The story, in brief, is one of resilience and coping, of boys and girls who, if they could not quite master fate, could meet it resourcefully. Their portrait is of course not entirely positive: their parents often suffered a great deal, from material want in household, some fathers' loss of status and authority, some mothers' forced assumption of domestic dominance; some children were thrust into early employment or household responsibility, and some developed mixed or negative images of their beleaguered parents. Yet they managed well on the whole, not least because in life as in politics and stagecraft, timing is everything. Elder notes that this age group were young enough not to undergo the stressed responsibilities of adults and old enough to have passed through critical early stages of development and to have assumed pre-adult awareness: "If one were to select an optimum age at which to pass through the Depression decade, it would not differ much from that of the Oakland sample."
As is so often the case in social research, this effort suffers from
limited evidence on a single population. It is exceedingly difficult to trace
out causal relationships, and the author's heroic analytical forays, although
couched in serviceable prose, occasionally mire the reader in thickets of
detailed argument. Yet the description is moving and significant. We are called
to explore "the implications of sacrifice and accomplishment in the biography of
Depression cohorts. This biography is unique in the sense that widespread
hardship, which enhanced the value of material goods and the desire for
children, was soon followed by an economic upswing that often turned these
values into reality. In one life span, A
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Contact: David Williamson
David_Williamson
919-962-8596
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
14-Jan-1999