UNC Press - Creating Consumers

424 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 20 hts, 1 table, notes, bibl., index

Cloth

ISBN 978-0-8078-3553-1

Published: May 2012

Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America

Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition, professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. Carolyn M. Goldstein charts the development of the profession from its origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual disappearance by the 1970s.

Working for both business and government, home economists walked a fine line between educating and representing consumers while they shaped cultural expectations about consumer goods as well as the goods themselves. Goldstein looks beyond 1970s feminist scholarship that dismissed home economics for its emphasis on domesticity to reveal the movement's complexities, including the extent of its public impact and debates about home economists' relationship to the commercial marketplace.

About the Author

Carolyn M. Goldstein is an independent historian and author of Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in Twentieth-Century America.

Reviews

“General readers and researchers will appreciate Goldstein’s attention to detail and ability to clearly communicate this complex subject. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; general readers.”
--Choice

"This timely book challenges the literature on consumer culture to think in more nuanced terms about the meaning of 'consumer' and 'housewife.' Goldstein combines analyses of the role of the state, corporate product development, the history of food, and gender to create a full history of the shaping of public as well as private market policy."
--Susan Levine, University of Illinois at Chicago

"In her insightful new book, Goldstein has done an excellent job of researching and reinterpreting the roles that home economists played in building the modern American consumer economy. Brought to life through a wealth of interesting sources, Goldstein’s home economists are complex historical actors. Nothing comparable is in print."
--Nancy Tomes, Stony Brook University

"Creating Consumers brings fresh perspectives and insight to the history of American consumer culture. Calling on a wide range of archival sources, Carolyn Goldstein offers an eye-opening analysis of a diverse movement with ambitious goals as reformers in business, government, and education."
--Susan Strasser, author of Never Done: A History of American Housework and Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market.