Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economics in the Interwar United States. By Susan Porter Benson. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. xvi, 233 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8014-3723-6.)

Abstract

The survival strategies of working-class families come alive in Household Accounts by the late Susan Porter Benson. In this work, Benson shifts her sights from work to working-class consumption between the two world wars. She writes that when she began her research, she hoped “to find both evidence of working-class immersion in a national culture of abundance and documentation of distinct racial-ethnic patterns of consumption. I found neither” (p. 6). She finds instead that even as consumption was becoming increasingly central to the lives of middle-class Americans, working-class Americans were still largely on the outside of the consumer culture, using a variety of coping strategies to get by but still unable to participate fully. Within the burgeoning consumer economy, those with adequate means were active participants while those with limited means were not. She also reveals that these working-class strategies were employed in similar (though not identical) ways across racial and ethnic lines.