Inside the Book

Chapter 2 charts the diverse paths of the 1900 generation to California, situating them within the larger history of migration. Changing residence is seen as a way to better one’s chances, and in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, America was viewed around the world as a land of extraordinary opportunity, especially the far west and California. The chapter reveals important differences based on birthplace, history, and descent, which set in motion the way their lives unfold as they make their way into adulthood and then come together as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers.

At the close of World War I, the Berkeley men were completing education, establishing careers, and starting families. The older men, who were born before 1900, had advanced further in career and earnings than the younger cohort born at the start of the twentieth century – a difference that would have notable consequences for their experiences in the Great Depression. Chapter 3 examines how family origin and education mattered in men’s socioeconomic careers and compares the 1929 income, savings, and investments of middle-class and working-class men in these two cohorts. The deprivation of men at the bottom of the class structure is an important and neglected side of life in the prosperous 1920s.

Chapter 4 examines the education, employment, and family formation experiences that characterized the transition to adulthood for women in Berkeley’s 1900 generation. Their life journeys are marked by somewhat surprising levels of educational and career achievement before getting married and settling into wife and mother roles. These women negotiated new options and made complicated choices in the face of strong gendered social norms. They established meaningful identities through the pursuit of education, emotionally and materially rewarding marriages, civic involvements, and sometimes careers. 

Chapter 5 exposes the interior of married life for men and women of the 1900 generation on the eve of the Great Depression. Couples shouldered heavy burdens related to rising expectations for spousal closeness and conspicuous consumption, and amid the greater daily distance between men in their workplaces and women in the homes they were expected to manage. This chapter reveals the inner qualities of these marriages from both spouses’ perspectives, highlighting specific challenges and rewards in different types of marriages. 

Chapter 7 examines how families’ social standards shaped the meaning of Depression-decade economic loss in different social classes and strained the emotional health of men, women, and couples. One especially problematic response was an inflexible adherence to previous living standards despite a real need to lower those standards. This was particularly true of families in the lower middle class and for wives who worried about shame and rejection and feared the loss of social ties. This inflexibility often entailed marital quarreling and blame for reduced earnings and expenditures. In terms of emotional health, men were more often the casualties of this hardship than their wives.

Chapter 9 views two forms of kin assistance across the Depression decade: the general giving and receiving of material aid, and pooling or saving resources through shared living quarters. Four out of five helped or were helped by relatives at some point. One of the most striking features is that later in the decade many of the assisted families were also providing support. In three out of four families, these contributions consisted of giving a parent or child a place to live. This assistance enabled many families to avoid the humiliation of applying for public welfare.

Chapter 10 views the Berkeley families adapting to life in an era of prosperity after a decade of doing without. What happened to them had much to do with war mobilization within the San Francisco Bay region and California. The families faced community change and adaptation in the presence of danger, massive population growth, an influx of strangers, and the excitement of living in a region mobilized for war. They also experienced the costs and benefits of men’s accelerated wartime work and higher wages, youths’ participation in the war effort, the misconduct of unsupervised adolescents, and the crisis of finding child care for working mothers.

Chapter 11 contextualizes the work experiences of the 1900 generation women during World War II within their broader life course. Unique longitudinal quantitative and qualitative data reveal that, for this generation of women, work in World War II was a continuation of occupational pathways launched earlier in life. Patriotism was undoubtedly a motivator for work, but these women’s accounts and behaviors show that work in this era was also related to the availability of material, social, and personal resources and rewards.

Chapter 12 examines the Berkeley 1900 generation’s perspectives on how their parenting differed from their parents, how their youth differed from their children’s, the virtues and faults of modern men and women, and their aspirations for their sons and daughters. The growing arsenal of parenting information altered their views of children and approaches to parenting, but it also brought new worries and even feelings of incompetence. This generation of parents also wrestled with gendered expectations for themselves and their children, emphasizing the need to address opportunities for women, equality in marriage, and the problems of men, masculinity, and power in society and social relationships. These observations provide a powerful lens for understanding historical change from generation to generation.

From their vantage point in the 1920s, the 1900 generation could not have imagined the future before them, lives that would turn out to be anything but customary journeys with familiar signposts. Chapter 13 asks how the Berkeley men and women fared in health and well-being along the path to old age, shaped as it was by their history and, from their vantage point in old age, their most and least satisfying years. Although the lives of the 1900 generation exhibit major departures from generations before them, they are also a “hinge” generation between past and present. Every American generation since has experienced rapid social change that leaves its members unsettled, standing as they are on the edge of change.

Appendix A contains supplemental tables and figures to support various chapters of the book.

The Berkeley Guidance Study represents a pioneer of its time in both design and data collection. Under the direction of Jean Macfarlane, this longitudinal and intergenerational study was launched in 1928-29 with a cohort of 244 study members born during those years and their parents. Roughly matched subgroups of parents on socioeconomic status and of study children were compared on staff guidance. During the pre-adult years, the more intensive subgroup of parents participated in open-ended interviews that were rigorously coded for a wide range of statuses and functioning in economic, psychological, social and other domains. Data collection on the parents continued into their later years. Appendix B provides an overview of the sample, data sources, and methods at the foundation of the book.

Appendix C describes the decades of research that ultimately culminate in Living on the Edge, which traces the journey of the Berkeley 1900 generation across the twentieth century. The project’s story spans more than half a century, from Elder’s appointment at the Berkeley Institute of Human Development in 1962, to his discovery of the files at the Institute during a sabbatical in 1972-3, which led to a book outline and some chapter drafts based on studies of the legacies of the Great Depression and World War II on families and their children. This provided the foundation for the collaboration with Settersten and Pearce over the last decade.