An All-Consuming Subject? Women and Consumption in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth-Century Western India

This article examines the emergence of women as new consuming subjects in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century western India. In a period of material and social change, elite women had new access to and new control over goods; reformers argued that it was the duty of the modern wife to manage the material comforts of household life. Examining writing by and for women, including memoirs, advice manuals, and popular journals, this article focuses on the central role goods played in negotiating new ideals of feminine behavior, whether through the emergence of consumption as women's work or in the way goods shaped women's new roles in society. In the end, it was the feminization of consumption that made the problem of material goods so pressing on the national scale; indeed, the role goods played in constituting new gender identities helped to shape nationalist agendas in this period.