Toward a History of Consumer Culture, Women, and Politics

Margaret Mary Finnegan. Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. ix + 222 pp. Notes and index. $49.50 (cloth); $17.50 (paper).

Landon R. Y. Storrs. Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xi + 392 pp. Appendices, notes, and index $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Reading these impressive books together reveals the capaciousness of both the category of consumption in recent works of historical scholarship and the meaning of consumer history itself. Focusing on the until recently neglected relations among women, politics, and consumerism, Margaret Finnegan and Landon Storrs, in very different ways, tell us a great deal about the current state of consumer history, show how consumption is a productive lens through which to view many different aspects of American political culture, and remind us--or for those who need convincing, demonstrate conclusively--that consumption has no simple political valence.

As the titles of these books indicate, whether attempting to "sell suffrage" to the American people or to use economic and political pressure to "civilize capitalism," suffragists and reformers practiced their politics through the market, and believed that achieving their political goals required engagement with, and participation in, the commercial world. Finnegan and Storrs have different assessments of this form of engagement: if Finnegan sees suffragists' use of consumer tactics as complicit with capitalist culture, Storrs sees the reformers' consumerist practices as resisting this very same force. Underlying their many important differences in interpretation, however, they agree that consumption is an important political category and they treat the politics of consumption in innovative and important ways.

Finnegan adds a new dimension to the well-studied topic of the campaign for women's suffrage by exploring the relationship between the political demands of the movement and the emerging consumer culture of which it was a part. Arguing that historians have paid disproportionate attention to radical suffragists, Finnegan examines a group of women that she labels "mainstream" or "nonradical" who, she argues, were important, if ultimately misguided, political innovators: "Not the staid, drab activists they were often characterized as, mainstream suffragists were inspired political beings who looked to the world around them for fresh tools of public persuasion. Their willingness to mix new and old campaign tactics not only made them savvy but also put them at the forefront of an emerging, commercialized style of politics" (p. 7). Their innovations helped make the movement fun, modern, and popular. Attending to the ideological meaning of the material and performative culture of the movement, Finnegan explores plays, suffrage bazaars, and a number of suffrage artifacts--hats, ribbons, badges, pins, kewpie dolls, playing cards, drinking cups--alongside more traditional sources like speeches and newspapers. (And even her treatment of newspapers takes an artifactual approach; in an impressive and insightful chapter she examines The Woman's Journal as an economic entity and locus of ideas about consumption and citizenship.) Finnegan's argument is that many of the imperatives and promises of the emerging consumer-capitalist order affected the suffrage movement, informing especially the tactics of mainstream or nonradical suffragists. Thus, she shows how they viewed the suffrage campaign as a problem of marketing, how they analogized the voter to the shopper, how they made self-fashioning central to their appeals, and how they appealed to potential supporters by describing suffrage campaigners--and women voters more generally--as fun, modern, likeable, and personable. She maintains that the image of women that these mainstream suffragists promoted was thoroughly congruent with the expectations of the emerging economic order. Rather than challenging this status quo, the mainstream suffrage movement reinforced it by endorsing the "malleability of modern identity," by adopting the rhetoric of marketing and advertising, and by selling artifacts that depicted a domestic and generally unthreatening femininity. What began as the use of consumer tactics to...