The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (review)

This fascinating collection, centered in history and gender studies, contains essays of interest to readers from any of the disciplines currently touched by the surge of interest in the cultural meaning of images, including American and European literatures, art history and film studies, and social sciences concerned with the way objects may become the focus of political, economic, social and sexual identities. The book contains thirteen essays (only two previously published in another form); a general introduction and three section introductions; an excellent twnety-page bibliography compiled by Ellen Furlough, which could be used to orient the student to many aspects of cultural studies; and a rich selection of forty-four plates that contribute, sometimes dramatically, to the persuasiveness of the arguments. Most essays contain a brief precis of the questions addressed, so a reader may quickly assess the relevance of that text to his or her interests.

The essays range from the seventeenth century to the present, Ancien Régime Paris or Restoration England to post-World War II Germany and England. Two deal explicitly with the United States in the first half of this century, and the whole collection exemplifies the imaginative and revealing analysis of gender which has been fostered by the rise in the United States of the disciplines of women or gender studies richly in dialogue with European theory. Editor Victoria de Grazia’s introductions, which themselves are among the more interesting contents, not only provide a conceptual summary of each section but also situate the essays theoretically and highlight their contribution to the intersection between consumption and modernity.

The collection is founded on the observations that the growth of a consumer society coincides with the rise of modernity and that many of the features of the modern are constituted by the meanings constructed and the social relations implied by the circulation and consumption of goods. And, de Grazia asserts, “In Western societies, acts of exchange and consumption have long been obsessively gendered, usually as female” (1). Both consumption and gender have usually been naturalized in modern society; these essays seek to unmask the meaning and constructedness of these intersecting categories. To do so these essays inquire into such widely divergent subjects as how the “production of feminine iconography intersect[s] with the burgeoning culture of modernity” in nineteenth-century France (“The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display,” Abigail Solomon-Godeau, 117); the possibility of well-heeled husbands’ disavowals of their wives’ debts (“‘A Husband and His Wife’s Dresses’: Consumer Credit and the Debtor Family in England, 1864–1914,” Erika Rappaport); the passage a century ago of U.S. laws preventing “shiftless fathers” (192) from disavowing their role as providers for consumer wives (“Male Providerhood and the Public Purse: Anti-Desertion Reform in the Progressive Era” by Anna R. Igra); and efforts in Italy and Germany to interpret female consumption choices in ways that buttressed national sovereignty or the state during World Wars I and II (“Food Scarcity and the Empowerment of the Female Consumer in World War I Berlin,” Belinda Davis, and “Nationalizing Women: The Competition between Fascist and Commercial Cultural Models in Mussolini’s Italy,” De Grazia).

In bringing feminist analysis to the history of Euro-American consumer society, the authors seek to avoid what they see as the pitfalls of predecessors utilizing “liberal historical paradigms” which stress “individualist conceptions of behavior” and those “theoretically conceived cultural studies” (6) that fail to analyze “processes of signification in the light of varying historical legacies” (7). Instead, they deliberately juxtapose studies of different class groups in England, Germany, France, Italy and the United States in different time periods, so as to demonstrate how the gendered meanings of consumption may be shaped by “diverse processes of state building, or by the relative power of the market, or by varying patterns of accumulation of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has familiarized as ‘cultural capital’” (7).

One...