Purchasing Power Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture

by Donica Belisle

Exploring the roots of Canadian consumer culture, this book uncovers the meanings that Canadians have historically attached to consumer goods. Focusing on white women during the early twentieth century, it 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, this book 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 Consumer Citizens 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.

Genres: History

304 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2019

Reviews

[Dasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture (2020), Belisle explores the politics, economics, and culture of consumerism in Canada between the 1890s and 1930s. The participation of select women, namely white, middle or upper-class women, in Canada’s economy and politics through consumer culture redefined, Belisle argues, Canadian citizenship. Belisle’s investigation demonstrates that women’s consumer involvement has been a critical aspect to survival but also to status, identity, belonging, and liberation (p. 3). Indeed, while white women used their role as consumers to negotiate a place within male-dominated spheres of politics and economics. These women navigated a complex consumer culture that constituted a major aspect to women’s lives and in which consumerism reflected morality, social and economic stratifications, justice, and aesthetics (p. 3-4).

[J Earl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture by Donica Belisle is a survey of the ways in which women, specifically white women, participated in and largely drove the rise of consumerism.

While the emphasis is on white women's actions and motivations it is not without making the elements of racism, classism, and nationalism visible. My impression on the rationale for the emphasis on white women is that they represented the bulk of the rise and that they offer, through the various movements and associated groups, the richest archival sources. Thus this works serves to both add to the current knowledge and offer places where other researchers can focus more closely on, for instance, one movement and take a more intersectional approach. Those avenues are mentioned here even though Belisle doesn't take those detours. That is not so much a weakness of the book as it is a function of keeping the work on topic and focused.

Depending on your level of knowledge of any of the major movements (temperance, conservation, home economics, feminist, and co-operative) there will be a great deal of new information for you. For instance, I was not aware that the role of redistributing the money within the family unit was as big a factor in the temperance movement as it was. Makes perfect sense and I knew that a couple of (in my case US) activists of the time mentioned this element, but I had not known that it was an established aspect of the whole movement.

I recommend this to any reader who wants to learn about the role of consumerism, both historically and by extension currently. The book doesn't make a large effort to bring the thinking into the present, though the theoretical influences she mentions serve that purpose to some extent, but that is because the book is about a specific time period. The main points, using products and buying habits to marginalize for example, are easily applicable to our current culture.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.