Getting and Spending

When I began my current project on working-class consumption in the interwar period, I believed that the glass was half full - that I would find working-class cultures permeated by mass consumption and working-class material life transformed by automobiles, household appliances, and ever more fashionable ready-made clothes. The vaunted post-World War II prosperity that stands between us and the interwar period colored my view of the earlier period, as did the focus on middle-class abundance of most of what has been written about the history of consumption. I should have known better. I had evidence from my work on department stores, which showed their preoccupation with the middle-class minority that commanded significant discretionary income as well as my memories of a 1950s working-class community in which scarcity edged out abundance despite Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union wages.

After digesting a great deal of evidence about working-class families’ lives between 1919 and 1940, I have concluded that in fact the glass was half empty. I emphasize the constraints placed on working-class demand and the ways in which working-class people negotiated them, rather than the possibilities offered by the marketplace. The material aspects of working-class peoples lives did, of course, improve in certain ways, but the improvements seem to me to be less striking than the continuing budget strictures under which families operated.