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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 84-88



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The Long History of Children as Consumers

Daniel Thomas Cook. The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. ix + 211 pp. Appendix, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper).

Few areas of postmodern life may be more disconcerting to parents and other adults than the $5 billion name-brand children's clothing market. Perhaps it is of some comfort to learn that merchants and advertisers have been pitching their wares to children since the early years of the twentieth century. In The Commodification of Childhood, sociologist Daniel Thomas Cook traces this development from the earliest trade discussions of marketing children's wear in 1917 through the explosion of children's specialty shops in the 1960s. His deeply interdisciplinary approach and nuanced interpretation result in a penetrating examination of much more than just the children's clothing industry. He enters the highly contested turf surrounding the social construction of childhood, the evolution of family governance, the shifts in the American cultural landscape, and the business of selling itself. Cook deftly lays his historical evidence onto a theoretical grid that moves The Commodification of Childhood well beyond existing studies of children's toys, literature, and culture. Cook originally intended to study children's fashion. Instead he has crafted a deeply researched, wide-ranging exploration of twentieth-century American childhood, placing Cook squarely in the forefront of a growing interdisciplinary literature on the culture of childhood.1

To explain the "commodification of childhood" of the title, Cook points to the intersection of two competing ideologies. One is the idea of the "purely oppressive markets which invade childhood," a concept that stands in constant tension and dialogue with the notion of the child "as essentially independent, free, [and] self-creating" (p. 6). This conjunction of childhood and markets was (and is) "morally contested space" (p. 10). Cook's willingness to interrogate the presumed sanctity of childhood as well as trace the evolution of increasingly sophisticated, blatant marketing forces provides the author an opportunity to explore competing notions of childhood in postmodern America. Although he presents an insightful overview of competing [End Page 84] conceptions of childhood in his second chapter, his own politics become clear only in the final chapter, "Concluding Remarks." Boldly asserting that "[m]arkets have not invaded childhood—either now or over the last century," Cook declares that markets are merely the "indispensable and unavoidable means by which class specific, historically situated childhoods are made material and tangible" (p. 144). Thus removing advertisers and sellers from any social responsibility in shaping children's desires, Cook aligns himself with the most radical advocates of children's rights.2 Informed by a new generation of childhood studies like Chris Jenks's Childhood (1996) and Ellen Seiter's Sold Separately: Mothers and Children in Consumer Culture (1993), Cook argues that children not only purchase and influence purchasing, but also influence the shape and direction of the market. The interaction between the consuming child and the market is thus impersonal and need not be restricted. However, the assertion that the child consumer is an independent, rational agent is diametrically opposed to the evidence of media and market manipulation presented forcefully in the 2001 HBO documentary Merchants of Cool.

The history of childhood and youth as a distinct field within the larger frame of social history originated in part as scholarly responses to Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood (1962) and to the remarkable document collection edited by Robert Bremner, Children and Youth in America (1970-74). In less than two decades, two competing strategies for examining the lives of children emerged. One focused on childhood as a social and cultural construct, for example, in Viviana Zelizer's Pricing the Priceless Child (1985) and Peter Slater's Children in the New England Mind (1977). Others situated the child as an historical actor and attempted to capture his voice, as in David Nasaw's Children of the City (1985...

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