Nobody's Burden

Reviews / Votes

Old people who are also poor are more or less forbidden to actualize any form of personal identity and are nonetheless punished for it, facing both casual and systematic discrimination. During the Great Depression, as today, many were arbitrarily denied adequate means of survival, even if family members or social workers came to their aid. Editors Ray (English, Wayne State Univ.) and Calasanti (sociology, Virginia Tech) have drawn on the archives of the Luella Hannan Memorial Home in Detroit, Michigan, to produce this narrowly focused but often-moving history. The contributors show how, between 1927 and 1933, the city's poor elderly banded together in support groups and endured years of humiliation and social stigma and how advocates spread awareness of their plight until it became one of the central political issues of the New Deal. The book traces dozens of intersecting story lines--many of them in first-person narratives, case notes, and letters--that together show how ageism in the US fails vulnerable people who seek only to eschew their own vulnerability. The parallels between their era and the contemporary world are uncanny and quite frightening. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. * CHOICE * As a gero-historian and grandchild of the Great Depression, who has experienced reversals of fortunes (economic and otherwise), I read Nobody's Burden with great admiration. Ruth Ray, Toni Calasanti, and their collaborators have mined archives to give us vivid history from the bottom up. They have recovered voices from the past which, richly informed by theory and narrative, should heighten our common resolve to fight sexism and ageism as we care for the needy. -- W. Andrew Achenbaum, University of Houston Located in a particular time and a particular place, this unique interdisciplinary study reaches out across the years and across the globe to illuminate and inform our understanding of who might care for, and about, old people in the twenty-first century. Couched firmly within a tradition of feminist gerontology, it is a riveting and evocative exploration of what it was like to live into old age during the Great Depression. Marrying detailed archival research with perspectives drawn from anthropology, English studies, communication, sociology, political science and social work, the editors and contributors paint a vivid picture which resonates all too often with current preoccupations: at times disconcertingly, at others poignantly. This 'living story' will speak to everyone concerned with the ethics of elder care, social justice and the need for policy reform. -- Miriam Bernard, Keele University