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WORK TITLE: A Thirst for Empire
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Rappaport, Erika Diane
BIRTHDATE: 1963
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/erika-rappaport/ * https://www.ft.com/content/77112998-80ec-11e7-94e2-c5b903247afd
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1963.
EDUCATION:Rutgers University, Ph.D., 1993.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. University of California, Santa Barbara, European cultural historian.
AWARDS:Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Biannual Article Prize, ‘The Bombay Debt’: Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India, Gender and History 16, number 2, August, 2004.
WRITINGS
“Sacred and Useful Pleasures: The Temperance Tea Party and the Making of a Sober Consumer Culture in Early Industrial Britain,” Journal of British Studies 52, number 4, October, 2013, p. 990-1016; “Marriage, Celibacy or Emigration? Debating the Costs of Family Life in Mid-Victorian England,” in Economic Women” Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press, 2013; “Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by Frank Trentmann, Oxford, Berg, 2006, p. 125-46; “‘The Bombay Debt’: Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India,” Gender and History 16, number 2, August, 2004, p. 233-260.
SIDELIGHTS
Erika Rappaport is a writer and European cultural historian. Rappaport received her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1993. She teaches European history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a focus on modern Britain, gender history, comparative consumer cultures, urban history, food history, and the history of empires, capitalism and globalization. Rappaport researches how commodities and shopping spaces have been essential to the construction of identities, politics, and economies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Shopping for Pleasure
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End is a historical examination into the relationship between women and shopping and the rise of London’s West End shopping district in the Victorian and Edwardian era. Andrea Friedman in Journal of Women’s History described Shopping for Pleasure as “an ambitious and meticulously researched book.”
In the book, Rappaport counters the theory that department stores, a representation of commodification, provided new opportunities for women to venture out in public spaces. She also dismisses the notion that women were merely manipulated passively by capitalism. Instead, she asserts that retailers and other department store entrepreneurs remade and marketed themselves specifically to attract the suburban female shopping population. She suggests that women were not seeking a way to exist in public spaces, but rather retailers lured them to department stores and other spaces of consumerism by appealing to their shopping interests. Additionally, she notes that women’s tastes dictated shopping culture, and the culture around shopping was a form of emancipation and empowerment for women.
Rappaport presents her argument by tracing the historical development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commodification and consumerism. She explains how women’s shopping was the result of a number of factors, not merely a simplistic relationship between merchants and consumers. She points to the rise of capitalism alongside with rise of consumer culture with the opening of department stores, the availability of credit, and the birth of the feminist movement. Rappaport describes how the feminist movement gave women the confidence and ability to leave the house and shop on their own, leading to more visibility of women and more interactions between women.
The rise of credit created an interesting contrast to the feminist movement. As women began shopping more, they began to rely on systems of credit to fund their spending habits. Particularly when they shopped far from their homes, they would rely on their husband’s credit to purchase items. This created tension between husbands and merchants and husbands and wives. Husbands feared that their wives spending would become uncontrollable, and such debt would feminize them. Courts agreed with this concern, and consistently upheld the claims of husbands to revoke their wive’s ability to pledge credit, limiting the women’s ability to shop.
Yasemin Besen in International Women’s Studies wrote, “through evocative examples and anecdotes it helps revive the emergence of shopping as a leisurely activity and explores its implications for the British society,” while Christopher P. Hosgood in English Historical Review noted, “the author does a superb job of situating women shoppers within the broader culture of West End life.”
A Thirst for Empire
In A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, Rappaport examines the history and culture of tea within the context of globalization. She focuses primarily on Britian, and how the beverage influenced and changed the culture of the region.
The book begins in the seventeenth century, when tea first made its way from Asia to Europe. The item immediately became popular and was associated with high culture and fashion. England came into contact with tea after the European continent, but it quickly became highly valued. It became a symbol if civility and refinement, and was integrated into British culture. By the middle of the eighteenth century, tea trade was common enough that even the lower classes had easy access to the beverage.
Rappaport writes that in the nineteenth century, a shift occurred in who had power over the tea industry. By this point, tea was an established component of British society. With the discovery of tea leaves in Assam, tea could now become a British crop product, allowing them to compete with rivaling China. Trade wars between the two empires were active and violent, and this new commodity allowed Britain to overcome China in tea production. Following this section, Rappaport uses tea as a context to examine other historical events in Britain and worldwide, including the Great Depression and the World Wars. She also analyzes the commodity in relation to such movements as continued globalization and the following decolonization.
