Making Choices, Making Do: Survival Strategies of Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression

Making Choices, Making Do is a comparative study of Black and White working class women’s survival strategies during the Great Depression. Based primarily on analysis of employment histories and Depression-era interviews of 1,340 women in Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and South Bend, Lois Helmbold discovered that while going through the Depression, both Black and White women lost work fairly equally, but the benefits that White women accrued because of structural racism meant they avoided the utter destitution that more commonly swallowed their Black peers. For example, when let go from a job, a White woman was more successful in securing a less prestigious job, which allowed her continuous employment, while Black women, especially older Black women, were pushed out of the labor force entirely. Helmbold found other ways that Black and White working class women’s lives intertwined, sometimes positively, sometimes not. She found that overall, working class women were less racially segregated than men in their jobs. Making Choices, Making Do strives to fill the gap in the labor history of women, both Black and White, during the Depression. The book will challenge the limits of segregated histories and encourage more comparative analyses.