Economic Hardship and Marital Relations in the 1930s

Abstract

Economic stress in families and lives represent interdependent, problem areas, although most work to date has ignored this critical relationship. Consistent with Burgess's concept of the family, as a unity of interacting personalities, a life course perspective on family development attends to the complex interaction of individual personalities and emergent social patterns in family change. With longitudinal data from the Berkeley Guidance panel, this study examines the impact of relative income loss (1929-33) on change in the marital relations and personalities of III couples up to the 1940s. Economic loss produced marked declines in marital quality among middleand working-class families. In large part, this outcome reflected the acute deprivational meaning of income loss to husbands. Marital discord increased under economic pressure as men who lacked adaptive resources became more difficult to live with, more tense, irritable, and explosive. But even apart from such change, marital relations generally grew more tense and conflicted as couples were forced to adapt family needs to unexpected income constraints. These adverse effects are one side of the Depression picture. Another side is evidence of remarkable personal and marital adaptation among couples whose marital bond was strong before hard times and among men of personal stability when they encountered hard times in the Great Depression.