Justin Zaremby in New Criterion wrote, “the patient reader will find Thirst for Empire informative and thought-provoking,” while a contributor to Financial Times website described it as “an authoritative and exhaustive work of scholarship,” adding, “Rappaport supports her broad claims by building from the ground up, with meticulous referencing comprising more than one hundred pages.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
English Historical Review, volume 118 number 476, 2003, Christopher P. Hosgood, review of Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End, p. 543.
Journal of International Women’s Studies, volume 6 number 2, 2005, Yasemin Besen, review of Shopping for Pleasure, p. 156.
Journal of Women’s History, volume 13 number 2, 2001, Andrea Friedman, review of Shopping for Pleasure, p. 159.
New Criterion, November, 2017, Justin Zaremby, “Imperial Blend,” p. 61.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2017, review of A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, p. 45.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (August 17, 2017), review of A Thirst for Empire.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, https://www.smh.com.au/ (October 12, 2017), Alan Attwood, review of A Thirst for Empire.
Washington Times Online, https://www.washingtontimes.com/ (January 7, 2018), Aram Bakshian Jr., review of A Thirst for Empire.
ERIKA RAPPAPORT
MENU
Erika Rappaport
Professor
Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1993
Area:
Modern Britain, Gender History, Comparative Consumer Cultures
Office:
HSSB 4252
Office Hours:
Tuesdays, 9:30-11:30 or by Appointment
Quarter: Winter 2018
Email:
rappaport@history.ucsb.edu
Personal Statement:
I am a European cultural historian, interested in the history of gender and consumer cultures in Modern Britain and its Empire. I study how particular commodities and shopping spaces are integral to the construction of identities, politics, and economies in the 19th and 20th centuries. My recent work to reposition the British Empire within a broader global framework. I enjoy teaching comparative histories of gender, consumerism, urban history, food history, and the history of empires, capitalism and globalization.
Advisor to:
David Baillargeon
Julie Johnson
Joshua Rocha
Elizabeth Schmidt
Stephanie Seketa
Kristen Thomas-McGill
Selected Publications:
A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2017)
Rappaport-A Thirst for Empire cover
A Thirst for Empire examines the history of tea from three interconnected perspectives: as a British-dominated colonial industry that was transplanted from China to India, Ceylon, Southeast Asia, and Africa; as a global commodity whose trade came to be centered in nineteenth and early twentieth-century London; and as beverage with similar but distinct consumer cultures in Europe, South Asia, the Americas and Africa. The Chinese and other imperial and regional powers play a part here, but this book focuses on the central role of the British Empire. It thus provides a new global history of Modern Britain and presents a portrait of empire as a changing, fluid and yet powerful entity. Through both a broad sweep and focused lens, A Thirst for Empire highlights how people living and working in South and East Asia, North America, Africa, the Pacific and Europe aided and resisted the growth of the new tastes and commercial practices that define global capitalism. Beginning in the seventeenth-century and reaching a peak in the early twentieth century, this book traces the development of an empire of tea that overlapped with but was never the same as the formal boundaries of the British Empire. This story reveals the practices, politics and imagination of merchants, planters, and promoters, as well as consumers and retailers. Lastly, although sharing much with other similar global commodities, tea was the first agricultural industry to use imperial power and resources to engage in and pay for advertising and political lobbying in many locations over a long period of time. The model that tea developed is still used today and is critical to understanding the role of politics and publicity in shaping the geographies and power dynamics of the modern global economy.
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Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Consuming Behaviours: Identity, Politics and Pleasure in Twentieth Century Britain, edited by Erika Rappaport, Sandra T. Dawson, Mark Crowley
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
“Sacred and Useful Pleasures: The Temperance Tea Party and the Making of a Sober Consumer Culture in Early Industrial Britain,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 4 (October 2013): 990-1016
“Marriage, Celibacy or Emigration? Debating the Costs of Family Life in Mid-Victorian England,” in Economic Women” Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013)
“Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party” in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006): 125-46.
‘The Bombay Debt’: Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India, Gender and History 16, no. 2 (August 2004): 233-260. Winner of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Biannual Article Prize.
Art, Commerce, or Empire? The Rebuilding of Regent Street, 1880-1927
History Workshop Journal 53 (Spring 2002): 96-119.
