Abstract

"Keepers of the Family Budget "

Joseph Moore, Kennesaw State University (jmoor450@kennesaw.edu)

In 1921, Home Economics writer Maurice Le Bosquet advised husbands to keep a separate account for their business and to “consider himself as working for “Self, Wife and Co.” Rather than commingling funds, the man should allocate a “salary monthly to a separate checking account” for the family. That account included the new Self-Accounting Check Books, which looked like complex account registers including categories for savings, food, clothing, housing, advancement, and luxuries.
Such divisions were unthinkable 100 years prior. Husbandry journals swapped ideas on best accounting practices for family farms great and small. Account ledgers and daybooks were on the well organized side and hastily thrown together list of bills, receipts, and discounted bills in a box were on the other. Nearly all of these assumed the unity of family and farm. As late as the 1920s, banks offered special “Farm Accounting Check Books” with registers that continued to blend family expenses with business ones.
The transition from chronologically backwards-focused farm accounting to forward-planning family budgets evolved in the housewife manuals Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Beecher in the nineteenth century through the Home Economics texts of Flora Rose and Martha Rensselaer. Debates over joint vs. separate account books for spouses, the optimal level of categorization, the slow shift from annual to monthly planning, and a diverse and shifting range of opinions on whose sphere this bookkeeping should be shaped American concepts of both the ideal budget and the ideal family.
For most families, the family accounts were less a means to wield power than a chore abhorred. Despite assurance from reformers that “Nothing draws a husband and wife closer together than a frank, business like operation about their finances,” by the 1920s only 1 in 4 families even attempted to follow a written budget.