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  • Seeking the Consumer in American Politics
  • Erika Rappaport
Joanna Cohen. Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. 284 pp. ISBN 9780812248920, $45.00 (cloth); ISBN 9780812293777, $45.00 (e-book).
Emily Westkaemper. Selling Women's History: Packaging Feminism in Twentieth-Century American Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017. 257 pp. ISBN 978-0-8135-7633-6, $90.00 (cloth); ISBN 978-0-8135-7632-9, $27.95 (paper); ISBN 978-0-8135-7634-3, $27.95 (e-book).

With their two marvelous new studies, Joanna Cohen and Emily Westkaemper have demonstrated how the consumer has been a key category in American political culture since the late eighteenth century. Unlike many other works that have highlighted how individuals were moved to engage in political action by virtue of their status as consumers, these books revisit familiar political debates—Hamilton's and Jefferson's struggles over the ideal political economy for a new nation, the on-going conflicts between free trade and protectionism that animated many Americans during the nineteenth century, the growing gap between the political economies of the North and South, and twentieth-century feminist efforts to challenge the masculine nature of the public sphere—to illustrate just how meaningful the idea of the consumer and the spaces of consumer culture were to shaping modern politics. Both show the degree to which local, regional, and national politics were very often about participation in the marketplace. Readers also see the ways in which the consumer was often, but not always, identified with particular classes, races, and genders and how these categories were intertwined with notions of citizenship and American identity.

With Cohen tackling the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, and Westkaemper taking the 1910s to the 1970s, both authors reveal how the growth in the marketplace of goods was frequently seen as a threat to imagined notions of simplicity and thriftiness and to diverse notions of American identity. Despite, or perhaps because of, this anxiety, several key groups managed to [End Page 211] redefine consumerism as a mode of citizenship; and in so doing, as Cohen explains, "enable[d] middle-class Americans in particular to harness the nation-state to a capitalist marketplace" (2). Westkaemper especially focuses on one legacy of this development by highlighting how middle-class women (white and non-white) employed market ideologies and methods and historical narratives to advance their vision of citizenship and carve out new roles for themselves and other women in the public sphere.

While there have been a number of very important studies of the politics of consumption in American history, these two books use the tools of cultural history to examine how actors and venues not necessarily associated with consumer culture were in fact critical to the invention and reinvention of the consumer in American political culture. Neither author explicitly wrestles with Frank Trentmann's very important argument on the role of liberalism in the construction of modern notions of the consumer, but both substantiate his intervention. Cohen in particular identifies the different visions of the consumer promoted by free traders and protectionists, and charts how these change over time given the developing nature of American politics, the market economy, and the economic knowledge. The twentieth-century feminists that Westkaemper examines embraced the increasingly white, feminine, and middle-class vision of the consumer constructed by figures in Cohen's book to advance their individual careers as producers of consumer culture. Relatively elite African American women often tried to appropriate this strategy to various degrees of success. All of the feminists Westkaemper studies turned to history for inspiring stories of exceptional women and to establish the idea that gender norms are not and never have been timeless and fixed. Whether selling cigarettes or women's equality, the idea of progress was critical to the successes of both feminism and consumer culture.

Joanna Cohen argues more broadly that consumer and political identities were intertwined throughout the nineteenth century. She is particularly attentive to the role of war and postwar settlements in producing new meanings of the nation, the economy, and the consumer. She focuses on the aftermath of...

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