It was a time of economic turmoil in the United States between 1929 and 1939. In October 1929, the stock market crashed sending Wall Street into a panic and destroying millions of investors' chances. America's confidence slowly faded. In Alan Brinkley's book on culture and politics during the Great Depression, he describes how men looked for work day after day knowing there was no hope of finding it (8). This insecurity has caused shame and despair in families. Mark Wheeler describes how the recession caused severe inflation of the wealth and income of the consuming population (66). Once wealthy families now find themselves without money. Wheeler comments that after the crash, the economy remained “burdened by excess capacity and inadequate demand” (66). This forced factories to lay off workers, which led to a dramatic increase in unemployment rates and caused the economy to collapse. The Great Depression not only affected the economy but also affected the social aspects of the United States. Brinkley describes how gender roles began to change within the family (8). Because women's occupations (nurse and teacher, for example) were not "immediately vulnerable to recession" like men's, according to Brinkley (9) women often became the "primary breadwinner of the family" during the Depression. Although this was a positive outcome for women, men considered it shameful