D onica B elisle . Purchasing Power

Donica Belisle’s eclectic history of women in early twentieth-century Canadian consumer culture offers a surprising and challenging perspective on consumer history. These are not the politicized Canadian consumer activists of the 1930s and 1940s who deployed gender normativity strategically to infiltrate the male-defined realms of economics and politics in pursuit of economic equality and expanded rights. Rather, these women remind us of the Australian, British, Chilean, and other housewives who mobilized in midcentury to support right-wing, conservative governments. Although the histories of right-wing housewives’ movements elsewhere are not referenced in this account, the white, British-identified, middle-class Canadian women who organized around moral and nationalist causes and who are the subjects of this study are their natural counterparts. That omission is consistent with the self-identification of the subjects themselves, none of which considered themselves to be consumer organizations. On the contrary, Belisle has reimagined evangelical, rural, nationalist, and club-women’s organizations; home...

Advertising · Club · Consumer choice · Consumer Culture · Economics · Middle class · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Purchasing · Sociology · White (mutation) · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law