Gendered Transactions: Identity and Payment at Midcentury

According to company lore, the idea for Diners’ Club¹, the first “universal charge card,” emerged in 1949 when Frank X. McNamara, a New York City businessman, was dining out with a client and realized that he had forgotten his wallet at home. He was able to sneak to off to call his wife, who drove in from Long Island “with cash in her pocket and a hot look in her eye” (and, in some accounts, “curlers in her hair”) so that he could pay for the meal and avoid embarrassment and potential loss of business (Sutton 1958). While he waited, the story goes, McNamara decided that this sort of thing should never happen again, that any “responsible businessman” should be able to sign a tab for a restaurant everywhere (Linehan 1956).

The Diners’ Club origin story is powerful, often repeated, and probably apocryphal (Simmons 1995). But like most good marketing myths, it demonstrates the imaginary from which Diners’ Club emerged: who the founders thought their consumers were and what their needs and aspirations might be. Even if McNamara never left his wallet at home, the tale reveals the context that animated the Diners’ Club card. The commuting businessman, the expense account dinner, and the suburb and the housewife in it were all interrelated midcentury American inventions, and the charge card, like the highway that the unnamed Mrs. McNamara drove in on, became an infrastructure that helped make them possible.

To understand this infrastructure, it is crucial to know that the Diners’ Club card was not, as it is sometimes described, the first credit card. Although the terms were sometimes used interchangeably, the Diners’ Club card was not a credit card but a charge card. In fact, it preceded the credit card by at least fifteen years. Unlike later, true credit cards, the Diners’ Club card was not tied to an account of revolving credit. It did not allow members to carry a balance, and it charged yearly membership fees instead of interest. For the first few decades, most of its revenue came from merchant fees.

It has been quite convincingly argued that consumer debt has been, and continues to be, a powerful social force in American life (see, for example, Mandell 1990; Cohen 2003; Nocera 1995; Martin 2002; Hyman 2011). Very little attention, however, has been given to payment infrastructures themselves, that, in fact, are not always tied to debt. This essay foregrounds payment as distinct from, but in relation to, debt. Payment systems, as Bill Maurer (2012b) puts it, are the “plumbing” of modern economies.² Attending to debt alone misses the pipes for the water that flows through them. Furthermore, studying the history of payment systems such as the Diners’ Club card is essential for encountering new and emergent payment systems, which increasing rely less on debt and more on other revenue models, notably those that trade on the value of identity in the form of personal transactional data.

Payment is always already a vector of identity. It is a tool used to perform and determine identity. It is one of what Michel Foucault (1998) called “technologies of the self,” those techniques through which “selves” are performed and policed according to available discourses. The way people pay marks them and marks the nature of their economic agency in everyday life. Particular payment instruments construct particular social relations. Georg Simmel (1900), for example, argued that modern money—which can be understood, in this sense, as a payment instrument—made people strangers, but it also made it possible to interact, trust, and pay as strangers. Like national currencies, payment forms define territories and foster within them a “common economic language with which to communicate” (Helleiner 1998, 1414).

Crucially, payment tools produce difference. Paying with a jar of pennies or a debit card that benefits the Sierra Club or a large wad of cash or a black American Express Centurion each produces distinction and meaning. This process is reciprocal: payment forms are marked by those who use them and also by the context in which they are used. Payment can be used to create or dissolve social...