I. Images of Consumption

A. A novel
B. Fiske: T-shirts and bumper stickers
C. Print and electronic media ads
D. Household shopping habits

 

II. The Emergence of the Housewife as Domestic Consumer

A. Elizabethan consumption of the late 16th century: male extravagance, competition for status
B. Veblen (1899): women consume to express husbands' pecuniary status
C. In 300 years, consumption had gone from public and male to domestic and female
D. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (1987): emergence of middle class, private/public spheres in England, 1780-1850
E. Defining the middle class

1. 18-25% of the population
2. Earned 50 - 1000 pounds/year
3. Shared lifestyle traits

a. Houses
b. At least one servant
c. Wives didn't work outside home
d. Went to church
e. Men didn't go to pubs
f. Shared behavioral norms: clothing, entertainment, education, manners, and morality

F. Public/private spheres

1. Public sphere = workplace
2. Private sphere = home
3. Corresponding division of labor between men (public) and women (private)
4. Women subordinated to men, isolated from business, property accumulation, or professional activity (except teaching)

G. Religious justification

1. Evangelical Protestants criticized upper classes (idle) and lower classes (wanton)
2. Gender differences stem from Bible
3. Women = passive, weak dependents; men = honorable providers

H. Importance of domestic sphere

1. Nurturing, loving center of emotion and care
2. Source of women's de facto power and equivalence with men

a. Unitarian jewelry entrepreneur describing his wife in the 1830s: "We have lived together nearly thirty years -- have rejoiced and sorrowed together -- economised together -- reflected together -- sympathised together -- and we will speed hand in hand together to our final home. Equal in property -- equal in importance -- equal in good intentions -- equal in fidelity and affection -- equal in the estimation and favour of Heaven" (Davidoff and Hall 1987:18)
b. Man owned business, property, had legal rights
c. Woman was nameless
d. Women's private economizing and labor underwrote public success of men's family-run businesses
e. Women accepted their roles, but didn't get public credit for them

I. Contradiction in gender roles

1. Women seen to belong exclusively to private sphere
2. Women's activities crucial to men's success in public sphere
3. Men's success reproduces public/private logic
4. "That process of social reproduction depends on the family and women's labour, a form of labour which, however, is hidden by its categorization as private. And yet, the creation of the private sphere has been central to the elaboration of consumer demand, so essential to the expansion and accumulation process which characterizes modern societies" (Davidoff and Hall 1987:29)
5. "Public was not really public and private was not really private despite the potent imagery of 'separate spheres'. Both were ideological constructs with specific meaning which must be understood as products of a particular historical time" (33).

 

III. A Different View: Shopping as the Public Sphere

A. Davidoff and Hall: public/private as powerful idealized vision, not description of reality
B. Nava: shopping in Victorian era, late 19th, early 20th centuries
C. Women were supposedly absent from public life
D. "My argument will be that women were not excluded from the experience of modernity in the public sphere: that, on the contrary, they participated quite crucially in its formation" (Nava 1997:58)
E. Victorian era

1. Dominant ideology of private domesticity
2. Increasing openness of public spaces in cities to respectable women

a. Galleries, libraries, restaurants, hotels, and department stores: "public-private liminal spaces" (term from Zukin)
b. Philanthropy takes middle-class women to less respectable neighborhoods
c. Women's suffrage
d. Public and private transportation

F. Department stores

1. Enabled display of external appearances in anonymous, uncertain landscape of urban diversity, means to acquire cultural capital
2. Stores explicitly welcomed women in ads and services: supervised children's areas, toilets, hairdressing, ladies' clubs, banks, other services
3. Source of women's employment
4. "an anonymous yet acceptable public space and it opened up for women a range of new opportunities and pleasures -- for independence, fantasy, unsupervised social encounters, even transgression, as well as, at the same time, for rationality, expertise, and financial control. Shopping trips, sanctioned by domestic and financial obligations, justified, as did the philanthropic expeditions referred to earlier, relatively free movement around the city and travel on public transport in the proximity of strangers" (69-70)
5. Acceptable way for women to see and be seen
6. Contributed to rise of mass consumption and hence modern capitalism

G. Why have academics depicted women as confined to private sphere?

1. Bias against women led to mistaking ideology for reality
2. Victorian attitudes: shopping as necessary and dangerous

a. Men routinized at work, women's shopping as arena for freedom, self-expression
b. Too much freedom ==> wantonness, shoppers are "capricious and emotional, craving glamour and romance" (76)
c. Shoppers = passive pawns of advertising and material desire
d. Shoppers = emotionally hyperactive, lose control in frenzy of shopping and spending

3. Men's status anxiety reflected in scholarship

a. Erosion of authority of pater familias
b. Women have identity in public sphere of shopping

4. Men's political concerns

a. Destruction of WWI
b. Suffrage movement

H. Denigrating women's consumption denied women power

 

IV. The Power of Women's Desires

A. Susan Bordo, "Hunger as Ideology" (1993): contemporary version of Victorian discourses on feminine consumption
B. Gender, control, and mastery in food ads

1. Control as desirable
2. Control as difficult to achieve
3. Women as obsessed with desserts, want to give in to temptation
4. Gendered representations

a. Women give in to low calorie, acceptable foods
b. Men indulge appetites: Manwich, Hungry Man Dinners, or Manhandlers
c. Ads targeting women often show men consuming voraciously: Haagen Dazs

C. Bordo: women's desire is unseemly
D. Control women's hunger, control women ==> feminine ideal of small physique
E. Conclusion: 18th-20th centuries as mass delusion about gender roles

1. Women's consumption becomes increasingly important to women, families, class, urbanization, economic production
2. Consistent rhetorical and ideological movement to denigrate women for their consumption

a. Women praised for controlling consumption, economizing
b. Consumption used to justify women's low status