A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society.

By Lawrence B. Glickman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. 220 pp., $35 cloth.

Readers interested in the growing contemporary movement toward living wage campaigns will open Lawrence B. Glickman's book with great anticipation. While they will be disappointed that his narrative stops in the 1930s, they will be rewarded with a rich discussion of the history of the notion of a living wage from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century through the New Deal. Glickman traces the origins of the living wage as an alternative to the previously predominant concept of wage slavery. He follows the shifting terrain that moves from resistance to the wage system to efforts …