scholarly journals Frank Albert Cotton. 9 April 1930 — 20 February 2007

2008 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 95-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm H. Chisholm ◽  
Lord Lewis of Newnham
Keyword(s):  
Mechanical Engineer ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Financial Resource ◽  
Office Work ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Family

F. Albert Cotton was born in west Philadelphia on 9 April 1930. He was named Frank Abbott Cotton by his parents in honour of thedoctor and friend of the family who delivered him. However, when he was not yet two years old his father, who was a mechanical engineer, died and guided by his mother he took his father's name, Albert. Although this was never legally recorded he became Frank Albert Cotton by common usage, or F. Albert Cotton, and to his friends he was Al. His family ancestry can be traced to England and Europe from whence his great grand parents had emigrated. His mother was only 32 years of age when his father died and, being widowed at the time of the great depression without a significant financial resource, she was placed in rather a predicament and forced to seek work. At first she did office work but thiswas not well paid and she discovered she could earn more as a waitress, and this she did for nearly the next 30 years.

Families, The Family, and the New Deal

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 341-350
Author(s):  
Robert Leighninger
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The New Deal ◽  
American Families ◽  
The Way

The New Deal, an outpouring of social policies formulated to combat the Great Depression, had enormous effects on American families. It also caused caseworkers to re-evaluate their roles in society. Using the lens of the journal The Family, this article will examine some of these self-reflections and briefly review the impact of New Deal policies on families. In general, caseworkers’ writings were focused more on the way policies were reshaping their profession than on trying to shape the policies themselves.

Emigrants, Travelers, and Escapers: the Haidutoff Family between Occident and Orient

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-184
Author(s):  
Georgeta Nazarska
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Local Population ◽  
The West ◽  
Professional Networks ◽  
Cultural Stereotypes ◽  
Labor Migrations ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
International Environment ◽  
The Family

The article examines the migrations of young Bulgarians abroad in the 1920-1930s, caused by the Great Depression and in particular the labor migrations of Bulgarian musicians in Egypt and the Near East and their cultural and social interactions with the Bulgarian diaspora there and with the local population. The focus of the study is the travels of the Haidutoff family – a musical trio that has made a living in Egypt for many years, and in the 1920s-1930s traveled and gave concerts in Argentina, France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia and Java island, then returned to Bulgaria and re-emigrated to Egypt. The text analyzes how their mobility is facilitated by blood-related networks, professional networks and interest networks, how it enables their nationalism to interact with the international environment, and how they perceive the West and the East (Orient) as traveling people through their own cultural stereotypes and social distances. The fate of the violinist Nedyalka Simeonova – the daughter-in-law in the family and a member of the musical trio – is traced in detail.

Unemployed Fathers in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
pp. 165-181
Author(s):  
Jürgen Martschukat
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
White Family ◽  
Family Structures ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Family ◽  
Wage Earning ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Middle Class Families

The ninth chapter puts its focus on the relations among gender, fatherhood, labor, and breadwinning. Based on interviews conducted by sociologist Mirra Komarovsky with unemployed white family fathers, their wives, and their children in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1930s, the chapter explores the impact of the Great Depression on white lower middle-class families and asks how the nuclear family ideal and its gendered and generational family structures depend on patterns and practices of wage earning and breadwinning. In particular, the chapter juxtaposes fathers’ attitudes toward their unemployment and the Great Depression to statements made by their family members on the fathers’ unemployment and the new division of roles in the family. Here the chapter reveals that what was experienced as a severe and depressing crisis by most husbands obviously had the potential to open up opportunities for their wives, as power relations changed and the tables were turned.

Spending Our Capital

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Ehrenfeld
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
York City ◽  
The Other ◽  
Earned Income ◽  
Annual Crops ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Hunting And Gathering ◽  
The Family ◽  
Almost All

A deeply felt aversion to spending accumulated capital is an ancient part of the heritage of most societies. Although my father was a doctor, not a businessman, he taught this to me. He had lived through the bankruptcy of his own parents during the Great Depression, watching as they gradually sacrificed the inventory of their store in Passaic to keep the family in food and clothing. On one side of this store, my grandfather sold records, phonographs, and sewing machines and repaired the appliances that he sold; on the other side, my grandmother, a brilliant dress de-signer, prepared bridal gowns for customers who came from as far away as New York City. She would dress the brides on the wedding day, too, and was celebrated for her ability to make the plainest bride look beautiful. But as the depression wore on, business fell off, the customers stopped coming from New York, and the stock of goods dwindled away. There was no choice but to close the store; my grandparents’ livelihood was gone forever. Later, my father and the oldest of his four brothers made it a priority to pay their parents’ creditors in full, a decision that entailed sacrifices in itself. The lesson was handed down to me: you can spend your earned income and any interest you may have received, providing you first set aside a portion to increase your savings; but never spend the principal, your capital, except as an act of final desperation. To most of us, capital is associated with business, yet the habit of pre-serving capital and handing it on to the next generation started, I am pretty sure, not as an economic or financial practice, but as an agricultural one. In Neolithic societies, it must have begun when farming replaced hunting and gathering as the main source of food. From Anatolia to North Africa to Peru, the staple grains of wheat, rice, corn, millet, oats, barley, and rye, the legumes such as peas and beans, and other vegetables from squashes to radishes, were almost all annual crops.

Women’s Work and Economic Crisis Revisited

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Milkman
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Great Recession ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Economic Downturns ◽  
The Family ◽  
The 2008 Financial Crisis ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter compares the gender dynamics of the Great Depression of the 1930s with those of the Great Recession associated with the 2008 financial crisis. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between gender and unemployment, and between gender and family dynamics during the economic crises. It then examines the family wage and married women's employment in the 1930s as well as inequality among women during the Great Recession. Despite the many changes in gender relations that unfolded in the intervening decades, the chapter shows that the structural effects of the two economic downturns were similar. In both cases, female unemployment increased less, and later, than male unemployment, and birth, marriage, and divorce rates declined as well. The Great Depression spurred a political transformation that led to a sharp reduction in economic inequality, accompanied by a dramatic upsurge in union organizing. Neither of these developments took place after the 2008 crisis. Instead, inequalities between the haves and have-nots have continued to widen, and especially class inequality among women.

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