North American Consumer Culture

Introduction

In the late 19th, early 20th century a new phenomenon arose. Along with the development of industrial advances and urbanization of the emerging North American culture was the growth and subsequent domination of the consumer culture. Consumer culture is a term that goes hand and hand with the American way of life today, but in those days it was a new and unique experience. Along with the development of the mail order catalogue, advertising became a focal point of North American mass media. Advertising can be traced back as early as Franklin's Philadelphia Gazette (Thogersen, pp. 439-445). After the turn of the century hand bills were given in the streets listing goods and services that many merchants could provide, and the New York Sun boasted that, along with news, readers could view advertisements in full print. The Untied States government realized the emergence of such a strong and forceful medium and that prompted them to slap the Stamp Act in any print advertisement way back in 1765 (Giddens, pp. 77-81).

Discussion

Historical Development in North American Consumer Culture

The historiography of the Post-World War II Era includes several social histories that attempt to grasp the lived experience of their subjects' lives as well as works that focus on discursive processes looking deeply at how ideas in culture develop and shift over time. Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumer's Republic and Jessica Weiss' To Have and To Hold are both seminal social histories of the post-War era, while in Homeward Bound and The Permissive Society, Elaine Tyler May and Alan Petigny have concerned themselves with cultural process. All of these works deal with the rise of mass consumption in the 1950s, and (some better than others) the issues of gender and race that are tied up in this rise. Each author, though focusing on the same period, had their uses of sources and analysis significantly colored by their decision to use a social or cultural analysis (Thogersen, pp. 439-445).

Elaine Tyler May and Alan Petigny use cultural sources to discern the effects of consumer culture on wider North American society in the 1950s. In her research, May concerns herself with cultural discourse and argues that images of the middle-class family within consumer culture, especially advertising, saturated society with ideas about such a family with a male breadwinner and a sexually attractive consumer housewife with children. This cultural discourse of the “normative” middle-class family became the dominant discourse within post-World War II America making it difficult to construct identities outside of this paradigm. Petigny, on the other hand, uses cultural sources to show how, instead of becoming more focused on domesticity, the immediate post-War period, which has been generally glossed over by historians, actually began the permissiveness that was evidenced in the 1950s and 1960s (Gelb, pp. 29-46).

The different ways in which these authors approached their studies theoretically, between a discursive or material analysis, profoundly shaped the ways in which they considered consumption in the late 1940s and 1950s (Vitell, pp. ...