| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Standard of Living: The Measure of the Middle Class in Modern America. By Marina Moskowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xii plus 300 pp. $45.00).
In Standard of Living, Marina Moskowitz is not interested in the standard, economic-history definition of "standard of living"—that is, a calculation of how much money is required to live in a healthy, comfortable and "decent" manner. Rather, she wants to describe how the manufacturers, advertisers, sellers, and buyers of certain goods and services together created an understanding of proper middle-class life in the early twentieth century.	1
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, social scientists had popularized the economic concept of an accepted "standard of living"—a bundle of the minimum goods required for health and comfort—in order to assess industrial living conditions. These scientists wielded the standard of living as a tool to measure human comfort and happiness objectively against wages and prices. Moskowitz argues that, for most middle-class people in the 1910s and '20s, the standard of living was understood not as a measuring stick, but as an ideal to strive for. This ideal, she writes, was the product of a dialectic between producers and consumers. She stresses the fact that the "standard of living"—a decent, proper, healthy, and fiscally responsible lifestyle for families—was as much about cultural ideas and mental habits as it was about the specific goods and services that were used to attain that ideal. The makers of bathtubs sold both the tub and the desire to maintain personal cleanliness and health through the use of a bathtub. Buyers, sellers, and a large cast of other parties, such as city planners and hotel managers, together constructed the ideal "standard" to which decent middle-class people could aspire. As Moskowitz writes, "[T]he commercial process of distribution paralleled the cultural process of establishing a standard of living. Neither producers nor consumers alone could create the standard of living; it was a by-product of the marketplace itself." (pp2–3).	. . .

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