4 - Low-Income Interwar Family Consumption in the United States: The Old Family Economists and Living Standards across Cities and Farms

Summary

In the early twentieth century, changes in production targeted low-income family consumption with labour-saving domestic appliances and factory-produced clothing and shoes. Employment of maids declined. Women’s factory work increased. After the Great War, governments and housing producer groups tamed male-worker unrest with low-interest housing loans. Working-class families left shoddy inner-city tenement abodes for bright, practical homes in Midwest suburbs. White mothers returned to household production. Non-English-speaking families migrated into rural areas. Consequently, family economists like Hazel Kyrk, Elizabeth Hoyt, Margaret Reid, and others studied how to improve the consumption activities of low-income and farming families, a problem that intensified during the Great Depression. Methods included studies of family expenditure, calculations of the value of household production for family income, and the development of consumer price indices. Their pragmatism produced policies to secure adequate family budgets and consumer-friendly markets. However, they accepted gendered divisions of household–market labour, distancing themselves from the feminist organisations that had supported women through war with cooperative domestic labour. Differences in living standards between urban and rural families, and between white and non-white families, were mostly viewed as outcomes of family preference, and not as injustices. Methodologies did not reach the family consumption of Dustbowl evacuees.