Gender and Consumption

Domestic Cultures and the Commercialisation of Everyday Life

Lydia Martens, Emma Casey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317130772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing upon anthropological, sociological and historical perspectives, this volume provides a unique insight into women's domestic consumption. The contributors argue that domestic consumption represents an important lens through which to examine the everyday production and reproduction of socio-economic relations. Through a variety of case studies (such as gambling, wedding day consumption and bedroom décor), the essays explore and reconsider the nature of public and private spaces, and the subsequent nature of domestic space - often by challenging traditional notions of what constitutes 'the domestic'. The volume demonstrates the broad range of experiences that domestic consumption offers women and reveals some of the complex meanings and motivations underpinning women's consumption practices.

PART 1
The Commercialisation of Domestic Life in Historical Perspective

Chapter 1

Class, Gender and Domestic Consumption in Britain 1920-1950

Judy Giles

Introduction

So long as the main activities of the bread-winner and the main expenditure of his money was outside the home, his wife was primarily his housekeeper. If the home has now become his centre of activity, and if most of his earnings are spent on his home or in his home, his wife becomes the chooser and the spender, and gains a new status and control – her taste forms his life. (Abrams 1959: 915)

Mark Abrams was not alone in identifying what many, by the 1950s, perceived as an epochal shift towards an increasingly privatised everyday life, marked out by the spatial landscape of the individualised ‘home’, and the social relations and sexual politics of the nuclear family (de Grazia, V (with E. Furlough) (ed.) 1996). This shift to the privatized home was closely linked to the establishment of the modern consumer household, defined as ‘one dependent on market exchange for most of its supplies and services’ (de Grazia 1996: 152). This re-formulated version of domesticity was the product of multiple and overlapping phenomena that included the emergence of a social welfare agenda focused on a particular form of family; suburbanisation; the decline in residential domestic service; debates about what constituted masculinity and femininity; the move to a more child-oriented approach to childrearing; increased affluence for some; and a growing culture of consumption that included the cinema, magazines, books, housing, domestic commodities, furnishings, clothing and beauty items (Johnson and Lloyd 2004; Giles 2004; de Grazia 1996). This chapter is about the last of these and examines some of the ways in which the practices and understandings of domesticity were shaped by the dynamics of consumption in the first half of the twentieth century. The consumer transformations that took place required specific markets and these markets were constructed along gender lines. At the same time, the search for new markets and distinct consumer groups produced and offered particular forms of gender identity. This chapter examines the social lives and identities of women in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of consumption with particular reference to retailing and women’s magazines.

Cultural theorists and social scientists, generally speaking, no longer see consumers as passive victims of capitalism (although the discourse of environmental politics continues to argue about the corrupting effects of excessive consumption by industrialised societies). Instead consumption has been treated as an activity in its own right with its own practices and its own symbolic and representational systems (Bourdieu 1984). Studies of the everyday use of consumer artefacts have explored ‘the pleasures of consumption’ and argue that in the appropriation of such products by marginalised groups, it is possible to discern, if not a radical or revolutionary politics, at least some resistance to traditional structures (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979). John Fiske’s influential work centres on the creativity of consumption, arguing that this creativity has empowering and subversive possibilities (Fiske l989a, 1989b). Whilst Fiske has been criticised for a naïve optimism regarding the political potential of consumer behaviours, his work, along with that of feminist scholars and subcultural theorists draws attention to the importance of everyday practices and popular culture as expressions of, often complex, social relationships (Wilson 1985; McRobbie 1989; McGuigan 1992; Nava 1992). In particular these studies have fostered approaches that address not only the gendered nature of consumption but also the relations between class and consumption.

The purpose of rehearsing these debates briefly is to identify three issues that arise from them. First, Frank Mort identifies a difficulty with the generalising narratives common to almost all of the perspectives and argues for an approach to consumption that is ‘precise and grounded’ (Mort 1996: 7). This is particularly important when dealing with women and historical change. Attempts to track the growth of modern consumerism or to define the meaning of consumer society can lead to a ‘tendency to over-abstraction’ (ibid.). What is required is an approach that recognises the differentiated nature of consumption practices: differentiated in terms of variables such as gender, class, locality, and age but also differentiated in terms of distinct groups targeted by advertisers and manufacturers. Moreover, as Mort points out, ‘there is strong evidence to suggest that consumers themselves do not view their activities in the marketplace as wholly isolated’ (ibid.: 8). I explore one particular aspect of consumer culture in the period – the creation of a distinct market aimed at married women with homes to run – and ask how this related to the everyday lives of such women.

