That’s the thing. It wasn’t worse for women prior to their emancipation than it was for 100,000 years prior to their emancipation. A woman in 1929 getting turned down for a job wouldn’t be the same as a woman from 2008 going back in time and thinking “this reallllly sucks.”
I’ll only provide anecdotal info from parents that experienced it and my own reading:
There have been a lot of good points made in earlier posts.
Yes, it was bad. Between 20 and 30% unemployment. My dad, at the age of 7, sold newspapers on the street to help feed the household.
Men who could not find a job would abandon their families or just ride the rails in order to try to find a job.
The crash occurred in '29 but the depths of the depression weren’t until '31 or '32. From about '30 to '36 the “Dustbowl” devastated agriculture in the Midwest. The severity of it darkened skies in the East.
There was no FDIC to secure the savings of bank deposits. If your bank failed you lost your savings or maybe you lost your job.
There was no Social Security, which, whether you like it or not, sustains a flow of cash through the economy and mitigates the effects of drastic shifts in the economy.
The people that lived through it have something to offer. I have very different political views than my father but some of the things I learned from him have allowed me to be positioned as well as possible against the current crisis. Unfortunately, the “Masters of the Universe” that created the current crisis never took a course in the Great Depression. Some truths don’t change.
My take on the lessons of the Great Depression: You must respect the environment. You must not borrow more than you can reasonably be sure you can repay in a downturn. No bubble expands without eventually bursting. Always beware of the greedy and inhibit their vice as much as you can (As my grandfather said, “every vice diminishes with age except for avarice”).
The Great Depression was bad. The current recession can be mitigated but the solution is in practical solutions, not in dogma.
Another anecdote:
My grandmother was functionally orphaned by the Depression. Her mother abandoned the family, and her father could not afford to support four girls, so he gave the youngest two to a Catholic orphanage. My grandmother and her younger sister were basically slaves for the nuns.
That’s true enough. The thing about the Great Depression, though, is that women weren’t only not hired for jobs; they were actually fired to be replaced by men. This was all happening at a time when women were getting a big idea - that maybe they could be something more than housewives, mothers and farmwives.
It was also the policy in most states that female teachers, or other public employees, who married were automatically fired. They had a man to support them was the logic.
It was so bad that many a new invention of those years didn’t come into general use till the '50s or later. I could mention several, but the most prominent, of course, was television. There was workable electronic technology by 1936 or so, just no way to make it pay given the tremendous initial build-out that had to take place. The British, whose BBC was nationalized, even had a growing TV program service until WW2 blacked it out.
It was so bad that the movies of the early 1930s seem much more foreign and awkward to us than those of just a few years later, and the popular music of that period has literally vanished into a cultural black hole. Both were casualties of an era no one much wanted to remember. We buried them and moved on.
Thanks once again for the responses; these are great stories. I just put in a request tomove this to IMHO, since it seems to have evolved in that direction.
Both sets of grandparents weathered the Depression quite well. My paternal grandfather, who was born in 1876 (he didn’t have my father until he was in his 50s), was co-owner with his brother of a successful hardware store in Hollywood. My maternal grandfather, who was quite a bit younger than the other one, was a county clerk in Arkansas, and at some point – this may have been during WWII, not sure – was a state employee in Little Rock.
Moved from GQ to IMHO at request of OP.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Also, the economic effects of the Great Depression were not the biggest worry for my late mother-in-law. She was a little girl in China at the time, and her family cut her hair short and disguised her as a little boy, to prevent her from being raped by the Japanese soldiers like all the other little girls.
Before the Great Depression, there was the Panic of 1907.
Geez, what IS it about Wall Street and October anyway?