MAKING DO: FAMILY LIFE IN THE DEPRESSION

Budgeting

In the 1930s more than half of American families earned between $500 and __BODY__,500 per year. In 1935-1936 the median family income was __BODY__,160. An income of $2,000 per year guaranteed a comfortable life-style and put a household at the top 10 percent of incomes. On an average annual income of roughly __BODY__,000, most families had between $20 and $25 per week for food, clothing, and shelter. Budgeting and stretching scarce resources was essential. In adapting to economic deprivation families used two strategies: they curtailed expenses and found alternative sources of income. Expenses were curtailed by using family labor to produce goods that used to be store bought, such as food, clothing, and home repairs. This reponsibililty typically fell on women, who did most of the household spending. The government gave guidelines for a family budget, recommending setting aside 35 percent of the family income for food, 33 percent for shelter, and 4 percent for taxes. One wit reacted to such budgets by noting, "In order to run a budget, you have to have money … I don't feel that I can afford one right now—there are so many other things I need worse."

Prices

Tight budgets demanded that women watch every penny. If a woman shopped carefully, she could feed a family of six on five dollars per week. Low food prices helped: milk cost ten cents a quart; a loaf of bread was seven cents; a pound of butter cost twenty-three cents; and two pounds of hamburger cost twenty-five cents. To stretch their pennies, some women shopped with a friend so that they could split the cost for, say, two pounds of hamburger meat, alternating on who paid the extra penny each week.

Recipes for Frugality

Radio shows broadcast money-saving recipes such as poor man's cake, made without flour, and green tomato mincemeat. Women temporarily stopped buying ready-made goods and began making food and clothing at home. Women did their own canning, pickling, preserving, and baking. Sales of glass jars reached an eleven-year high in 1931, as the demand for store-bought canned and bottled foods declined. In these ways women helped the household economy by expanding their unpaid labor at home. By substituting their own labor for goods and services that were previously purchased, women enabled their families to maintain their former standard of living despite decreased incomes. As the Depression lessened, however, women returned to their roles as consumers of household products—now consuming new products, such as frozen foods, intro duced during the decade.

Declines in Marriage and Divorce

The Great Depression affected more than the household economy. It caused many couples to delay marrying and having children; both became too expensive. Divorce also was too expensive, although Nevada reaped a fortune in tax receipts midway through the decade by offering quick, low-cost divorce. Between 1930 and 1935 there were 170,000 fewer divorces than would have occurred if the divorce rates of the 1920s had continued. This did not mean that marriages were happier in the Depression. Rates of desertion rose, as husbands left their families without divorce, and by 1940 there were more than 1.5 million married women living apart from their husbands. Fifteen percent of all households were headed by females that year, as opposed to only 12 percent in 1930. Hard times may have made some couples stick together, but others stayed married because it was easier to qualify for relief if there was a family to support. The divorce rate increased again after 1933, as families finally collapsed under the financial strain; by 1940 divorces would exceed the level of the 1920s.

BIRTH CONTROL AND RACE

Although population rates declined during the Depression, the movement to provide birth control to families continued during the decade. Margaret Sanger and other birth control advocates not only lobbied to make contraceptives legal for married couples (they were illegal in most states) but championed the cause of national health and child care.

In spirit, birth control advocates had the support of the Roosevelt administration. In the 1920s Eleanor Roosevelt had served on the board of Sanger's American Birth Control League. But Franklin Roosevelt depended heavily on the support of the Catholic Church and southern Democrats and thus refused to acknowledge the move ment, fearful of alienating these conservative polit ical supporters. Eleanor Roosevelt in fact resigned from Sanger's league when her husband ran for president in 1932. The New Deal nonetheless funded birth control surreptitiously, paying nurses in the employ of New Deal agencies such as the Farm Security Administration to bring birth control information and contraception to poor farm women and women in migrant labor camps.

Moreovert efforts to fund birth control waited until southern governments began to fear the increasing rate of births among blacks. In 1937 North Carolina became the first state to offer contraception as part of its public health service, followed by South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. All these states were already burdened with expensive relief payments and supported birth control as a means of keeping down costs. All these states also had high populations of blacks and few Catholics.

Source:

Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: Amerimn Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992).

Unmarried Women

The marriage rate was 10.14 per 1,000 persons in 1929 but dropped to 7.87 per 1,000 in 1932. By 1938 hard times forced an estimated 1.5 million people to postpone marriage. For some couples postponing marriage meant never marrying. Schoolteacher Elsa Ponselle explained: "Do you realize how many people in my generation are not married? It wasn't that we didn't have a chance. I was going with someone when the Depression hit. We probably would have gotten married. He was a commercial artist and had been doing very well … Suddenly he was laid off. It hit him like a ton of bricks. And he just disappeared." Ponselle was typical of women in her age group: the number of women who never married is 30 percent higher among those who were aged twenty-five to thirty-five in 1935 as compared to women of the same age group five years earlier.

