| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lawrence B. Glickman. A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 220.

Historians have shown increasing interest in the relationship between class and consumption of late. That interest has fueled one of the most significant developments in recent American labor historiography and led to important, insightful, and provocative studies. Lawrence B. Glickman's book is bound to occupy a position in the front ranks of this literature for some time to come. This ambitious and sophisticated volume advances arguments that no student of consumption history can safely ignore. 1

Glickman's book is organized in four parts. Part one examines the initial resistance of nineteenth-century workers to the notion of wage labor. Reinforcing the conclusions of other scholars, Glickman reminds readers that, for most of the century, workers had aspired to become independent producers. They believed that a lifetime spent working for wages was nothing more than wage slavery. This belief was gendered, according to Glickman, and was inscribed in "prostitution narratives" that drew explicit connections between the "wages of sin and the sin of wages" (p. 38). Because male wage slaves were too poorly paid to provide adequate sustenance for women, women were driven into even more poorly paid work that in turn left them vulnerable to the temptation of prostitution, these narratives held. . . .

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