient wages and erratic incomes, she contends, made it impossible for most families to purchase much beyond basic necessities. For this reason, she situates consumption within the larger framework of family economy, considering various interrelated strategies that working-class families used to earn money as well as to buy goods and services.

Benson concludes that, contrary to popular belief, wives often took less pleasure in consumption than in wage earning, whereas husbands were more likely than wives to direct a portion of their earnings routinely toward luxuries for themselves. A similar pattern emerged for daughters and sons—the boys edging tended more toward discretionary spending than their sisters. Benson also covers the ways in which working-class families tried to lessen the stringencies of the market economy by exchanging goods, services, and labor with kin and neighbors. Moreover, such emerging financial practices as credit may have heightened middle-class engagement with consumption, but they had little appeal to working-class families, who chose second-hand goods over falling into debt. Remarkably, these strategies varied little across various ethnic groups, prompting Benson to conclude that class prevailed as the major factor determining consumption patterns during the interwar period.

The methodology that informs this important study is boldly qualitative. Before telling the larger story, Benson opens by relating her own family’s limited engagement with consumer culture during this period. She states clearly that her concern is “not with absolute levels of consumption, nor with the quantitative aspects of the family budget” (7). Instead, she uses the “raw data” of reports and surveys of working-class families conducted during the 1920s and 1930s to understand how working-class families made decisions and how they meshed their strategies with the desires and goals of individual family members (9).

Two main sources predominate—reports of the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, compiled from home-visit interviews with wage-earning women, and studies of working-class families conducted by social scientists during the 1920s and 1930s. Benson admits that because she was less interested in the conclusions offered by these investigations than the raw data that informed them, she set aside the published reports and headed to the National Archives, There she retrieved mounds of descriptive material, including highly effective first-person narratives. For example, in examining the often tense relationship between working-class parents and their wage-earning daughters, she quotes a Kansas City meatpacker who complained that her teenaged daughters “don’t make much and they want everything” (71).

David Montgomery writes in the afterword, “Susan Porter Benson has left a distinctive imprint on the writing of American social history primarily because of her independence of mind” (170). Household Accounts confirms his assessment as much by its methodology as by its important conclusions.