Consuming Modernity: Gendered Behaviour and Consumerism before the Baby Boom ed. by Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Dan Malleck (review)

In Consuming Modernity, editors Cheryl Krasnick Warsh and Dan Malleck have curated an interesting, well-documented collection of essays exploring consumption during the 1920s and 1930s. The ground that this volume covers is not wholly original, but the insertion of Canada into debates about consumption and modernity is a welcome development. In the Introduction, the editors promise to move the debate beyond the “Anglo-American nexus” that has dominated scholarship on consumption, including essays not only on Canada, Britain and the U.S., but also Mexico, Argentina and Germany. (3) It is organized into sections exploring consumption, public display, modern girls and ideologies of modernity. The essays are for the most part well written and the volume is attractive, with appropriate inclusion of illustrations. It will serve well as an undergraduate reader in courses dealing with consumption and culture in Canada, and contains articles that will interest scholars of cultural history, gender studies, and media studies.

Some of the strongest contributions in the collection are able to balance attention to global trends in consumption with careful eye to local context. Susanne Eineigel examines the construction of the gendered modern subject in Mexico City. Eineigel explores the messages that young people received about how to dress, move, and interact with the opposite sex not only from advertisements but from radio, movies, magazines, plays, cartoons, and dance halls. She skilfully demonstrates how Catholic understandings of morality came into conflict with new attitudes about appropriate masculine and feminine behaviour in Mexico. Fiona Skillen traces the growth of women’s sport participation in Britain, outlining debates over appropriate attire for sportswomen and spectators. Skillen pays attention to the class distinctions of different sports clubs, where modern middle class Britons could go to socialize while still remaining “respectable” in the eyes of their families and communities. (118) Jane Nicholas uses the advice columns of Saturday Night magazine to consider just how Canadian women of the 1920s and 1930s learned to be modern and what product choices were most appropriate. Nicholas nicely contrasts the messages women were bombarded with about how to cultivate male attention through consumption of cosmetics and lingerie with the cautions of Canadian legal and medical authorities who blamed women for tempting men and encouraging sexual assault. (191)

Other chapters use advertising to track changing notions about women’s bodies, health, and beauty. Using a close reading of patent medicine advertisements like Dr. Chase’s Nerve Food, Denyse Baillargeon traces the influence of both American and English Canadian business in the French-language press. Baillargeon points out instances where the advertisers’ vision of modernity might be at odds with local attitudes towards the display of bodies, as in the case of an ad depicting a young mother in a bathing suit. (91) Kristin Hall analyzes North American ads for Lysol disinfectant as a means to explore changing expectations for mothers and housewives to ward off disease using modern, scientific methods of housekeeping. (58) Hall effectively traces shifts in the visual style and emotionally charged copy of Lysol ads, showing how the manufacturer used increasingly blatant references to infection, disease, and death to scare female consumers into purchasing disinfectant. Tracy Penny Light similarly explores how ads for Fleishmann’s Yeast or Kotex used medical discourses to encourage Canadian women to buy. (35) Light’s analysis would be strengthened by considering the relationship between multi-national corporations and the Canadian market. An ad for Calay soap included in the chapter (38) specifically mentions that the product is produced in Canada and has a different name in the US, suggesting that manufacturers tweaked their ads before placing them in Canadian periodicals like Maclean’s. Were these products sold in the same way in the United States? Were any of these messages about womanhood and medicine distinct to Canada? Should the ads in Canadian periodicals simply be viewed extensions of American ad campaigns?

Marilyn Morgan...