Research Catalog

The sex of things : gender and consumption in historical perspective

Title: The sex of things : gender and consumption in historical perspective / edited by Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough ; introductions by Victoria de Grazia.
Publication: Berkeley : University of California Press, ©1996.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Use in library	HF5415.32 .S49 1996	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Description

x, 433 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

For centuries, women have been caricatured as consummate shoppers, relegated to provisioning the household, and fetishized as objects of advertising. This wide-ranging volume of thirteen original essays illuminates the development of modern consumption practices, gender roles, and the sexual division of labor in both the United States and Europe. Drawing on social, economic, and art history as well as cultural studies, these essays consider commodities from bread and potatoes, cosmetics, home appliances, and the dandy's suit to social welfare handouts, movie melodramas, and pornographic picture cards. With extensive introductions and an annotated bibliography, this volume advances a new research field and the vital social and cultural issues at stake in its progress.

Subject

Genre/Form

History
Books.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

pt. 1. Changing consumption regimes: Introduction / Victoria de Grazia -- Coquettes and grisettes: women buying and selling in ancien régime Paris / Jennifer Jones -- The making of the self-made man: class, clothing, and English masculinity, 1688-1832 / David Kuchta -- The gendering of consumer practices in nineteenth-century France / Leora Auslander -- The other side of Venus: the visual economy of feminine display / Abigail Solomon-Godeau -- pt. 2. Establishing the modern consumer household: Introduction / Victoria de Grazia -- "A husband and his wife's dresses": consumer credit and the debtor family in England, 1864-1914 / Erika Rappaport -- Male providerhood and the public purse: anti-desertion reform in the progressive era / Anna R. Igra -- Living on the margin: working-class marriages and family survival strategies in the United States, 1919-1941 / Susan Porter Benson -- The technological revolution that never was: gender, class, and the diffusion of household appliances in interwar England / Sue Bowden and Avner Offer -- pt. 3. Empowering women as citizen-consumers: Introduction / Victoria de Grazia -- Food scarcity and the empowerment of the female consumer in World War I Berlin / Belinda Davis -- Making up, making over: cosmetics, consumer culture, and women's identity / Kathy Peiss -- Nationalizing women: the competition between fascist and commercial culture models in Mussolini's Italy / Victoria de Grazia -- Deviantpleasures?: women, melodrama, and consumer nationalism in West Germany / Erica Carter -- Soft sell: marketing rhetoric in feminist criticism / Rachel Bowlby -- Gender and consumption in historical perspective: a selected bibliography / Ellen Furlough.

ISBN

0520200349
9780520200340
0520201973
9780520201972
9780520916777
0520916778

LCCN

95037354

OCLC

ocm32924491
32924491
SCSB-2092149

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library