Product Description

This volume brings together the most innovative historical work on the conjoined themes of gender and consumption. In thirteen pioneering essays, some of the most important voices in the field consider how Western societies think about and use goods, how goods shape female, as well as male, identities, how labor in the family came to be divided between a male breadwinner and a female consumer, and how fashion and cosmetics shape women's notions of themselves and the society in which they live. Together these essays represent the state of the art in research and writing about the development of modern consumption practices, gender roles, and the sexual division of labor in both the United States and Europe.
Covering a period of two centuries, the essays range from Marie Antoinette's Paris to the burgeoning cosmetics culture of mid-century America. They deal with topics such as blue-collar workers' survival strategies in the interwar years, the anxieties of working-class consumers, and the efforts of the state to define women's--especially wives' and mothers'--consumer identity. Generously illustrated, this volume also includes extensive introductions and a comprehensive annotated bibliography. Drawing on social, economic, and art history as well as cultural studies, it provides a rich context for the current discourse around consumption, particularly in relation to feminist discussions of gender.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #354095 in Books
• Published on: 1996-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 443 pages

From the Inside Flap
"A rare pleasure. Rooting gender and consumption in the actions of people making their own history, these brilliant essays move from nineteenth-century pinups to the formation of gendered modernity. Once you've savored this volume, you'll never think of modern life in the same way again."--Temma Kaplan, author of Red City, Blue Period

From the Back Cover
"A rare pleasure. Rooting gender and consumption in the actions of people making their own history, these brilliant essays move from nineteenth-century pinups to the formation of gendered modernity. Once you've savored this volume, you'll never think of modern life in the same way again."-Temma Kaplan, author of Red City, Blue Period

About the Author
Victoria de Grazia is Professor of History and Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. She is the author of How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (California, 1992). Ellen Furlough is Associate Professor of History at Kenyon College and author of Consumer Cooperation in France (1991).

Customer Reviews

Gender and Consumption Historically Explained
In The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, the authors aim to analyze political demands through consumer history. Victoria de Grazia asks whether consumption a measure of economic well-being, a manner of constructing social hierarchies, or is it a way to relate to the body politic the desires of the people? Within these contexts, three themes are further examined, including the framework of European-American consumerism, the history of consumer culture, and the methodology of feminist analysis.
The purposes of these essays are to provide a historical context for the rise of consumer culture through the transition from the aristocratic to the bourgeois society. Rather than specifically detailing each essay's thesis, I will focus on the particular essays that involve a slightly more historical analysis rather than a critical, theoretical framework (although those are interesting as well).
Jennifer Jones' essay, "Coquettes and Grisettes: Women Buying and Selling in Ancien Regime Paris" tracks the "consumer revolution" between 1650 and 1789, following with a "commercial revolution." The initial transactional atmosphere during this period involved a male consumer and female merchant. This, she explains, was a broader, more public setting for a courtship ritual between the seller and buyer. As salons, cafes, promenading became leisurely pursuits, so did shopping, and it became a form of public life, resulting in more female buyers from all classes in the 1780s. According to Jones, the reasons for women being seduced by goods changed as a result of the Enlightenment: Biblical reasons like Eve seducing Adam were no longer acceptable, so inquiries into female psychology and their mental capacities through "scientific" explanations took hold (35). The female aesthetic sense and imagination became dominant reasons for their desires. These "scientifically-based" explanations were seen as acceptable and permissible, as long as the buying on the part of women were for suitors or husbands. Growing female merchants changed the courtship aspect, and it was replaced by a class system that emphasized the difference between female merchants and female consumers.
Women's work was also largely confined to the home in cottage industries during the late 19th Century. Soon, the transition from producer-based households to modern consumer households led to new democratic ideologies and problems. Anna R. Igra's "Male Providerhood and the Public Purse: Anti-Desertion Reform in the Progressive Era" reveals how the anti-desertion movement regulated man's use of wages to family and ideas of manhood. However, women were still obligated to be domestic to impede desertion. In the end, desertion implicated women as well as men.
To this de Grazia notes while families were seen as providers, it was under the State that passed laws on credit, property, retail, and defined public spending versus private spending (public spending being housing, health, education and pensions). One method to divert the attention of women from their domestic duties was the rise of department stores and commercial districts. Political commercialism fragmented centralized patriarchal systems, and individual ones. Performative politics led to collective politics. De Grazia has also, as previously mentioned, employed the feminist inquiry that combines politics with methodology. This leads us to the question, is consumption for women liberating or repressive?
In "Making Up, Making Over: Cosmetics, Consumer Culture and Women's Identity" by Kathy Peiss, the author of "Cheap Amusements" explains how earlier 20th Century female identity went from "essential, interior self to one formed in marking and coloring of the face." (330) and that commodities became the language that destabilized cultural hierarchies among women. Issues of Race and class were brought to the table by both the marketing of whiteness to African-Americans through products such as Madame C.J. Walker's hair straightener to "exotic" looks disbursed through film media, specifically Cleopatra.
De Grazia admits, as do other scholars of leisure, that there is no unified field of inquiry into consumer history. Ultimately, the book as a collection of essays examines how the consumption of an individual leads to the collective desires of families and communities, which ultimately help to define national character.