Household Accounts: Working-class Family Economies in the Interwar United States

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.

In her life and in her scholarship, Susan Porter Benson exemplified the heroic struggle, dignity, reciprocity, and mutuality of Americans embedded in networks of family, kin, and friends. She understood how ordinary people lived their lives not as individuals freely engaged in market exchanges but as connected people who took things one day at a time. It is that understanding that makes this book so powerful. In original and compelling ways, she reveals that the worlds of the working class in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s show us lives of struggle of people deeply embedded in complex webs of human relationships as they daily came up against hard material reality.

In this outstanding book, Susan Porter Benson goes home with women like the bargain basement shoppers and saleswomen she described in her pathbreaking Counter Cultures. Her close reading and compassionate interpretation of primary sources yield straight talk about the meanings of class in twentieth-century America, and challenge the conventional account of the 1920s as an era of mass consumption. Household Accounts is wise about how families work and alive with the voices of women who have never before been heard from except as aggregate statistics.

Just as Susan Porter Benson's first book, Counter Cultures, changed the way historians looked at the work-culture of consumerism, so her last book, Household Accounts, will change the way we understand the 'consumerism' of working-class families in the interwar era. By bringing to light the intimate and often conflicted negotiations over expenditures within working-class families, this extraordinary book shows how far working men and women compromised with conventional gender rules in their efforts to survive at the narrow, short-credit margins of the American way of life.