Life in the 1930s was very difficult. Electricity did not arrive in until the early 1930s. The rest of the towns and cities depended on paraffin lamps and candles for lighting their homes. The lamps were either hung from the ceiling, which gave more light, or used as table lamps that could be moved from room to room. Candles were used in the bedrooms but one had to be careful not to knock them over and to be sure to blow them out before going to sleep because of the fire risk. A range was standard equipment for heating and cooking in every home. The oven was on one side of the open fire and the boiler for water heating on the other. A steel rack hung over the top of the range so that the kettle could be hung over the fire from a pot-hook. The boiler took two buckets of water and someone to keep topping it up to prevent it drying out and cracking. You could toast your bread on a toasting fork in front of the fire.
The Wall Street crash and the depression that outspread in its stir saw an explosion of unemployment. The struggle of the unemployed became a major factor in the political and social like of the decade. This cause sent many people homeless and without jobs and work, numerous citizens had no choice but to live their lives on the street and moving from city to city trying to find an occupation. Between 1929 and 1933 the unemployment rate increased by over 17-20 percent. For the remainder of the decade, the unemployment rate stayed in the double digits. On the eve of America's entry into World War Two, between 9.5 and 14.6 percent of the labor force was out of work, depending on how unemployment is measured. In addition to high levels of unemployment, the 1930s witnessed the appearance of widespread and persistent long-term unemployment, which was more then one year, as a serious problem. According to a Massachusetts state census taken in 1934, fully 63 percent of unemployed persons had been unemployed for a year or more.