Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (review)

Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years. By Joy Parr. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. x+368. $60/$21.95.

Domestic Goods explores the relationship and often conflicted interaction between Canadian manufacturers, consumers, and the state during the two decades after the Second World War. Each of the book's eleven essays has the integrity to stand alone, yet together they build upon one another to form a compelling narrative that links postwar national economic policies with household economic management through debates over the design, manufacture, and sale or purchase of domestic appliances.

Joy Parr's focus on the distinctive Canadian experience undermines the hegemony of the American postwar consumer juggernaut and reveals a fascinating alternative. Canadian households contributed to national postwar reconstruction through thrift and delayed acquisition and, later and even more dramatically, by choosing outmoded domestic technologies that nonetheless cohered far better with Canadian cultural practices and expectations. Parr enriches this story further by exposing the cross-purposes at which designers, manufacturers, consumer organizations, and policymakers often worked, each hampered by gendered assumptions about what Canadian housewives and families needed and wanted as they struggled to recover from the dislocations and scarcities of wartime.

The book has three sections. The first focuses on economic policy and the way in which designers and economists envisioned economic development through competing models that either encouraged Canadian-designed indigenous craft production or Canadian entrance into mass production. Faced with postwar scarcity, and despite the critical shortage of domestic appliances faced by newly established households, federal policymakers privileged the capital-goods sector at the expense of consumer goods. Thus, in the interest of national security and economic stability, householders continued their already decades-long tradition of "making do" and labored yet again to distinguish true need from simple desire. With consumer durables classified as luxury goods, "postwar controls on consumer spending were, in their ideological foundation, the modern equivalent of early-modern sumptuary laws" (p. 83). The ideological result was to degrade household labor as being less entitled in the postwar economy. Consumer groups representing Canadian housewives aligned themselves politically and their divisiveness prevented the organization of a countervailing advocacy on behalf of women consumers.

The middle section of Domestic Goods explores ideas about industrial design and the way they became linked with "contemporary hopes for freer trade of mass produced goods" (p. 122). Federal policy dictated design principles that embraced the modernist international style in order to bolster the appeal of Canadian goods in a global market. However, efforts to produce a design that would, at the same time, speak to Canadian identity proved to be too much of a cultural burden. Parr's chapter on the popularity of maple furniture with young householders is particularly significant as she describes the very complex interaction among materials, ideology, economics, production, consumption, and nationalism.

The third and final section focuses on consumers and their power--once the economy strengthened and appliances became readily available--to influence market choices. These are the most polished essays and move both chronologically and successively through the great triumvirate of "white metal boxes," the stove, the washing machine, and the refrigerator (p. 205). Parr's "What Makes Washday Less Blue?" is a brilliant analysis of Canadian women's rejection of the automatic washer in favor of the far more arduous wringer washer for reasons that had less to do with technological logic and more to do with ideas about resources, ecological awareness, cleanliness, and the moral economy of the home.

Domestic Goods is a valuable book. While its gender analysis builds on literature that first delineates and then confounds the dichotomy between male/female and production/consumption oppositions, Parr adds to this analysis by linking it to national economic policies. She strengthens her argument, too, by scrutinizing the subtle differences between rural and urban households and among different classes...