Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada (review)

The importance of mass retail in Canada has been apparent since the country's early development, when a group of trappers and traders established the first joint-stock company in North America, the Hudson's Bay Company. Retail Nation, a new book by women and gender studies professor Donica Belisle, looks at the roots and effects of the big department stores on their employees and customers, whose roles sometimes overlapped in unexpected ways. Belisle's overall argument—that the stores were agents of nationalism and modernization—unfolds in a careful and systematic fashion. Unlike other studies in this genre, such as William Leach's Land of Desire, which places much emphasis on the artifice and theatricality of the early American department stores like Wanamaker's, Retail Nation focuses more on labor and the employees' lives, in keeping with Susan Porter Benson's Counter Cultures.

In the first chapter, Belisle lists the department stores that appeared in cities like Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, and Vancouver. Department stores such as Eaton's, Simpson's, and the Hudson's Bay Company were vital to the country's economy—by World War II, Eaton's was the third largest employer of Canadians. In Chapter 2, the author addresses the question of consumption and national identity head-on, maintaining that department stores in Canada had a distinctive cultural purpose: mass retail helped guide the Dominion into modernity and provided a mechanism for celebrating class and race privilege via the elegance of the department stores and the Eurocentric rhetoric of its advertising campaigns. White customers were assured the stores were (modern) places of civility where their employees would impress due to, among other things, a good upbringing. Belisle's historical account of modernization takes racist discourse into consideration more effectively than comparable studies in the genre. Her textual analysis of ads reveals how First Nations people and peoples of African descent were depicted in ways that tried to legitimate imperial consumerism.

In the third chapter, Belisle examines paternalism, which features strongly throughout the book and pulls together the various facets of the department store. Eaton's and other stores prided themselves on the notion that they uplifted communities through affordable goods, charity, and special events for the public. Belisle focuses on the everyday experiences of customers and workers (both inside and outside the stores) in the book's three middle chapters. So, in "Crafting the Consumer Workforce," we learn how Eaton's tried turning their employees into consumers by placing ads in their pay envelopes. The author describes company contests, sporting events, summer camps, and other activities that they were (strongly) encouraged to participate in. Belisle argues the bodies of female employees were turned into advertising that does a particular kind of work for industry and the nation. Healthy, white, Christian, English-speaking women were the heart of the retail workforce. Female employees would even get reminders to practice proper hygiene (again, notices in their pay envelopes). While her use of theory is decidedly scant, Belisle does a lot with various sources, such as biographies, fiction and poetry, and department store advertising and pamphlets.

Despite rarely moving beyond the entry-level position of salesperson and faced with the demeaning attitudes of both store managers and customers, female workers used their specialized knowledge of retailing to combat unwanted pressures and sexism. As they became arbiters of taste, female workers acquired communication skills and specialized knowledge of retail. Here, the author effectively draws on the work of Benson in her analysis of saleswomen in early U.S. retail constituting a sphere in which they could talk about goods, fashion, and work.

While the final chapter—dedicated to the criticisms of the big stores that were voiced at the time and the stores' influence over the press—is strong for its historical insight, it might have been useful to provide more theoretical grounding for...