This book focuses on middle-class urban women as participants in new forms of consumer culture. Within the special world of the department store, women found themselves challenged to resist the enticements of consumption. Many succumbed, buying both what they needed and what they desired, but also stealing what seemed so readily available. Pitted against these middle-class women were the management, detectives, and clerks of the department stores. Abelson argues that in the interest of concealing this darker side of consumerism, women of the middle class, but not those of the working class, were allowed to shoplift and plead incapacitating illness--kleptomania. The invention of kleptomania by psychiatrists and the adoption of this ideology of feminine weakness by retailers, newspapers, the general public, the accused women themselves, and even the courts reveals the way in which a gender analysis allowed proponents of consumer capitalism to mask its contradictions.

This book focuses on middle-class urban women as participants in new forms of consumer culture. Within the special world of the department store, women found themselves challenged to resist the enticements of consumption. Many succumbed, buying both what they needed and what they desired, but also stealing what seemed so readily available. Pitted against these middle-class women were the management, detectives, and clerks of the department stores. Abelson argues that in the interest of concealing this darker side of consumerism, women of the middle class, but not those of the working class, were allowed to shoplift and plead incapacitating illness--kleptomania. The invention of kleptomania by psychiatrists and the adoption of this ideology of feminine weakness by retailers, newspapers, the general public, the accused women themselves, and even the courts reveals the way in which a gender analysis allowed proponents of consumer capitalism to mask its contradictions.

This reader offers an essential selection of the best work on the Consumer Society. It brings together in an engaging, surprising, and thought provoking way, a diverse range of topics and theoretical perspectives.

There they competed for grades and honor directly against male classmates. Before and after school they joined a public world beyond adult supervision - strolling city streets, flagging down male friends, visiting soda foundations." "Over the long term, their school experiences as "girls" foreshadowed both the turn-of-the-century emergence of the independent "New Women" and the birth of adolescence itself."--BOOK JACKET.

Argues that the two popular women's magazines were pivotal in the combining of gender and commercialism at the turn of the century, and that publishers and advertisers conspired to create both a gendered commercial discourse and a commercial gender discourse for both men and women. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

How women in turn-of-the-century Chicago used their consumer power to challenge male domination of public spaces and stake their own claim to downtown. Popular culture assumes that women are born to shop and that cities welcome their trade. But for a long time America’s downtowns were hardly welcoming to women. Emily Remus turns to Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century to chronicle a largely unheralded revolution in women’s rights that took place not at the ballot box but in the streets and stores of the business district. After the city’s Great Fire, Chicago’s downtown rose like a phoenix to become a center of urban capitalism. Moneyed women explored the newly built department stores, theaters, and restaurants that invited their patronage and encouraged them to indulge their fancies. Yet their presence and purchasing power were not universally appreciated. City officials, clergymen, and influential industrialists condemned these women’s conspicuous new habits as they took their place on crowded streets in a business district once dominated by men. A Shoppers’ Paradise reveals crucial points of conflict as consuming women accessed the city center: the nature of urban commerce, the place of women, the morality of consumer pleasure. The social, economic, and legal clashes that ensued, and their outcome, reshaped the downtown environment for everyone and established women’s new rights to consumption, mobility, and freedom.

Chronicles the use of cosmetics by women, describing the way their motivations have changed over history and how the concept of beauty has been redefined.

Taking cultural theorist Michel de Certeau's notion of 'the everyday' as a critical starting point, this book considers how fashion shapes and is shaped by everyday life. Looking historically for the imprint of fashion within everyday routines such as going to work or shopping, or in leisure activities like dancing, the book identifies the 'fashion system of the ordinary', in which clothing has a distinct role in the making of self and identity. Exploring the period from 1890 to 2010, the study is located in London and New York, cities that emerged as as socially, ethnically and culturally diverse, as well as increasingly fashionable. The book re-focuses fashion discourse away from well-trodden, power-laden dynamics, towards a re-evaluation of time, memory, and above all history, and their relationship to fashion and everyday life. The importance of place and space - and issues of gender, race and social class - provides the broader framework, revealing fashion as both routine and exceptional, and as an increasingly significant part of urban life. By focusing on key themes such as clothing the city, what is worn on the streets, the imagining and performing of multiple identities by dressing up and down, going out, and showing off, Fashion and Everyday Life makes a unique contribution to the literature of fashion studies, fashion history, cultural studies, and beyond.

CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE AWARD WINNER 2018 It is commonly accepted that the consumer is now centre stage in modern Britain, rather than the worker or producer. Consumer choice is widely regarded as the major source of self-definition and identity rather than productive activity. Politicians vie with each other to fashion their appeal to 'citizen-consumers'. When and how did these profound changes occur? Which historical alternatives were pushed to the margins in the process? In what ways did the everyday consumer practices and forms of consumer organising adopted by both middle and working-class men and women shape the outcomes? This study of the making of consumer culture in Britain since 1800 explores these questions, introduces students to major debates and cuts a distinctive path through this vibrant field. It suggests that the consumer culture that emerged during this period was shaped as much by political relationships as it was by economic and social factors.

In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character articulates the fascination goods, technology, and modernity held for many Latin Americans in the early twentieth century when he declares that “incredible things are happening in this world.” The modernity he marvels over is the new availability of cheap and useful goods. Steven Bunker’s study shows how goods and consumption embodied modernity in the time of Porfirio Díaz, how they provided proof to Mexicans that “incredible things are happening in this world.” In urban areas, and especially Mexico City, being a consumer increasingly defined what it meant to be Mexican. In an effort to reconstruct everyday life in Porfirian Mexico, Bunker surveys the institutions and discourses of consumption and explores how individuals and groups used the goods, practices, and spaces of urban consumer culture to construct meaning and identities in the rapidly evolving social and physical landscape of the capital city and beyond. Through case studies of tobacco marketing, department stores, advertising, shoplifting, and a famous jewelry robbery and homicide, he provides a colorful walking tour of daily life in Porfirian Mexico City. Emphasizing the widespread participation in this consumer culture, Bunker’s work overturns conventional wisdom that only the middle and upper classes participated in this culture.