"Making Choices, Making Do is a remarkable study that recasts the 1930s working class through the lens of black and white women's experiences during the Great Depression. Analyzing how race, immigration, and gender shaped women's survival strategies, Helmbold opens up fresh interpretive possibilities and an intersectional, comparative, and feminist methodological approach to defining class."
~Keona Ervin, author of Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis
"Deeply researched in remarkably rich sources, this fine study takes us into the lives of working class women—their budgets, jobs, struggles, interactions with authorities, worries, and dreams. Full of insights regarding gender, immigration, and family, the book especially succeeds in its careful comparisons of women’s lives across the color line dividing African American and white women, capturing both common oppression and critical differences."
~David Roediger, author of The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History
"No one knows the social history of working-class women better than Lois Helmbold, and no one has written with more insight and sensitivity. By uncovering the everyday lives and struggles of working women, she manages to recast the story of the Depression-era labor upheavals in completely new light. Making Choices, Making Do ought to be required reading."
~Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
