Getting By on the Minimum

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 15, 2002

For this Nickeled and Dimed line field report, Johns Hopkinds researcher Johnson spoke to 60 white, married, Baltimore-area mothers between the ages of 35 and 52 who work in settings ranging from convenience stores and customer service centers to hospitals and beauty parlors. In general, her working-class interviewees married young, never received adequate education or career guidance, struggled to raise their children and were striving for a second chance at finding more rewarding, lucrative work. Even as these women work toward goals such as GEDs or professional training, they continue to view what many would consider to be attainable careers, such as nursing or teaching, as beyond their reach. While Johnson provides plenty of statistics and cites a wide range of secondary sources, she wisely gives her interviewees ample space to tell their own stories, and their narratives inject the book with vivid realism. They discuss not only the challenges and rewards of working life but also such family issues as children struggling with substance abuse, aging parents grown mentally or physically ill and grandchildren in need of care and attention. As Johnson addresses the influence of their upbringings on these women's adult lives, the link between employment and their self-esteem, and related topics, she largely avoids editorializing and lets the facts speak for themselves, and her writing is compassionate without being heavy-handed. As a non first-person-based complement to Ehrenreich's book, this study could be recommended to anyone interested in class an gender.