Consuming Modernity: Gendered Behaviour and Consumerism before the Baby Boom ed. by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Dan Malleck (review)

The subtitle of this book highlights gender and consumerism, both terms and topics that have received ample attention. So it is a surprise and a frustration that here gender refers with minor exceptions to women and femininity (aren’t men gendered?) and consumerism is a trope that turns on women as consumed by an array of products, practices, and ideas. That is to say, many of the chapters in this collection have inevitableness about them; their arguments and conclusions resonate with predictability. Makeup, hair, fashion, sports, leisure, household products, decorum, assumptions about the female voter: most all are located within a rich archive of historical examples, yet the comments about them coalesce around such platitudes as “the modern feminine identity that emerged in the interwar was tied to consumption” (Tracy Penny Light).

There are thirteen chapters, divided into four sections. In part 1, “Consumerism as Politics, Practice, and Ideology,” Bettina Liverant writes about political speeches and debates that addressed the new pre–Second World War category of “purchasing power and consumer interest.” Tracy Penny Light looks at the medicalization of feminine identity through ads and medical journals. Kristin Hall analyzes the marketing of Lysol and the resultant cultural conception of “scientific motherhood.” De Anna J. Reese discusses the African-American beauty and cosmetics industry via the work of Annie Turnbo Malone, owner of a beauty school. Here black women are consumed by the ideal of straight-haired beauty though they are celebrated for achieving self-confidence through “proper grooming methods.” One wants to ask whether this generous reading applies to contemporary black female consumers, or stars such as Beyoncé. A standout essay by Denyse Baillargeon, original and a boon for anglophone readers, reads conceptions of work in Quebec through advertisements for medicine. Baillargeon coins the term “modern somatic culture” and examines the shift in emphasis from the female body as fit for work to the body as primed for pleasure.

In part 2, “Consumerism and Public Display,” Fiona Skillin writes about how British sports participation conformed to a new modern embodied and clothed identity. Marilyn Morgan’s chapter looks at how the meaning of the swimsuit shifted from athletic apparel to part of a “contest of feminine beauty.” What could have been an interesting discussion of the suntan and tanning practices by Devon Hansen Atchison becomes a reductive equating of Coco Chanel’s adoption of the suntan trend with the slavish devotion by “women who wanted to be Parisian-chic.” But culture doesn’t work that way.

Part 3, “Modern Girls,” contains chapters on beauty advice columns for the modern Canadian consumer (by Jane Nichols), the gendered dimensions of modernity in Mexico with emphasis on religion and with a small discussion of men and masculinity (by Susanne Eineigel), and the negotiation of national identity in Buenos Aires (by Cecilia Tossounian). In part 4, “Texts and Ideologies of Modernity and Consumerism,” Kara Ritzheimer focuses on censorship, gendered behaviour, and some German films within the context of the country’s postwar recuperation. And the final chapter is an odd inclusion: a detailed discussion of the literary fiction of Mary Quayle Innis (why her?), who, according to Donica Belisle, wrote about the realities of the middle-class homemaker in Toronto in the 1930s and 1940s.

All the essays aim to embellish the nexus among bodies, culture, and nations. Their strengths lie in the archives chosen for the analyses. There are many ads, some photographs, and sources from popular newspapers and magazines; these offer the researcher a wealth of material. Too often, however, the conclusions fall flat: “the modern woman became a type to which actual women had to conform” (introduction). Where is the nuanced appreciation of the banalities of everyday life whereby advertisements – a popular example chosen in these analyses – are read, negotiated, and sometimes ignored, or picked up and reworked (what we used to call “resistance”)?