Editor's Note
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPFrom Marie-Antoinette to Madonna, women's relationship to consumption and material goods has been at the center of representations and experiences of femininity. Women consuming—be it feeding their children, satisfying their desires, or displaying familial wealth and status on their bodies—affected social, cultural, economic, and political life in ways that historians have probed with fascinating results. Over the past twenty years, material culture and consumption have become centerpieces of the increasingly established field of women's and gender history. Exciting work, for example, has focused on the role of women in creating consumer culture and, in particular, on the association of femininity with fashion, luxury, and caprice. Scholars have also used consumption to explain women's political status in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, demonstrating how women derived both political rights and constraints from their essentialized connection with the home, motherhood, and provisioning. The articles in this special issue draw on and contribute to this burgeoning literature, providing new case studies as well as fresh insights and perspectives. They also contribute to a newer historiography on non-Western consumption and material culture. The geographical range of the eight articles published aptly represents these developments, spanning Australia, Latin America, South Asia, and Africa, as well as the United States, France, and Britain.
The number and quality of submissions to this special issue of the Journal of Women's History is perhaps the best indication of the strength of current work in this field. We received over forty responses to our call for papers; they were of such interest that the journal editors decided to publish them in two issues, 18.3 and 18.4. Graced with this generosity of space, I faced extremely difficult decisions on acceptance and also on the division of articles. Inevitably, resonances and echoes among the articles have been somewhat diminished by dividing the issue. Originally, I was excited by the synergy of placing articles focusing on representations and experiences of consumption (now grouped in 18.4) beside those on the politics of consumption and consumer associations (in issue 18.3). However, what is lost in intimacy has been gained by the opportunity to present eight outstanding articles. I am grateful to Victoria de Grazia for her thoughtful and thought-provoking comment on the collection, which will appear in 18.4. My introductory remarks will treat the two issues separately, but I urge readers to turn to de Grazia's comment for synthetic treatment and to read the two issues in conversation with each other. [End Page 6]
The articles in 18.3 shed light on what their authors argue remains an understudied figure in women's history: the housewife. The articles collectively demonstrate the ways in which, over the course of the twentieth century, housewives mobilized around issues of consumption, thereby creating new forms of associative and political life. These articles reveal the growth of the "housewife" as a demographic category, as a focus of interest by the state, and as a category of self-conscious identification among women. The rise of the housewife in the middle decades of the twentieth century relied on labor markets oriented toward male breadwinners, as well as cultural valorizations of domestic life and housekeeping. The authors emphasize the essentialist nature of these notions—and their potential to be harnessed to conservative political projects—but also the agency women acquired through their responsibility for managing, provisioning, and nurturing the household. In the interests of economic progress and social stability, states accorded high importance to domestic consumption and therefore reached out to mobilize women in their capacity as managers of household consumption. The celebration of domesticity thus resulted, ironically, in the emergence of new kinds of female experts and professionals, who ran consumer associations and staffed government boards and agencies.
Together, these articles highlight the redefinition of the "political" that emerges from study of female consumer associations, and the blurring of public and private that occurred as...