Courses Taught:
History 4C: European History, 1715 to the Present
History 141A: 19th Century Britain
History 141B: 20th Century Britain
History 124A: Women, Gender and Sexuality in Europe, 1750-1914
History 124B: Women, Gender and Sexuality in Europe, 1914 to the Present
History 193F: Food in World History
Various graduate and undergraduate seminars on comparative consumer cultures, British National and Imperial History and European Gender History
Honors and Professional Activities:
Associate Editor, Journal of British Studies
National Endowment for the Humanities, Personal Research Award, 2010-2011
Modern Britain and Ireland Editor, History Compass
University of California President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, 2004-05
International Visiting Fellow, Cultures of Consumption Program, Birkbeck College, University of London, Summer 2004.
Honorable Mention, 2001 British Council Prize, North American Conference on British Studies for Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)o
Reviews, Interviews, Podcasts
Listen to Episode #26, “The Once and Future of Food,” The American Scholar Podcast featuring an interview about my book, A Thirst for Empire
Financial Times
The National
Times Higher Education
Wall Street Journal
The Spectator
Erika Rappaport
Professor
Ph.D., Rutgers University, 1993
Area:
Modern Britain, Gender History, Comparative Consumer Cultures
Office:
HSSB 4252
Office Hours:
Tuesdays, 9:30-11:30 or by Appointment
Quarter: Winter 2018
Email:
rappaport@history.ucsb.edu
Imperial blend
Justin Zaremby
New Criterion. 36.3 (Nov. 2017): p61+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Foundation for Cultural Review
Full Text:
Erika Rappaport
A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press, 672 pages, $39.50
In 1946, George Orwell published an essay on a matter that is the subject of "violent disputes'--namely, the making of a "nice cup of tea." His recommendations include warming the pot beforehand and pouring tea in the cup before adding milk. He also touches on the global reach of the beverage: tea, he explains, is "one of the mainstays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia, and New Zealand." "China tea," he writes, "has virtues which are not to be despised nowadays--it is economical, and one can drink it without milk--but there is not much stimulation in it." His final point is that tea, unless drunk in the "Russian" style, must be served without sugar.
In Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, Erika Rappaport places the consumption of tea within a larger history of empire and globalization. In the process, she explores the ways in which an ancient infusion traveled from Asia to Europe, becoming a symbol of temperance, civility, and refinement. And as Britain sought to extend its influence to Asia, it laid claim to the beverage, transforming a foreign drink into a vital part of modern British culture. Throughout the book, she describes tea's wide influence on politics, social life, war, empire, diplomacy, commercial life, and religion.
When tea arrived in Europe during the seventeenth century, it was an object of conspicuous consumption. England developed a taste for the leaf later than its continental peers, after the restoration of the British monarchy. According to one story, the East India Company curried favor with Charles II by giving him two pounds of tea. Others suggest that Charles's queen, Catherine de Braganza, made tea fashionable (a 1663 poem, "On Tea," written for her birthday, honored "the best of queens, and the best of herbs"). Tea, like coffee and chocolate, gradually became a central part of English culture, politics, and economics. The tea trade became a motivating force behind the rise of English maritime life and a popular cargo for smugglers. It also provided new retail opportunities as tea shops emerged, including, in 1717, Thomas Twining's retail tea shop for female shoppers. By the middle of die eighteenth century, prices were low enough that tea was consumed by members of the lower classes, with some critics decrying die fact that the foreign substance was being consumed by every "Lady, Lord, and common punk."
Indeed, there was no unanimity regarding the effect of tea on British society. For some the drink served as an antidote to Britain's widespread overconsumption of ale. Tea was a symbol of temperance and moderation. For others it signaled decadence. In 1822, the radical journalist William Cobbett decried tea as the drink of the idle. He called it "a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an engenderer of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age." "There is no useful strength in it" he declared, "it communicates no strength to the body ... [and] does not in any degree assist in affording what labour demands."
Of course, although tea rapidly became a central part of British society, it was not initially a British commodity. The transformation of the world's perception of British culture seems to have resulted from Britain's taking an active role in the crop's production with the discovery of tea in Assam. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Raj offered Britain the opportunity to compete with China. During a time when trade wars were evolving into military wars between the two empires, the tea trade provided a valuable commodity for Britain and a source of national pride, even as the global production and sale of Assam tea went hand-in-hand with certain cruelties of British imperialism. Tea originally may have moved from East to West, but by the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was sending tea back to the East and around the world.
