I. Critiques Linking Consumption with Production

A. Industrial revolution, globalization have increased quantity of goods, lowered prices
B. American consumption of clothing

1. Clothing prices have been stable for decades, other consumer goods have risen in price:



2. Meanwhile, "Women's clothing store sales in the US increased by $4.6 billion between 2005 and 2014" (https://fungglobalretailtech.com/news/fashion-becoming-faster/).

C. American consumption depends on exploitation of producers

1. Low wages, long hours, poor conditions abroad
2. Domestic "outsourcing"

 

II. Consumption, Pleasure, and Cultural Distinctiveness

A. Self-expression, pleasure
B. Miller: Coca-cola in Trinidad
C. Consumption of mass-produced goods can promote heterogeneity

 

III. The Emergence of the Housewife as Domestic Consumer

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

G. 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)

H. Importance of domestic sphere
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.'" (33).

 

IV. 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

 

V. 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. Lay's potato chips ad
E. Control women's hunger, control women ==> feminine ideal of small physique
F. 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 associations used to justify women's low status

 

VI. The Housewife: Manipulated Dupe of Corporate Greed or Global Dictator?

A. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963): Women as dupes of corporate capitalism

1. Post-WWII ad industry tries to keep housewife at home by convincing her that domesticity is scientific management
2. Goal: housewife is content because "she feels less like an unskilled laborer, more like an engineer, an expert" (33)
3. Women control 75% of American purchasing power
4. "I suddenly saw American women as victims of that ghastly gift, that power at the point of purchase" (28)

B. Daniel Miller's view: "housewife as a global dictator"

1. Culturally and ideologically significant image of consumption power
2. Power of housewives is real and significant, but they have been rendered passive by cultural discourses, capitalist advertising

C. Both Friedan and Miller: purchasing power that women have has not been used to assert women's power
D. Should response be for women to reject housewifery (Friedan) or for society to recognize economic power of housewifery (Miller)?

 

VII. Feminist Rejection of Fashion

A. Fashion makes, treats, and constructs women as mindless sex objects
B. Susan Brownmiller (quoted in Wilson): "Why do I persist in not wearing skirts? Because I don't like this artificial gender distinction. Because I don't wish to start shaving my legs again. Because I don't want to return to the expense and aggravation of nylons. Because I will not reacquaint myself with the discomfort of feminine shoes.... Because the nature of feminine dressing is superficial in essence" (295).
C. Reject time consuming and uncomfortable clothes, hairstyles, and body treatments
D. "Natural", "authentic" look
E. Dilemmas arising from feminist perspective

1. Women themselves enjoyed fashion: Was this false consciousness? Wasn't feminism supposed to respect women's choices?
2. 1970s-1980s feminist "uniform" of jeans, overalls, chunky sweaters, and Indian printed skirts isn't any more "natural" than other clothes

F. Elizabeth Wilson: modernist feminism

1. Fashion as a game, use it to be what you want
2. "Madonna feminism"
3. Fashion as performance art