The Culture of Consumption Reconsidered: Essays in Tribute to Susan Porter Benson

Just before the Toronto conference in September–October 2005 on "Labouring Feminism and Feminist Working-Class History in North America and Beyond," at which the articles in this issue were presented, I happened to see Álex de la Iglesia's film El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime). It is a film that would have made Susan Porter Benson chuckle.¹ The opening scene describes Rafael Gonzalez, "king of the sales floor," as he surveys his domain—the ladies' apparel department of YeYo's department store. Rafael is a perfect product of modern consumer culture; born in the handbag department—where his mother went into labor while shopping—he aspires to the elegant, the beautiful, and the expensive. His life is a consumer fantasy come true. He spends his nights with the most glamorous saleswomen at YeYo's, sleeping in luxurious beds in the furniture department, dining on beautifully set tables in the housewares department, and dressing in expensive suits from menswear. He avoids the less attractive saleswomen and competes for commissions with his archrival, Don Antonio, who sells electronics and appliances. Rafael's ultimate ambition is to extend his territory and become floor manager. He seeks the perfect world—and then to commit the perfect crime—in the department store. There are problems, however—best symbolized by the spelling mistake in the film's original Spanish title Crimen Ferpecto—which plague Rafael's less-than-perfect world and his not-so-perfect crime.²

The film is a brilliant and funny critique of consumer culture and the social dynamics of the department store. It plays on advertising's gender stereotypes—for example, the idea that female customers prefer either male clerks who flatter them into spending large sums or unattractive female clerks who encourage their sense of superiority and their inclination to spend. Both the film and the Toronto conference panel gave me a way to reread Susan Porter Benson's work and to reflect on her contributions to the history of both women's labor and consumer culture, her insights about class and culture, and her sense of humor.

Rereading Sue's work reminded me why her book Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 and her essay "Living on the Margin: Working-Class Marriages and Family Survival Strategies in the United States, 1919–1941" have become such classics.³ From her book's generous acknowledgements—including to "women who know well that scholarly work is anything but a contained academic exercise"—to the clear argument that remains fresh to this day, Counter Cultures offers a model for the study of work, consumption, and gender relations. Sue argued that consumer culture was neither simply the promise of an "American standard of living" nor simply the deceptive manipulation of American capitalism. Instead, she treated consumer culture as a complex relation between power and resistance, creativity and oppression.

For Sue Benson, culture, particularly consumer culture, was a concrete, shared experience based on work relations, social attitudes, and individual aspiration. She borrowed the term "culture" from the work of such anthropologists as Sidney Mintz to suggest a "kind of resource," a framework of "attitudes and standards of behavior that one draws upon in dealing with society.⁴ Department-store cultures, Benson wrote, for example, grew partly out of conditions and struggles within the store and partly out of class, gender, ethnic, and racial relations outside the store. For Sue, a "culture of consumption" meant something over and above, but certainly not independent of, cultures of race, gender, or class. For the period she was studying, that is, roughly the 1920s through the end of World War II, a distinction could be drawn between working-class culture and middle-class culture with consumption—levels of spending, access to consumer goods, and market-based desires—as a key difference. During this period, she argued, working-class families were "on the margin." This was reflected both in the absence of working-class images in advertising (indicating that marketers saw no point in targeting this group) and in the well-developed informal family...