AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE MAKING OF MODERN CONSUMER CULTURE

Kathy L. Peiss

Kathy Peiss is currently a Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts. She has written and lectured on American women's history and cultural history for fifteen years. Her first book, Cheap Amusements (1986), explored the social life of working women in turn-of-the-century New York, and a coedited anthology, Passion and Power (1989), surveyed the history of sexuality. Love Across the Color Line, on an interracial romance in Massachusetts in the early twentieth century, was published in 1996. Her new book, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 1998), examines the history of the mass-market beauty industry and the changing cultural meaning of cosmetics for American women. Peiss has consulted on documentary films and museum exhibits, including a Smithsonian Institution show on costume and gender, for which she coauthored the exhibition booklet. She has also been interviewed on the history of cosmetics and beauty by CNN, the Washington Post, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Allure, Out, and other publications.

Peiss received her B.A. from Carleton College in 1975 and completed her doctorate at Brown University in 1982. She has taught at Rutgers, Cornell, and the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she developed a Women's Studies program. She has been teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1986 and currently serves as Director of the History Graduate Program there. Among Peiss' many honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Smithsonian Institution, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.

The following lecture by Prof. Peiss was delivered at the University at Albany - State University of New York on March 26, 1998. The text of her lecture, with additional notes, is also available.

Kathy Peiss' lecture and her response to audience questions have been digitized. Two versions of each audio file are available -- one for slow modem access, and one for faster connections.)

Kathy L. Peiss's Talk (for slower internet connections -- 14.4 Kb/sec modems and above)

Kathy L. Peiss's Talk (for faster internet connections -- 28.8 Kb/sec modems and above)

Answers to Audience Questions: (There was no audience microphone, so all questions are transcribed. Kathy Peiss' answers, however, were recorded clearly. Click on the icons following each question to hear her response.

Question: Did women play a role in defining women by playing a role in what was actually produced, or what was provided the consumers -- thinking now to focus test groups that we have today that actually shape what's produced?

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec

Question: You talked about things like Carnation milk appearing in ads instead of things like cream. Do you see similar things in magazines like Field and Stream, and Car and Driver; in terms of editorial texts deliberately appealing to products on the market?

14.4 Kb/sec . 28.8 Kb/sec

Question: When you talked earlier about women having a place in production, you talked about feminists being involved, and then you talked about women who were suffragists. Are you making distinctions there that are accurate? Because a lot of women were suffragists -- a lot of women supported the vote who were very very conservative women, women in the DAR, for instance, who supported the vote were not feminists. . . . (Follow up) And your sources were what?"

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec

Question - follow-up: You're not convincing me that you actually found good grounds for identifying women as feminists. . . We talked about women who think subconsciously that they are feminists . . . you know the term feminism was very, very loosely used, very loosely used. A woman who might call herself a feminist and really not have committed herself in any way to feminism.

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: Obviously both suffragist and anti-suffragist women believed in domesticity across the board and perhaps all that you're talking about [here], and feminists and suffragists are talking about, is abundance. One historian said that no feminist has ever repudiated that. In some sense consumerism is just simply an updating, an upgrading in all kinds of ways . . . of abundance.

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: Thinking about what's perhaps the biggest campaign I can think of to reshape behavior to make a product acceptable -- that is the campaign to get women riding bicycles in the 1890's -- I know that Colonel Pope, and others, heavily subsidized that campaign by commissioning articles and planting stories with journalists. Do you find women played any part in this effort to get women to ride bicycles? It succeeded, of course.

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: I am persuaded by you that women who were feminists did enter the world of advertising and did participate in developing marketing strategies to convince women to buy goods. Do you find any who felt uneasy about it? They were caught in a dilemma. I like the way you put it. Were they aware of the dilemma, were they self-conscious about it, did they think about it, did they respond to it, were they uneasy about it?

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: I think of The Bell Jar and of Sylvia Plath going to New York to work for Mademoiselle, Glamour -- some serious comments. The falsity that she portrayed!

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: I just wanted to ask about home economics courses. When did they start pushing consumer goods? I remember that ours in seventh grade used a 1950's textbook that was entirely about buying convenience food. [Follow-up comment: You just might want to know that the field has been renamed family and consumer sciences. As a whole field, in the nation, they don't call it home economics.]

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: You argue that there's a period when the consumer was solely pitched as a woman, maybe before the 1950's. Was there a male consumer in the minds of the businesses and the advertisers? It seemed to be a big economic incentive, and certainly by the second half of the century. . .

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: Isn't this one of the Barbara Ehrenreich's points in the Hearts of Men about Playboy in the 1950s? Wasn't this one of the first avenues where men were encouraged to beautify themselves but at the same time not be seen as homosexual?

14.4 Kb/sec 28.8 Kb/sec.

Question: You can also see that in business magazines like Fortune and Business Week there's a shift around the fifties from more industrial advertisements to more consumer-oriented ones . . . . [Related question quickly following up on this one -- by another member of the audience: But I think in the thirties you see ads in McFadden's Magazine, or other magazines, that are directed exclusively to men and are all about male fears -- male fears about weakness, balding, and so on. They're also tied to very gendered male excitements because McFadden Magazine also covers a lot of crime, true confession, and romance. I think you see it segmented earlier than traditional . . . ]

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec.

;

Question: To what degree was the content of women's magazines changed -- not just in terms of putting bicycles, or other products, into stories? To what degree was the political program, and even feminism, of such magazines subverted by the new commercialism?

14.4 Kb/sec. 28.8 Kb/sec

Comments to: [email protected]

Back to contents: JMMH Volume 1 number 1 Fall 1998