“All the World and her Husband”

Women in 20th Century Consumer Culture (with Maggie Andrews) (Continuum, 2000)

talbot_alltheworldCritical acclaim for “All the World and her Husband”:

“The exploration of women’s consumer power in some chapters is checked in others which focus instead on the interpellating function of consumer discourses and consumer culture’s commodified versions of power which has co-opted even feminism itself…this is a very useful book”.

Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou, University of the Peleponnese

Many of women’s everyday experiences are tied up inextricably with consumption. In consumer culture research, it tends to be the activities and interests of women which take centre stage. This collection provides a wide range of different perspectives on women as consumers, focusing on popular culture, including examinations of popular media and their targeting of female audiences. Apart from a grounding in feminism, the collection does not present a single view, theoretically, methodologically, or politically. Its contributors work across a wide range of disciplines, including cultural and media studies, design history, and sociolinguistics. What they all have in common is the aim of understanding women’s experiences and struggles in relation to consumer culture in the 20th century.

Available here.

Chapter Contents:

1 Introduction: women in consumer culture
Maggie Andrews and Mary M Talbot
2 ‘All the World and Her Husband’: the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition 1908-39
Deborah S Ryan
3 New disciplines for women and the rise of the chain shore in the 1930s
Janice Winship
4 Modernity tamed? Women shoppers and the rationalisation of consumption in the inter-war period
Mica Nava
5 ‘The greatest invention of the century’: menstruation in visual and material culture
Alia Al-Khalidi
6 Georgette Heyer: the historical romance and the consumption of the erotic, 1918-1939
Sallie McNamara
7 ‘A Material Girl’? Adolescent girls and their magazines, 1920-1958
Penny Tinkler
8 ‘Mrs Housewife and Her Grocer’: the advent of self-service food shopping in Britain
Barbara Usherwood
9 Decisions in DIY: women, home improvements and advertising in post-war Britain
Jen Browne
10 ‘As seen on TV’: design and domestic economy
Alison J Clarke
11 Advertising difference: women, Western Europe and ‘consumer-citizenship’
Anne M Cronin
12 Strange bedfellows: feminism in advertising
Mary M Talbot
13 ‘Thanks for stopping by’: gender and virtual intimacy in American shop-by-television discourse
Mary Bucholtz
14 A self off the shelf? Consuming women’s empowerment
Deborah Cameron
15 Fashioning the career woman: power dressing as a strategy of consumption
Joanne Entwistle
16 Non-occasion greeting cards and the commodification of personal relationships
Jane Hobson
17 Girl power and the post-modern fan: the 1996 Boyzone concert tour
Maggie Andrews and Rosie Whorlow

Print Friendly, PDF & Email