A Nation of Realtors®: The Professionalization of Real Estate Brokerage and the Construction of a New American Middle Class

Abstract

The rise of professional real estate brokerage is an ideal window into the internal dynamics of the cultural transformation of the American middle class in the twentieth century. Emerging as a full-time occupation in the late nineteenth century, real estate brokerage embodied a variety of early twentieth-century cultural, social, business, and economic trends, including the drive to professionalize business, the rapid expansion of white-collar labor and its feminization, the rise of independent contracting as a prominent form of labor relations, and the enormous growth of the home-building and -selling industries. As many scholars have noted, the home became a crucial site of both consumption and middle-class identification in the early twentieth century.