Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years by Joy Parr (review)

humanities 549 Joy Parr. Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years University of Toronto Press. x, 368. $60.00, $21.95 Material history B the study of our relationships with the physical goods that surround us B has not received a great deal of scholarly attention in Canada, especially in the context of twentieth-century consumer culture. Joy Parr's recent examination of precisely this phenomenon is therefore a welcome addition to a relatively sparse literature. As the book's title suggests, Parr concentrates here on the evolution of the consumer market for `domestic goods' in postwar Canada, and particularly on the volatile point of intersection between political, economic, ideological, and personal attitudes to such goods in an era when definitions were being actively sought but, Parr argues, remained elusive and often contradictory. In approaching the topic, Parr eschews a single sustained narrative in favour of a `series of relatively distinct, chronologically ordered essays' organized in three thematic sections. The first and longest of these explores how government, business, public agencies, and lobby groups formulated a uniquely Canadian discourse around household technologies that was informed by economic exigencies and the debates surrounding reconstruction and the direction of the Canadian economy. These interlocking debates, Parr argues, shaped a political and moral economy of consumption that was not only distinct from the American experience with which it is often conflated, but was also implicitly deeply gendered and embodied decisions about who was entitled to possess what kinds of goods. The second section focuses on the aesthetic and ideological context of the emerging Canadian marketplace, starting with the dalliance of Canadian design gurus with international high modernism and its `formfollows -function' paradigm. Parr argues that as Canadian postwar hopes for international free trade gave way to a nationalist, protectionist reality, so too did designers abandon the international model in favour of a morèindigenous' style which, as suggested in the following chapter, turns out to be an updated `colonial' style of maple furniture. Far from being simply nostalgic, Parr suggests, this style was popular precisely because `maple was modern,' in so far as it suited the new lifestyles and architectural proclivities of postwar Canada. The final essay in this section, entitled `Domesticating Goods,' is central to the book in many ways. Here, Parr offers a considered critique of thèinjection theory' of consumption that positions the buyer as a passive tool in the hands of industrial capitalism, and proposes a model that stresses deliberation, intelligence, and agency on the part of the consumer. With specific reference to household goods, Parr argues that women selected and deployed these objects as part of a larger process of constructing 550 letters in canada 1999 personal and familial identities, thus `domesticating the goods' rather than`commodifying domesticity.' It is from this theoretical position that Parr embarks, in the third and final section of the book, on an exploration of the details and nuances of that process with respect to B in order B electric stoves, washing machines, and the late-arriving dryers and refrigerators. These are perhaps the most original and provocative essays in the book, and the ones that most closely consider the goods themselves in relation to their ultimate owners and users. Overall, the structure of the book enables Parr to present a more multifaceted and nuanced account of the subject than might otherwise be possible with a single sustained narrative, although the format compels a certain amount of repetition and cross-referencing, while intensifying the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various essay-chapters. Certainly, some sections are less compelling than others, notably those on consumer credit and the impact of the `high modernism' movement, but taken in the balance the many strengths of this book far outweigh its weaknesses, especially since the topic has received so little attention to date. Of particular interest are Parr's arguments concerning how the Canadian postwar experience differed in crucial ways from the American, and the extent to which gender was implicated at every level of that experience as it related to the development of a modern consumer market for household goods. Thus, for anyone interested in the postwar years, in...