Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 189-193

5. Coming of Age in Consumer Society

5. Coming ofAge in Consumer Society In 1920, when she was twelve years old, Louise Rosenfield left her affluent family and their comfortable home in Des Moines, Iowa, and boarded a train bound for Maine. She was headed for summer camp, wearing a brand-new outfit in which she felt "very well dressed." She wore a navy skirt, a white shirt, white socks, "low-heeled shoes, and best of all, a wide-brimmed straw hat decorated with streamers of embroidered ribbons." When the train reached Chicago, she met other girls headed for the same camp. As she sized them up, her satisfaction with her own clothing disappeared. She recalled , "I was completely taken aback. They were wearing heels, silk stockings, girdles, and sophisticated hairdos. I was the unsophisticated girl from the country and completely out of place." Her feelings of inferiority continued. The rest of the girls at camp were "sophisticates from New York and Washington," and Louise found it difficult to bridge the social chasm that separated her from their society. "I felt like an outsider all summer long," she recalled. At the end of her stay at camp, in an attempt to replicate the look of her camping mates and cope with her envy, she replaced her ribbontrimmed hat (which she now disparaged) with a more stylish beret purchased in a neighboring village. When she returned home, she expected her mother to criticize her for her new purchase, but her mother was unperturbed.1 Louise's experience was increasingly typical of children growing up in consumer society. Acutely aware of status distinctions and their own relative social standing, middle-class children believed wholeheartedly that the solution to their status anxieties could be found in retail stores, and their parents often supported them in this belief. Children born between 1890 and 1930 de- COMING OF AGE IN CONSUMER SOCIETY 149 veloped a strong faith in the power of goods and played a central role in the expansion of American consumer society. As youngsters they developed new emotional habits, habits that stayed with them their entire lives and which they passed on to their own offspring. The emotional style that they developed is widely evident today and continues to sustain the American consumer economy. Middle-class children's concerns about their own status and their appetite for consumer goods ran counter to many adults' assumptions about the nature of childhood. Bourgeois adults of the period generally regarded childhood as a time of innocence. In this idealized view of youth, adults sheltered children from financial realities, freed them from the need to labor, and protected them from the stiff social competition and status anxieties that so plagued the adult world. While this idealized view was popular, it was hardly accurate.2 Middle-class children (here defined as under sixteen) growing up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were acutely aware of the income and relative status of their families, and the differences in wealth and position that separated adults often created sharp cleavages in children's worlds as well.3 Youngsters with less often envied schoolmates with more, while privileged youth frequently and cruelly flaunted their advantages in order to provoke envy in their poorer acquaintances. As bourgeois Americans confronted the new pressures and temptations that the expanding consumer economy offered, the occasions for envy multiplied . In the 1890s and 1900s, children observed their parents and friends using consumer goods in their struggle for status, and they often found themselves similarly engaged in social competition. Department stores, magazines , and catalog houses also educated them about desirable products and the social prestige that they offered. The culture of childhood was gradually becoming commercialized. By the 1910s and 1920s, this trend was even more apparent. Movies and advertisements exposed young and old alike to a wider range of goods and lifestyles. The influence of these new media could be felt in the quickening pace of social life, a pace which bourgeois adults and their offspring often struggled to match. Children of the 1920s learned from their parents and from the commercial culture around them that envy, striving, and acquisitive behavior were socially acceptable and became willing participants in the consumer culture. Some adults worried about children's envy and tried to discourage the emotion and offset the effects of consumer culture. Schoolbook authors, ministers, and psychologists all worked to teach children to restrain their 150 CHAPTER 5 envy. Even...