For Rappaport, tea provides a framework for examining subjects ranging from the Depression and the World Wars, to advertising and decolonization. Her book is tremendously detailed and clearly the result of painstaking research. A Thirst for Empire is not light reading, however. Indeed, Rappaport's desire to engage with academic literature often leaves her narrative feeling a bit oversteeped in historiographical debates. She writes with hesitant prose, seeming to fear that at any moment her narrative may be subject to attack from one or another group of scholars who may feel slighted by being overlooked, hi addition, there is a didactic quality to the text, given her focus on "how global capitalism has produced both ideologies of internationalism and multiple articulations of nationalism and racism." It is certainly true that Britain's relationship to tea reflects its changing self-conception as a nation and empire, and the ways in which a commodity can affect politics and society. One wonders, however, whether her extensive research and compelling stories could have reflected her thesis more deftly.
The patient reader will fincL4 Thirst for Empire informative and thought-provoking. Patience and attention to minutiae, are, of course, essential parts of tea culture. To quote Orwell again, "It is worth paying attention to such details as warming the pot and using water that is really boiling, so as to make quite sure of wringing out of one's ration the twenty good, strong cups that two ounces, properly handled, ought to represent."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Zaremby, Justin. "Imperial blend." New Criterion, Nov. 2017, p. 61+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A514513337/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c89f014e. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A514513337
A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the
Modern World
Publishers Weekly.
264.23 (June 5, 2017): p45+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World
Erika Rappaport. Princeton Univ., $39.50
(672p) ISBN 978-0-691-16711-4
Rappaport (Shopping for Pleasure), professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, leaps onto the commodityhistory
bandwagon in this diverting but overstuffed history of the "civilizing force" that was supposed to
heal "bodies, nations, and world problems." She traces tea's rise as a global commodity in the 17th century
and the empire of consumption, taste, and commerce that grew up around it. As Rappaport duly notes, the
history of tea is intertwined with the history of capitalism and of modernity itself; as the ultimate imperial
product, tea linked diverse peoples across vast swaths of space and time. The book moves from the
coffeehouses of London to the muggy plantations of Assam to the advertising firms of Madison Avenue,
revealing the technologies and marketing techniques that were instrumental in achieving tea's global
popularity. Along the way, Rappaport touches on the temperance movement, commodity chains, Americans'
famous dislike of tea, and the sociocultural sphere inhabited by the planter class in Southeast Asia, among
many other topics. Exhaustively researched and winningly recounted, the book is nevertheless
overambitious in scope and its focus on the beverage makes it unavoidably mundane on occasion--an
impressive achievement, but perhaps not everyone's cuppa. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 45+.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538368/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a942d4e5. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
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Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the
Making of London's West End
Andrea Friedman
Journal of Women's History.
13.2 (Summer 2001): p159.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Johns Hopkins University Press
http://www.press.jhu.edu
Full Text:
Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End. Princeton, N.
J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. xiii + 323 pp.; ill.; maps. ISBN 0-691-04477-5 (cl).
Since Western nations began building consumer economies, the consuming woman has been constituted as
an object of dread and ridicule, fear and desire, a figure whose wants and needs some seek to suppress,
others to incite. At the same time, consuming women have ranged between home and marketplace, crossing
boundaries that demarcate private and public, self and family, production and reproduction, and feminine
and masculine. These two aspects of consumption--how women are constituted as objects and constitute
themselves as subjects--are not unrelated. Because consumption remains uncontained and uncontainable
within the ideological boundaries of Western capitalist societies, women's participation in consumer culture
offers rich opportunities for historical analysis.(1)
The four books under review here investigate the relationship between gender and consumer culture by
focusing on the various ways that women have interacted with commodities. Together, these studies yield a
fuller understanding of the gender and class politics of consumption. While the authors offer distinct
methodologies and theoretical orientations, they agree that by buying, selling, and using things, women
invested goods with meaning, gave structure and voice to their own identities, and reshaped the world
around them. Each author touches on the relationship between consumerism and women's activism, but they
differ over whether women's participation in consumer culture is liberating or oppressive, as well as over
whether this is a meaningful question.
In Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, Nan Enstad establishes working-class women's consumption as a
foundation for their gender and class identity and politics. Her departure point is striker Clara Lemlich's
complaint during the 1909 New York City shirtwaist strike that working girls had no protected place to hang
their hats: "Sometimes a girl has a new hat ... but it's pretty sure spoiled after its [sic] been at the shop.... We
like new hats as well as other young women. Why shouldn't we?" (8). Enstad reads this striker's reproach,
together with the evidence of dime novels, fashion, female adventure films, and journalistic representations
of shirtwaist strikers, to offer an imaginative and often brilliant analysis of the ways that urban working
women "formed subjectivities in relationship to commodities" (13). The identity that they created, which
Enstad terms "working ladyhood," articulated their uniquely gendered and classed brand of radicalism, and
provides a lens through which we can understand their consumption behaviors as political.
Enstad's approach arises out of a scholarship that recognizes the limits on corporate capital's ability to
control the uses to which commodities are put and the meanings that goods have for consumers yet she is
attuned to the industrial practices, economic pressures, and cultural forces that actually produce
commodities.(2) She traces the processes of rationalization that shaped and standardized the cultural
products available to working women, yielding flimsy French-heeled shoes, formulaic dime novels
featuring a virtuous working-class heroine who discovers her secret inheritance and marries a rich hero, and
serial films that ignored the collective labor activism in which working women engaged, showcasing
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instead individual working girls engaged in improbable feats of derring-do. However, it is what happened to
these commodities when they were placed in circulation that most interests Enstad. She analyzes three
aspects of consumption--acquiring, using, and imaginatively interacting with goods--each of which became
part of the construction of working ladyhood. When working women spent money they earned on
commodities, they constituted themselves as workers; when they read English-language novels or wore
modern hats, they claimed an American identity.
To describe their imaginative interactions with products, Enstad uses theorist Walter Benjamin's notion of
the "wish image," arguing that working women "made themselves into ladies" by engaging the utopian
element present in commodities--for example, by dressing with "gentility" or imagining themselves as
movie stars (69). But the wish for ladyhood was not merely a fantasy that distracted working women from
the real challenges at hand. Instead, it expressed their ability "to imagine recognition and value as workers"
and as women; it supported their dignity and self-worth, and it made possible solidarity and resistance
(200).
Enstad's rendering of working women's multifaceted relationships to these products, particularly clothing
and dime novels, is persuasive and richly imagined. For example, she makes a compelling case that dime
novels were not merely, or even primarily, disempowering and conservative, as other historians have
charged.(3) Rather, when the dime novel heroine gains her secret inheritance and marries her hero, the
working woman reader recognizes her as the "lady" that she has been all along. Thus, the dime novel plot
can be read as an affirmation of working ladyhood, offering to its readers "narrative fantasies of social
recognition that allowed them to briefly bridge painful cultural contradictions that assigned heroic worker
status to men and heroic `lady' status only to middle- and upper-class white women" (70).
These cultural contradictions also came into play when working women took to the picket line in the 1909
shirtwaist strike. Much as she examined the "dual nature" of goods, tracing both the rationalized production
process and more elusive practices of consumption, Enstad analyzes the dual nature of women's labor
activism. Labor leaders, seeking middle-class support, sought to construct striking women in terms that
would be "intelligible" to the public, simultaneously as rational political subjects and needy victims. This
construction, which, Enstad claims, historians have erroneously taken as a description of reality, was at odds
with--indeed, was meant to counter--strikers' self-presentation as working ladies, who dressed elaborately
and were boisterous and sometimes violent on the picket line. Strikers fashioned themselves as heroines by
creating their own political subjectivities that redefined worker militancy and womanhood in line with their
experiences in factories, on the streets, and as consumers. Strike leaders' narratives, which accepted the
equations between femininity and irrationality, and working woman and abject victim, made strikers
invisible.
Because she rejects the idea of a bifurcated politics and consumerism, Enstad refuses to conclude her
narrative with the story of the strike, placing her analysis of working ladies' consumption of movie serials at
the end of the book. Resisting "a heroic history of political actors who have exhibited remarkable, if
inexplicable, autonomy, rationality, and agency despite the myriad of forces arrayed against them," Enstad
prefers to locate union militance and moviegoing on similar terrain (205). This decision might give some
readers pause: is there no difference between self-conscious collective political action and the construction
of "political subjectivities?" Some of the differences that existed among working women--for example, their
varying attitudes about popular culture, to which Enstad alludes, as well as distinct positions in relation to
consumer culture held by the Jewish and Italian immigrant women about whom she writes--are also given
short shrift in this book. Also, a heavy dose of theory may make it challenging for undergraduate course
use. But these are minor complaints about a groundbreaking book that must alter how historians think about
the relationship between commodities and politics.
