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  • The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer
  • Jacqueline K. Dirks (bio)
The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. By Daniel Thomas Cook. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. x+211. $21.95.

Historians of consumer culture often find it easier to count new products and describe new methods of production than to assess how social relations and identity were shaped by the proliferation of goods and markets. In this compelling, lucid, and useful study, however, sociologist Daniel Thomas Cook compellingly describes key shifts in the advertising and selling of ready-made apparel for children in order to trace changes in the meanings of childhood. Those who marketed children's clothing in America during the 1920s and 1930s aimed to sell apparel, of course, but Cook argues that these merchandisers also helped to shape "discursively configured" children, "more or less full persons" who were recognized as "legitimate, individualized, self-contained consumers" (pp. 17, 3).

Cook's study joins work by scholars such as Gary Cross and Stephen Kline in examining how the material worlds of consumer culture transformed the experience and idea of childhood. Drawing on advertising and trade journals, Cook charts the emergence in the 1920s of separate infants' and children's departments in retail stores. Initially, displays were fashioned for mothers, not babies. Merchants lightened mother's purse and her moral anxieties about the market. For Cook, "The mother is the moral arbiter of children's goods, spaces, and beings; she is the shield against the profanity of self-indulgence, of extrinsic monetary value. As the middle term between market and child, the mother as consumer in a sense purifies economic exchange by imbuing commodities with sentiment" (p. 64). But merchandisers [End Page 822] also began to address child consumers directly. Cook notes that famous juvenile actors, most notably Shirley Temple, all had their own clothing lines. From fashioning young children, it was a short step for merchandisers to create teenagers, pre-teens, and many smaller market niches during and after World War II. Cook does an especially nice job of exploring how clothing manufacturers negotiated tensions between dress and sexuality in crafting fashions for high school girls.

Cook claims that the 1930s marked a turning point in this commodification of childhood. Age designations such as "toddler" came to refer not just to children themselves, but to clothing size ranges and merchandising categories. While advertisers and manufacturers worked harder to sell their wares during the Great Depression, their sales fell dramatically. Nevertheless, Cook argues that "For perhaps the first time in history, the perspective of 'the child'—its vantage point in the world—becomes incorporated into market institutions and hereby becomes institutionalized" (p. 67). Cook calls this view "pediocularity."

As the sweatshop-aware mother of a five-year-old fledgling consumer, I was swayed by Cook's argument. But as a historian, I wanted more concrete evidence about the production and sales of children's clothing. Cook's study of merchandisers' and advertisers' attempts to reconfigure childhood is most persuasive, and it is useful to know how marketers tried to sell to children before the resurgent consumerism and baby boom of the postwar period. But Cook never tells the reader exactly how much children's clothing was made during this period, only that "Children's wear did not become a category in the U.S. Census of Manufactures until 1937" (p. 172, note 18). He makes little distinction between mothers who could afford to buy clothes for their children and those who could not. Even middle-class mothers could opt out of purchasing ready-to-wear for their offspring. Indeed, sales of cloth and sewing machines indicate that many American women still sewed some of their families' clothing until well into the mid-twentieth century. There is also the problem of ignoring or avoiding the specter of the exploited female and child workers who crafted most children's garments; public discourse about the resurgence of child labor during the 1930s complicates Cook's argument. Students of consumer culture need to look at both producers and users.

Cook...

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