Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century (review)

Things are seldom what they appear to be in modern consumer culture; the same is true of consumer history. While most people assume that mass marketing for children originated after World War II, Lisa Jacobson's engaging and detailed study joins a growing number of works that show that American advertisers and manufacturers directly targeted children long before the mid-twentieth century. Child consumers were made, not born.

Changing ideologies of the middle-class family, child rearing, and consumption all shaped and were shaped by marketing to children. Psychologists and social scientists emphasized democratic decision-making by benevolent male breadwinners and consumer-savvy mothers and children. Parents were encouraged to foster children's responsibility by giving them a weekly allowance and holding family conferences to discuss financial decisions. Jacobson argues that this new familial model encouraged child consumers to save and spend, while it kept their consumption firmly under parental control. The middle-class child consumer reproduced American capitalism along with middle-class ideals and aesthetics.

Advertisers promoted and exploited the new child consumer. While Victorian ads featured passive, dutiful children, early-twentieth-century images celebrated "children [who] were meant to be seen and to be heard" (p. 21). Manufacturers advertised their wares through children's magazines and organizations like the Boy Scouts. Public schools were given "enrichment materials" designed to encourage children to purchase (or nag their parents to buy) products such as cereals and soaps. Young shoppers collected trade cards and story booklets devised to cultivate brand awareness. With other scholars, Jacobson provides evidence that designated age cohorts (e.g., toddler, teenager) were the combined work of child psychologists and manufacturers. She cites the 1922 advertising campaign for Keds sneakers, which pioneered "a new archetypal consumer—the peer-conscious adolescent girl" (p. 127).

Jacobson does an excellent job of demonstrating gender differences in marketing to children. As in the larger society, "[a]ll child consumers were not equal" (p. 94). Boys received more attention than girls. To counter older associations of consumption with femininity, ad men glorified boy consumers as expert guides to consumer culture and its new technologies, especially radios, automobiles, and other mechanical devices. By harnessing boys' desire for goods to entrepreneurial goals, advertisers sought to portray consumption as a "manly virtue" (p. 126). For example, boys were encouraged to save up for bicycles in order to expand their newspaper-delivery routes. Jacobson argues that, at least in ads, boys were transitional figures who mediated between an old and new consumer ethos and "balance[d] the tensions between hedonism and control" (p. 96). The dilemma for girls was to "reconcile other-directed consumer self-hood with older notions of self-sacrificing femininity" (p. 151). Ads also reflected changing public discourse about women's proper roles in politics and society. Thus confident, athletic girls featured in ads during the 1920s gave way by the 1930s to anxious, competitive girls eager to get a date (and a marriage partner).

Jacobson masterfully describes the complex interactions among parents, children, educators, and advertisers. Working-class parents worried that allowances fostered too much independence, while middle-class parents thought them too restrictive. Family conferences about finances, promoted by advertisers as a way to increase children's influence on familial spending, may have had the opposite effect. Jacobson does not wholly agree with those who have argued that modern consumer culture invaded and overwhelmed the family, yet she is cautious in attributing too much agency to adult and child consumers. Merchants and advertisers did meet with some opposition, including parental resistance (especially on the part of immigrant parents) and the school savings-bank movement. The consumer movement during the 1930s, which sought to educate consumers about the quality of products, also helped foster consumer caution. Most important, child consumers themselves learned that ads often promised more than products delivered.

Twentieth-century advertising is a complex technology, and this fine book offers many...