Erika Diane Rappaport is interested in a different group of women, focusing on bourgeois women's
relationship to commodities in London's West End to reveal gender's importance to urban history. In
Shopping for Pleasure, she argues that the process of creating the city and of recreating gender identities
went hand-in-hand. Like Enstad, she is interested in the ways that meanings become attached to things.
Rappaport contests the notion that commodification itself (in the form of department stores) created new
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opportunities for women to venture out in public. Instead she traces the ways in which retailers and their
allies remade themselves to attract the suburban crowd that female shoppers constituted. As she maps the
ways women traversed the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century city, she reveals new details about
the creation of "a bourgeois femininity that was born within the public realm," convincingly portraying a
female explorer and adventurer whose pleasure was central to the consumer culture that grew up around her
(5).
An ambitious and meticulously researched book, Rappaport's study brings together business, cultural,
urban, and gender history, ranging among topics that include the emergence of department stores, married
women's credit law, debates over public lavatories, the creation of clubs and businesses owned and managed
by women, and the theatrical West End. She is especially adept at exploring how distinct cultural forms
overlapped and informed each other, allowing for a variety of ways of becoming familiar with the city and
its pleasures. For example, Rappaport details how from the 1860s, the women's press presented London as a
"great exhibition," featuring sketches of city life through which women could imagine themselves
wandering the streets. By the 1880s, these journals, increasingly dependent upon advertising revenue,
described the West End "as a `real' feminine arena in which women wandered, worked, shopped, dined, and
clubbed together" (122). Accompanying this shift, the women's press published detailed guides to the
delights that awaited women shoppers, from stores to restaurants to clubs, and sought to convince women
that public transportation endangered neither their safety nor their respectability. By 1909, when American
entrepreneur Gordon Selfridge opened his massive and elegant department store, the press reported on the
event as news and so "broadcast the [display] windows' message to an incalculable number of potential
shoppers" (156). As Rappaport reminds us, retailers and journalists produced Edwardian commercial
culture together, and women gained urban knowledge not just from shopping in the city but from reading
about the city as well.
Rappaport is attuned to the ways that the emergence of the female urban adventurer and shopper altered
notions of public and private and reshaped relations of gender and power. Her analysis of the debates over
married women's credit is particularly fascinating. As women shoppers traveled farther from their homes,
pledging their husbands' credit to shopkeepers to whom they were strangers, conflict arose between
husbands and merchants, and husbands and wives. Fears that women's out-of-control desire for things could
feminize their husbands, making them dependent upon shopkeepers to whom they were indebted,
apparently trumped retailers' need to limit their risk, for courts consistently upheld the claims of husbands
who had privately revoked their wives' rights to pledge their credit. At the same time, women's enhanced
mobility and the expanding network of retailers combined with a legal system that limited women's
responsibilities for their debts to create opportunities for women to purchase goods even when forbidden by
their husbands. As the female shopper ranged farther afield, bringing familial responsibilities and private
relationships into public, retailers coped with the conflict between bourgeois domestic ideology and
advanced capitalism by abandoning credit and moving to a policy of "ready money."
Consumption's disruptive effect upon gender hierarchies is also seen in the creation of "resting places" for
women shoppers. Rappaport discusses the demand for public lavatories and the founding of women's clubs
as part of the growth of a "feminist commercial culture" in Victorian London. Meant to make women's
sojourns to the city not only comfortable but also possible, such institutions, with their restaurants and
reading rooms, invited women to enter as consumers, but clubwomen hoped they "would exit as citizens"
(88). Women's clubs that flourished during the late nineteenth century, Rappaport contends, challenged the
very notion of the public sphere as a masculine space; claiming the prerogatives and mobility of men,
women "traveled the world and advanced the cause of feminism" (100). Rappaport's claims for the creation
of a "feminist public sphere" would be strengthened by a more precise definition of feminism, which
sometimes seems to mean merely the move into public. Still, her analysis of the ways that women could use
consumption to redesign the city to create spaces for themselves is compelling, as is her account of how
commercial enterprises ultimately supplanted female institutions, with the result that the opportunities for
"exiting as citizens" were restricted. Although the broader argument is sometimes obscured by an excess of
detail, the story Rappaport tells of the conflicts and collaborations arising from women's movement through
the modern city is an important contribution to the history of urban commercial culture.
