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Gender and Consumption Historically Explained, December 8, 2001
This review is from: The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Paperback)
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.
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