| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America. By Marina Moskowitz. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv, 300 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8018-7947-7.)

Refusing to recognize boundaries between social science and the novel, this innovative history rejects divisions between cultural and business history. Marina Moskowitz probes the "standard of living" as a liminal aspiration between production and consumption that defined the American "middle class" through the objects and spaces of the home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Against labor scholarship that associates living standards with the purchasing power of the wage, she recovers a model of the good life from "negotiations in the marketplace" between manufacturers, distributors, arbiters, advertisers, and purchasers (p. 18). Unpacking the meaning of environmental determinism, the belief that the "material world not only reflected the status of those who lived in it, but could in fact help shape that status" by generating "behavior and shared values appropriate to middle-class life" (ibid.), Moskowitz explores the making of communities that Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis, 1922) and Middletown (Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, 1929) "both captured and created" (p. 222) as surely as did marketers of household goods and planners of cities.

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