Sarah Damaske - The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America

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MY FIRST semester of college was my introduction to Dorothea Langes photographs of the unemployed and their families during the Great Depression. In many ways, I could not have been further removed from the people in her photographs, sitting, as I was, in a small class of twenty students in an old stone building on a picturesque campus set on top of a hill. In this class, an introduction to the liberal arts, we listened to Mozart, read about Lincoln at Gettysburg, considered philosophical debates about knowledge, and examined a book of Dorothea Langes photographs. The contrast felt stark to me as we sat in those elite halls, where I did not feel quite at home, examining her portraits of people living in poverty nearly a century before.

Lange is probably best known for a portrait called Migrant Mother that appeared in the book. In Langes time, migrant referred to someone who had moved across the United States to find work and earn money; it was not an immigrant from another country, as we might think today. A woman with furrowed brow, lines etched into the corners around her mouth and eyes, has one hand cupping her face, as if she were about to rest her chin on it; her eyes look bleakly out into the distance. She has a baby in her arms and a child on either side, snuggled into her. We cannot see their faces, only the dirt and grime that cover their clothes. Langes notes on the photographs of the mother and her children explain that the family is destitute and living in a squatters camp, having sold their car tires to pay for food that morning.

Lange understood the power of her photographs. She wanted her work to effect change, particularly after her marriage to social scientist Paul Taylor, who shared her passion for documenting American society and for bringing attention to those without a voice. I did not need to read about their shared commitment to social change in the historical essays to have known this as her truth; it is vividly evident in her work.

Other photographs moved me. The picture of the men lined up at the White Angel Breadline in San Francisco, tightly crowded next to one another, waiting for someone to dole out the desperately needed food. Yet one man had turned away, his hat falling forward to cover his eyes and his hands clasped, perhaps in prayer, as he leaned against a wooden fence. The photograph, A Sign of the Times, depicts a womans legs below the knees with tired-looking shoes and nylons worn beyond repair. The nylons have tears that have been mended, but they also have newer rips that have not been fixed.

I yearned to better understand the experiences of precarity faced by so many not so long ago. I was also moved by Langes call for social justice. Her call has guided my research interests in college, graduate school, and today. After I graduated, I set the book aside while I moved to first Boston, then New York, then Houston, then central Pennsylvania, working for a time and then earning first my masters, then my doctorate, and holding first a postdoctoral fellowship and then finally a position on the faculty at Penn State. Yet Langes images always stayed with me. And I still have the book, nearly twenty-five years after I first sat with it in that class in a college on a hill.

When writing my first book, For the Family? How Class and Gender Shape Womens Work, I discovered a pattern of womens employment that had previously been ignoreda pattern that involved womens repeated experience of unemploymentand I knew it was time to rediscover Langes photographs. After that books publication, I began the research that would comprise this one, and I examined the photograph of the Migrant Mother again. This time, I saw that picture with new eyes, wondering who the mother was, who all of the unemployed were, what had brought them to that place, and what happened next. While I could not ask those questions of Langes subjects, I could ask them of the people I set out to meet for this project.

By the time this book is published, I will have spent nearly ten years researching and writing on this topic, in addition to the time I spent studying unemployed women for my first book. I have done so almost a century after Lange started her photographic career and about eighty years after her Farm Security Administration photographs were completed. In the passing years, a lot has changed about unemployment. Yet Langes work still calls out to us from across time. She reminds us that we have an obligation to look and to see the unemployed and to take up her call to action.

THE TOLLS OF UNCERTAINTY