Secondly the ‘mass culture’ perspective that saw consumption as a frivolous, passive, corrupting activity had gender implications. Passivity and frivolity are congruent with the qualities culturally attributed to femininity. As Rita Felski points out the conventional linking of femininity and consumption has led to certain narratives of modernity in which ‘the idea of the modern becomes aligned with a pessimistic vision of an unpredictable yet curiously passive femininity seduced by the glittering phantasmagoria of an emerging consumer culture’ (Felski 1995: 62). Recent work by the feminist scholars, cited above, is concerned to dismantle the gendered oppositions produced by a dichotomised understanding of production and consumption. As Erica Carter observes, women ‘participate in the regulation and organization of market processes. The machine itself, if vast and apparently all-embracing, is never intrinsically monstrous; it is both manipulative and manipulated… Passive manipulation or active appropriation, escapist delusion or Utopian fantasy, consumerism can be all or none of these’ (Carter 1984/1993: 107). More recently, Victoria de Grazia argues that we should not only move on from this either/or formulation of the debates around the moral implications of consumer culture but our concerns, while remaining aware of these debates, should be differently focused (de Grazia 1996). Instead, de Grazia suggests, we need to concern ourselves with the historical construction of gender roles and the part that consumption, broadly defined, has played in this (de Grazia 1996: 7-8). In what follows, therefore, I am concerned to illuminate the interrelationships between consumption and women’s everyday lives in the formation of identities, rather than to assess the extent to which women were or were not empowered or manipulated.

Finally, one of the consequences of thinking about consumption and production as distinct and separate systems has been to privilege the world of work over the home, seeing production as taking place in the workplace and consumption as an activity that takes place in or is linked to the home. The domestic arena has been largely ignored in narratives of modernity or been understood as either a refuge from the demands of modern life or a stifling, outdated, mundane place from which to escape into a freer, modern world. The paradigmatic spaces of modernity have been those of the public sphere – the workplace and the city (Giles 2004).1 My starting point is that responses to ‘the modern’ are to be found not only in the public sphere such as the city but also in the private realm of the home. Such spaces are, of course, both material and imaginary, both actual and metaphoric, and it is, at least in part, through the activities of consumption that the real and the symbolic meet to give meaning to the experience of everyday life. In the first half of the twentieth century advertisers and manufacturers in a rapidly shifting industrial economy saw the home as an emergent market for new commodities. Married women were targeted as potential consumers and their job as housewives re-drawn. This chapter recognises, also, that consumption practices can embody class relations as surely as these are formed by the forces of production. As de Grazia observes, it is a fallacy to interpret consumer desires as solely individual choices made for the purposes of self-realisation or ‘therapeutic uplift’ (de Grazia 1996: 8). Choices may be shaped by the activities of the state in regulating spending or allocating resources, or by the norms and expectations of specific communities, and of course there will be those whose poverty prevents access to many forms of symbolic or cultural capital.

The material for this chapter draws on three distinct sources. First, I have used existing literature on the growth of suburbia, the decline of domestic service, the department store and shopping as well as a detailed research project on the Ideal Home Exhibition. This chapter is not intended to provide a detailed history of any one of these phenomena. Such stories can be found in the extensive literature to which I refer. Instead I use this literature to provide a context in which to explore the impact these factors had on the everyday lives of women. Secondly, I have looked at women’s magazines of the period and, while space prevents a full examination of all publications available at the time, I have drawn on a small, representative sample of what was being published.2 I have used both content and textual analysis in order to explore the ways in which these magazines, and the advertising on which they depended financially, produced specific versions of the housewife. Finally, I have drawn on oral testimony as such testimony offers the only working to lower middle-class ‘voices’ available.3 Whilst the values and attitudes expressed in such accounts are often highly subjective, and not amenable to systematic checking, the fact that the same or similar views have been expressed in numerous accounts, assembled at different times by this and different interviewers, suggests that credence can be given to such views.4 Rather than creating a seamless narrative from these sources I proceed by juxtaposition and dialogue. In the conclusion I suggest some possibilities that arise from this method.

Gender and ‘ideal homes’

The commodification of the home, not only in terms of furnishings and appliances but also in terms of style and taste, and its relation to gender positions in the family was well established by the beginning of the twentieth century. As Leora Auslander points out, ‘by [1890-1914], a model of domesticity, with the woman/ wife as consumer, was already becoming quite apparent in the developing genres of women’s magazines, etiquette books, marriage manuals and furnishings’ (1996: 84). The department stores that sprang up in all the major cities in North America and Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century were constructed as places that were welcoming and comfortable for, mainly, middle-class women. These ‘palaces of consumption’ re-defined the act of shopping as a worthwhile activity, and one that would be undertaken by women as part of the highly-skilled task of ‘homemaking’. However, at the same time women were invited to see themselves as irrational consumers, easily prone to profligacy and extravagance when confronted with the spectacular displays of commodities for sale (Felski 1995). Department stores offered, first, middle-class women, and later working and lower middle-class women opportunities to browse sumptuous displays of goods for the home and for self-fashioning. They also offered safe spaces on the city streets from which middle-class women had previously been excluded and where ‘respectable’ working-class women were fearful of being seen as prostitutes.

