Disrupting Historical Life-Course Studies: New Questions for a Generation of Life-Course Scholarship

was able to articulate this as women’s need for self-actualization. While the feminist movement as such is way outside the historical range of this study, Living on the Edge helps us realize why it, indeed, came out of the lives of the white middle-class and upper-middle-class women. It also enables us to understand why the movement never paid much attention to the lives of working-class women, especially women of color and immigrant women who had a more consistent attachment to work. In sum, Living on the Edge is a wonderful blend of sociology and history – a longitudinal study that shows us how white Americans experienced historical time and place: how two World Wars and the Great Depression deeply influenced their lives in California. There is much here that could guide a future longitudinal study of white and ethnic minority families in America as we traverse the 21st century.