Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America - Softcover

Goldstein, Carolyn M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469622149 ISBN 13: 9781469622149

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014

Synopsis

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 this title

Book Description:

"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

About the Author:

Carolyn M. Goldstein is Public History and Community Archives Program Manager at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is also the author of Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in Twentieth-Century America.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1469622149
• ISBN 13: 9781469622149
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 424