Shopping for Pleasure

Women in the Making of London's West End

Bibliographic Data

ID19905191
AuthorsErika Rappaport (0009-0004-4923-2010, corresponding author), Erika Diane Rappaport
Year1999
Pages344
Publication date1999-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueShopping for Pleasure (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPrinceton University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1515/9781400843534
OpenAlexW3003504543
Open LibraryOL34170728M
ISBN9781400843534
GOOGLE_BOOK_IDuMkkEAAAQBAJ
LanguageEN
Citations received20

In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century.Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London

Advertising · Art · Business · Pleasure · Computer Science · Consumer Retail Behavior Studies · Decadence, Literature, and Society · Interdisciplinary Cultural and Social Studies · Neuroscience · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Wine Industry and Tourism · Consumer behavior · Consumption (Economics) · Department stores · Economic conditions · London (england)

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