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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Jeffrey M. Hornstein
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Extract

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.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 2002 , pp. 613 - 619
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) (2002). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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References

1. “Rosie the Realtor” is borrowed from Pearl Janet Davies, official historian of the Women’s Council of Realtors. See Davies, Pearl Janet, Women in Real Estate: AHistory of the Women’s Council of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (Chicago, 1963), 38 Google Scholar. See also Chapralis, Sally Ross, Progress of Women in Real Estate: 50th Anniversary, Women’s Council of Realtors (Chicago, 1988), 13 Google Scholar.

2. Shern, Mary, Real Estate, A Woman’s World: The Saga of Suzy Soldsine, Super Salesperson (Chicago, 1977).Google Scholar

3. See Kimmel, Michael S., “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Brod, Harry and Kaufman, Michael (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1994), 119–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996); Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York, 1993)Google Scholar. For an attempt at synthesis, see Traister, Bruce, “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” American Quarterly 52 (June 2000): 274–304 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

4. “Business maternalism” bears the traces of other scholars' attempts to coin neologisms to capture the irony of the “doubled quality and consciousness of women's participation in civic life,” in the words of Nancy F. Cott. I am indebted in particular to Linda Kerber's notion of “republican womanhood,” the idea that women had a natural and crucially important moral influence on the social and political world of the early American republic, and to Seth Koven's notion of “civic maternalism.” Cott, , “What's in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’; or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History,” Journal of American History 76 (Dec. 1989): 809-29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kerber, Linda K., “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment-An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28 (Summer 1976): 187–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980), 185-231. The literature on gender and welfare in the twentieth century is large. I have found especially useful Gordon, Linda, “Single Mothers and Child Neglect, 1880-1920,” American Quarterly 37 (Summer 1985): 173-92CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920,” American Historical Review 95 (Oct. 1990): 1076–1108 Google Scholar; Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1910-1935 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, “Social Insurance and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought in the United States, 1890-1935,” American Historical Review 97 (Feb. 1992): 19–54.Google Scholar