Giving and Receiving Aid: Kin Networks in the Great Depression

Abstract

Richard Settersten Jr., Glen Elder Jr., and Lisa Pearce ’ s book Living on the Edge: An American Generation ’ s Journey Through the 20th Century is a comprehensive study with origins dating to the 1960s. The authors look at how a rapidly changing society influ-enced the lives of 210 middle-class and working-class couples who were members of the 1900 generation. The 1900 generation was defined as those born between 1885 and 1908 who had children born in 1928 – 1929 were included in the longitudinal Berkeley Guidance Study led by Jean Walker McFarlane. The Berkeley Guidance Study included detailed interviews from 1930 to 1947 with follow-up interviews through the 1980s. Settersten et al. were particularly interested in the generation ’ s adaptation to two world wars and the swings of great economic prosperity and depression, which make up much of the book. The authors cover a multitude of topics and in many ways, I almost wish this book was longer to cover the topics more in depth. The authors explore many facets of family life; migration, marriage and marital quality, childbearing, parenting, labor force participation and views on work, economic assistance from kin, and doubling up to name a few. Instead of covering every topic, my comments focus specifically on their chapters looking at kinship networks and economic assistance. The authors focus primarily on economic assistance between kin from 1929 to 1939 (when the bulk of their data was collected) and argue in favor of two models to describe kin economic assistance: a depression model and a life course model. The depression model is how most laypeople understand kin economic assistance. Kin helped in times of need, such as a loss of employment and poor health. A life course model alternatively describes assistance based on the age of individuals where younger individuals