Purchasing Power
Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture
by Donica Belisle
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Pub Date Apr 21 2020 | Archive Date Mar 27 2020
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Description
Exploring the roots of Canadian consumer culture, Purchasing Power uncovers the meanings that Canadians have historically attached to consumer goods. Focusing on white women during the early twentieth century, Donica Belisle reveals that for thousands of Canadians between the 1890s and World War II, consumption was about not only survival, but also civic expression.
Offering a new perspective on the temperance, conservation, home economics, feminist, and co-operative movements, Belisle brings white women’s consumer interests to the fore. Due to their exclusion from formal politics and paid employment, many white Canadian women turned their consumer roles into personal and social opportunities. They sought solutions in the consumer sphere to isolation, upward mobility, personal expression, and family survival. They effectively transformed consumer culture into an arena of political engagement.
Yet if white Canadian women viewed consumption as a tool of empowerment, so did they wield consumption as a tool of exclusion. As Purchasing Power reveals, Canadian women of privileged race and class status tended to disparage racialized and lower income women’s consumer habits. In so doing, they constructed hierarchical notions of taste that defined who – and who did not – belong in the modern Canadian nation.
Advance Praise
“Drawing on rich archival research, Donica Belisle has written a fascinating consumer history of Canada, focusing on women’s contributions before World War Two. This well-written study explores the links between citizenship and consumption, detailing the ways that white British practices were normalized as “Canadian” and the role that women played in the formation of white Canadian nationalism in the early twentieth century. Belilse’s work offers a more nuanced understanding of the periodization of North American consumer society. Analyzing twentieth-century women’s “prosumer” activities such as cooking, sewing, and knitting, as well as diverse Canadian women’s efforts on behalf of consumer-oriented social movements, Belisle demonstrates the centrality of consumption to Canada’s cultural, economic, and political life. Her book is a welcome addition to recent scholarship that is working toward breaking down the artificial barriers between consumption and production.”
- Vicki Howard, University of Essex, United Kingdom, author of From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Stores (Penn Press, 2015).
Marketing Plan
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- International Review Mailing
- Author interviews
- E-Marketing Campaign
- Social Media Campaign
- International Advertising
- Conferences
- Academic Journals
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781442629110 |
| PRICE | CA$29.95 (CAD) |
