| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 40.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

A Nation of Realtors®nosp: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. By Jeffrey M. Hornstein (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 264 pp. Cloth $79.95, Paperback $22.95).
I cursed Jeffrey M. Hornstein as I poked aimlessly around the keyboard looking for the ® sign. ®nosp, however, is central to this important new contribution to a growing literature on the history of professionalization, gender, social geography, and the middle class. In a well-written and meticulously researched account of how the occupation of selling homes became realtors®nosp, Hornstein connects the study of a profession to the rise of the American ideology of home-ownership as a marker of social well-being and success in the first half of the twentieth century. In a final, important chapter, Hornstein traces how a profession that had developed its collective identity as a respectable male occupation became a site of women's employment.	1
Over the past decade, there have appeared a wide range of studies, ranging from the medical profession to social work, that have examined the process of professionalization as an articulation of a middle-class identity and as a strategic deployment of ideologies of science. This articulation of expert knowledge helped centralize access to the jobs within the profession. A Nation of Realtors® may not challenge this argument, but it does add an important element to the historiography. After all, no other occupation managed not only to invent the name of the profession, but also to trademark it. Through the professional imagination of brokers, the word "realtor"—first appearing in the dictionary in 1917—moved from a brand name for someone selling real estate who was a member of the local branch of the National Association of Real Estate Boards to a generic term. The defining and defending the term "realtor" provides an important window into the process of professional association.	. . .

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