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"Women consumers -- United States -- History -- 20th century"
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Stars, fans, and consumption in the 1950s : reading Photoplay
\"The fan magazine Photoplay pioneered the construction of both female stars as social types and fans as aspiring consumers in the first mass consumption society. In the 1950s, stars embodied a leisured California lifestyle based on goods. Addressing working- and lower middle-class readers, Photoplay published beauty tips, fashion layouts, sewing patterns, home decorating advice, recipes, and vacation guidelines so that fans could live like the stars. This book traces the changing social mores regarding female behavior and the new relationship between stars and fans. When the magazine adopted tabloid conventions to report sex scandals like the Debbie-Eddie-Liz affair in 1958, stars were demystified and fans became scandalmongers. The construction of female identity based on goods and performance in a consumer society resulted in multiple, fragmented, and unstable selves - a legacy evident in postmodern culture today\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Building a Housewife's Paradise
Supermarkets are a mundane feature in the landscape, but as Tracey Deutsch reveals, they represent a major transformation in the ways that Americans feed themselves. In her examination of the history of food distribution in the United States, Deutsch demonstrates the important roles that gender, business, class, and the state played in the evolution of American grocery stores.Deutsch's analysis reframes shopping as labor and embeds consumption in the structures of capitalism. The supermarket, that icon of postwar American life, emerged not from straightforward consumer demand for low prices, Deutsch argues, but through government regulations, women customers' demands, and retailers' concerns with financial success and control of the \"shop floor.\" From small neighborhood stores to huge corporate chains of supermarkets, Deutsch traces the charged story of the origins of contemporary food distribution, treating topics as varied as everyday food purchases, the sales tax, postwar celebrations and critiques of mass consumption, and 1960s and 1970s urban insurrections. Demonstrating connections between women's work and the history of capitalism, Deutsch locates the origins of supermarkets in the politics of twentieth-century consumption.
eBook
Food Is Love
Modern advertising has changed dramatically since the early twentieth century, but when it comes to food, Katherine Parkin writes, the message has remained consistent. Advertisers have historically promoted food in distinctly gendered terms, returning repeatedly to themes that associated shopping and cooking with women. Foremost among them was that, regardless of the actual work involved, women should serve food to demonstrate love for their families. In identifying shopping and cooking as an expression of love, ads helped to both establish and reinforce the belief that kitchen work was women's work, even as women's participation in the labor force dramatically increased. Alternately flattering her skills as a homemaker and preying on her insecurities, advertisers suggested that using their products would give a woman irresistible sexual allure, a happy marriage, and healthy children. Ads also promised that by buying and making the right foods, a woman could help her family achieve social status, maintain its racial or ethnic identity, and assimilate into the American mainstream.Advertisers clung tenaciously to this paradigm throughout great upheavals in the patterns of American work, diet, and gender roles. To discover why, Food Is Love draws on thousands of ads that appeared in the most popular magazines of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Ebony, and the Saturday Evening Post. The book also cites the records of one of the nation's preeminent advertising firms, as well as the motivational research advertisers utilized to reach their customers.
eBook
Making War, Making Women
Drawing on war propaganda, popular advertising, voluminous government records, and hundreds of letters and other accounts written by women in the 1940s, Melissa A. McEuen examines how extensively women's bodies and minds became \"battlegrounds\" in the U.S. fight for victory in World War II. Women were led to believe that the nation's success depended on their efforts-not just on factory floors, but at their dressing tables, bathroom sinks, and laundry rooms. They were to fill their arsenals with lipstick, nail polish, creams, and cleansers in their battles to meet the standards of ideal womanhood touted in magazines, newspapers, billboards, posters, pamphlets and in the rapidly expanding pinup genre. Scrutinized and sexualized in new ways, women understood that their faces, clothes, and comportment would indicate how seriously they took their responsibilities as citizens. McEuen also shows that the wartime rhetoric of freedom, democracy, and postwar opportunity coexisted uneasily with the realities of a racially stratified society. The context of war created and reinforced whiteness, and McEuen explores how African Americans grappled with whiteness as representing the true American identity. Using perspectives of cultural studies and feminist theory, Making War, Making Women offers a broad look at how women on the American home front grappled with a political culture that used their bodies in service of the war effort.
eBook
Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800-2015
This article proposes explanations for the transformation of American families over the past two centuries. I describe the impact on families of the rise of male wage labor beginning in the nineteenth century and the rise of female wage labor in the twentieth century. I then examine the effects of decline in wage labor opportunities for young men and women during the past four decades. I present new estimates of a precipitous decline in the relative income of young men and assess its implications for the decline for marriage. Finally, I discuss explanations for the deterioration of economic opportunity and speculate on the impact of technological change on the future of work and families.
Journal Article
Tactical Inclusion
The revolution in military recruitment advertising to people of
color and women played an essential role in making the US military
one of the most diverse institutions in the United States. Starting
at the dawn of the all-volunteer era, Jeremiah Favara illuminates
the challenges at the heart of military inclusion by analyzing
recruitment ads published in three commercial magazines: Sports
Illustrated , Cosmopolitan , and Ebony . Favara
draws on Black feminism, critical race theory, and queer of color
critique to reveal how the military and advertisers affected change
by deploying a set of strategies and practices called tactical
inclusion. As Favara shows, tactical inclusion used representations
of servicemembers in the new military to connect with people
susceptible to recruiting efforts and rendered these new audiences
vulnerable to, valuable to, and subject to state violence.
Compelling and eye-opening, Tactical Inclusion combines
original analysis with personal experience to chart advertising's
role in building the all-volunteer military.
eBook
Fabricating consumers
Since its early days of mass production in the 1850s, the sewing machine has been intricately connected with the global development of capitalism. Andrew Gordon traces the machine's remarkable journey into and throughout Japan, where it not only transformed manners of dress, but also helped change patterns of daily life, class structure, and the role of women. As he explores the selling, buying, and use of the sewing machine in the early to mid-twentieth century, Gordon finds that its history is a lens through which we can examine the modern transformation of daily life in Japan. Both as a tool of production and as an object of consumer desire, the sewing machine is entwined with the emergence and ascendance of the middle class, of the female consumer, and of the professional home manager as defining elements of Japanese modernity.
eBook
From Pink to Green
From the early 1980s, the U.S. environmental breast cancer movement has championed the goal of eradicating the disease by emphasizing the importance of reducing-even eliminating exposure to chemicals and toxins.From Pink to Greenchronicles the movement's disease prevention philosophy from the beginning.Challenging the broader cultural milieu of pink ribbon symbolism and breast cancer \"awareness\" campaigns, this movement has grown from a handful of community-based organizations into a national entity, shaping the cultural, political, and public health landscape. Much of the activists' everyday work revolves around describing how the so called \"cancer industry\" downplays possible environmental links to protect their political and economic interests and they demand that the public play a role in scientific, policy, and public health decision-making to build a new framework of breast cancer prevention.
From Pink to Greensuccessfully explores the intersection between breast cancer activism and the environmental health sciences, incorporating public and scientific debates as well as policy implications to public health and environmental agendas.
eBook
Food is love : food advertising and gender roles in modern America
\"An engaging look at how food advertisements from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have both helped define and played up to the stereotypical gender roles prevalent in American culture.\"-Library Journal
eBook