Long Engagements

More common than broken engagements were prolonged ones that frustrated young people and worried moralists. In a mock trial of "Society," staged by the Council of Social Agencies in 1935, one of the eighteen charges brought against society was "allowing conditions to exist under which young people are unable to marry due to a lack of employment." The mock jury of twelve adults held society guilty on six counts, one of which was negligence in creating the material conditions conducive to marriage.

Frustrated Couples

Some psychologists believed that postponing marriage was detrimental to the mental health of young people. Moralists feared a rise in premarital and extramarital sexual activity, and longer engagements did result in premarital sex. In 1937 the Roper Organization asked a representative sample of the American public if the government should give financial assistance to young couples to help them get married and establish homes. This proposal represented a startling departure from the deeply held view that government should not to intervene in private matters such as marriage, but more than 38 percent answered yes. Women supported the proposal more than men, and older women liked the idea most of all. This response reflected public discomfort with premarital sex; young marriage with financial dependence was preferable to sexual activity before marriage. Overall, prolonged rather than broken engagements typified the 1930s, and the marriage rate rose significantly by 1940.

Falling Birthrates

During the early years of the Depression the birth rate dropped sharply from 21.2 live births per 1,000 in 1930 to 18.4 by 1933. For the first time in U.S. history, the birthrate was below the level needed to replace the population. Couples deliberately put off having children or had fewer children than they wanted. Many explained, "I don't want to bring children into a world that has no use for them." Pregnancy was often viewed as unfortunate rather than joyful. The use of contraceptives increased and forced revisions in legal prohibitions against birth control. Illegal abortions also increased, as did the desertion of infants. As the economy improved, however, the birthrate began to rise.

THE DIONNE QUINTUPLETS

The focus of enormous public attention, the Dionne quintuplets were five girls born during one delivery to Elzire and Oliva Dionne, a farm couple with six other children in Corbell, Ontario, 28 May 1934. The multiple birth was so rare that Morris Fishbein of the American Medical Association reported that only thirty cases had been reported in the five hundred previous years; in none of those thirty, according to Fishbein, did all five children live longer than fifty minutes. The public was more than intrigued. Progress of the quints was eagerly reported by the press; their eating habits, spirits, and illnesses were scrutinized by the public; gifts of money, food, clothing, and toys poured in to the Dionnes. The government of Canada, viewing them as national treasures, made them wards of the state and built a new home and provided subsidies for them. The king of England gave Oliva Dionne a royal bounty of five pounds for her troubles. The grandfather of the family made a healthy profit on a souvenir stand set up on the farm. Elzire Dionne continued to farm. His daughters continued to garner public attention throughout the 1940s as they grew into healthy adulthood.

Source:

Cabell Phillips, From the Crash to the Blitz, 1929-1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

Family Interdependence

The Depression brought some families closer together, forcing them to pool resources and turn toward one another in what was called "intelligent independence." As a newspaper in Muncie, Indiana, put it, "many a family that has lost its car has found its soul." Everyone pitched in to get by. In those families where wives were not engaged full-time in stretching the household economy, they found part-time work to supplement the family income. Children took part-time jobs running errands, mowing lawns, baby-sitting, shining shoes, and selling newspapers. Rural families sent their teenage boys and girls out to work as migrant field hands, hoping they would return with their earnings. The 1930 census indicated that one-third of all American families had more than one wage earner, and a quarter had three or more earning income. The multigenerational extended family, long in decline, returned, as many elderly lost their means of financial independence and moved in with their children. Relatives in nearby communities often turned to one another for help. Fifty percent of working wives in Utah, and 40 percent in Cleveland, Ohio, helped support relatives living outside the home. For many, in fact, the Depression helped to renew a sense of family compromised by the materialism of the 1920s. With less money to spend on entertainment outside the home, families gathered around the radio in the evening or played cards, checkers, or the new board game Monopoly. Although such family closeness was an important source of psychological support, for many Americans it was too confining. Families forced to share a common home—a phenomenon known as "doubling up"—sometimes complained about lack of privacy, as did young people, who often chafed under close parental supervision. After World War II, when sound, cheap housing became available, the extended Depression family quickly fragmented, demonstrating that it was an arrangement of necessity as much as an expression of values.

Sources:

Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988);

Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992);

Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982).