Mica Nava has insisted that department stores need to be ‘recognised as one of the main contexts in which women developed a new consciousness of the possibilities and entitlements that modern life was able to offer’ (Nava 1997: 64). While the experience they offered was undoubtedly orchestrated by men, as owners, managers and (in the early stages) shopwalkers, and while control over domestic expenditure was still in the hands of husbands, nevertheless the emergence of department and chain stores, first in large cities, but by the 1930s on the high streets of every town, enabled women of all classes to practise skills of financial management and aesthetic expertise as they compared prices, assessed quality, and made judgements about style. Store owners undoubtedly saw the potential for constructing a lucrative market by persuading women to spend lavishly on both their homes and their appearance. However, the impact on women of being able to ‘just look’ cannot be overestimated (Bowlby 1985). Conventionally the object of male (and sometimes middle-class) scrutiny and surveillance, ‘just looking’ enabled women to position themselves as both subject and object as they gazed upon displays of clothing and cosmetics that might enhance their femininity at the same time as weighing the cost of these against the cost of a labour-saving cleaner that could release time for such self-fashioning. These complex calculations were not simply financial: they involved active decisions about self-worth and identity. Equally, as Mica Nava has pointed out it was through their use of department stores that women acquired an ability to read the complex signifiers of social hierarchy and taste: a literacy that was later learned at the cinema (Nava 1997: 67; Stacey 1994). Shopping was not simply about realising dreams or an enjoyable leisure activity for the affluent. It involved work: the work of decoding and encoding new and complex signifiers that enabled women to acquire the cultural capital required to function as effective housewives. This information was in turn used to construct their own forms of knowing about complex social gradations. Signifiers such as houses and furnishings suggest hierarchical gradations within the class system but so do hairstyles and clothing. Such nuances were both read and produced by women in their roles as housewives and formed the basis of their everyday experience of complex social relations.

The expansion of retailing also produced new employment opportunities. Increasingly from the 1920s onwards, shop assistants were working-class women who chose retail work in preference to domestic service and who became ‘experts’ in helping women to make informed purchases. Deferential and astute, female shop assistants could, it was believed, ‘understand so much more readily what other women want. They can fathom the agony of despair as to the arrangement of colours, the alternative trimmings, the duration of a fashion and the depth of a woman’s purse’ (quoted in Aldburgham 1979: 179). These new employment opportunities brought lower-middle and working-class women into more public contact with their middle-class sisters. For most bourgeois women in the mid to late nineteenth century, contact with the ‘lower’ classes took place in the private home, carefully mediated by the rituals and forms of domestic service, or through the acceptable practice of philanthropy. Increasingly, as retailing was modernised, this contact also took place in a public, and less mediated, space. Shopping offered pleasures but it could also be a source of anxiety for middle-class women. It was arduous work that required careful budgeting and the newly-acquired fashion-sense and smartness of shop assistants could make it difficult to distinguish between the classes. Furthermore, shop assistants, who perhaps longed for the commodities they were employed to sell, might be rude or contemptuous, overtly deferential but covertly hostile. The relationship between shop assistant and consumer was less easily controlled than that between mistress and servant, and a sales assistant could strike terror in the heart of a middle-class woman, as she determinedly ‘ferreted out’ the private dreams of her customer and attempted to ‘seduce’ her into buying (quoted in Lury 1997: 131). Thus the class relations between women were, however slightly, beginning to be re-drawn. Retailing enabled working-class women to inhabit the same public spaces as their middle-class sisters and to do so as ‘experts’ in the complexities, both literal and symbolic, of consumption. By the 1950s this shift had been exacerbated by the war. June MacDonald, a middle-class housewife, recalls her awareness that, ‘everybody during the war was more or less equal … shop assistants were suddenly very powerful people because things were in short supply’ (quoted in Hinton 1994: 139).

The proliferation of, and encouragement to buy, commodities that would make an ‘ideal home’ have to be seen in the context of other changes taking p...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Commercialisation of Domestic Life in Historical Perspective
• Private/Public Dynamics in Gender and Consumption
• Gender and the Material Culture of the Domestic Sphere
• Index