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If Rappaport sees a constrained and conflicted, but real, possibility of emancipation via consumerism in
women's responses to London's West End, Margaret Finnegan is less optimistic in Selling Suffrage. This
study of the mainstream suffrage movement's embrace of consumerism in the 1910s demonstrates that even
as the movement reached its zenith, it "contributed to the commercialized political sphere that now
dominates American culture" (12). This, then, is a story of declension, of the paradox of women seeking to
expand democracy while advocating an ideology that privileged personality over rationality and "access to
commodities over equal access to political power" (113).
Along the way, though, suffragists demonstrated a real talent for infusing their movement with "color and
dash." While early suffragists were frequently uncomfortable with consumerism, by the 1870s they had
generally accepted that consumption could contribute to social progress, a view that was ultimately
expressed in their embrace of expediency arguments and an activist state that serviced the needs of citizenconsumers.
By the Progressive Era, suffragists portrayed the woman voter as a rational and knowledgeable
shopper among candidates, who would use her ballot to purchase social uplift.
Having made their peace with consumerism, mainstream suffragists sold their movement in a variety of
ways. They embarked on carefully orchestrated propaganda campaigns that attracted the attention of the
press to influence the middle-class reading public, while targeting the mass public with elaborate pageants
and spectacles, which provoked an emotional response. These and similar strategies--for example,
purchasing billboard space, erecting electric signs, and displaying suffrage slides in motion picture theaters-reflected
a new understanding that urban space was commercial space and that the city itself could be used
as a site to advertise woman suffrage. Women activists also sold a wide variety of suffrage commodities,
building on such earlier practices as the suffrage bazaars of the nineteenth century. By the 1910s, however,
the marketing of suffrage goods had become more widespread, more formal, and better organized, as these
goods served as a form of advertising rather than a "symbol of political identity" (124). Further, as
commercial enterprises also marketed suffrage commodities, suffragists welcomed such developments as a
sign of their movement's success. New York activists designated Macy's as "suffrage supply headquarters"
and suffrage organizations endorsed products like the "suffrage blouse" and "WOMANALLS," overalls for
women who replaced men as agricultural laborers during World War I.
Yet as suffragists embraced commodities, Finnegan argues, they sometimes made their challenge to
American political culture less comprehensive. Some suffrage wares, like kewpie dolls and suffrage
valentines, embodied a kitsch expression, representing votes for women in sentimental and romantic terms.
These goods may have helped advertise and legitimize woman suffrage, but they also made it less
disruptive to the gender order. Similarly, representations of suffragists--in plays, pageants and films, and as
speakers--increasingly emphasized activists' pleasing personalities and attractiveness, rather than the logic
and ethical foundation of their cause. And when suffrage pageants blended "fantasy, reality, color, and
abundance," Finnegan contends, they could "bypass rational discourse completely" (102). These new
representational strategies ensured that "citizenship became another part of [the] commodity-defined, otherdirected
sense of self," simultaneously reassuring spectators that the woman citizen would remain a woman
(107).
Here and throughout her study, Finnegan's approach departs substantially from that of Enstad, who
identifies the binary between "character" and "personality" as an ideological construct created by the middle
class to disguise its self-definition through the use of commodities. According to Enstad, many historians
have accepted this view, and consequently they "decry the centrality of commodities to the self in the
twentieth century, dismiss the so-called `culture of personality' as superficial, and harken back to the
`culture of character' as a mode of being in which values, rather than products, mattered" (20). Finnegan
positions herself within this tradition, arguing that as suffragists embraced consumerism and enacted the
culture of personality in their self-representation, they collaborated in emptying citizenship of its former
meanings, giving up "free inquiry for a supervised image and social approval" (108). These differences
between the two authors also are reflected in their basic understanding of the relationship between
consumerism and politics. Where Enstad downplays the distinction between the two, portraying working
women, like all individuals in capitalist society, as inevitably constituting their political selves through their
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use of commodities, Finnegan suggests that as suffragists embraced consumption, "the lines between
political and consumer-oriented means of self-realization could become confused" (107). But those lines
existed nonetheless.
These differences delineate widely divergent approaches toward the study of gender, politics and
consumption. Each perspective has its benefits, and Finnegan's has much to commend it. In particular, she is
able to decipher how twentieth-century suffragists understood their strategies of promotion and
representation. Plumbing suffrage organization records, suffrage and popular journals and newspapers, and
the memoirs and memorabilia of women involved in the movement, she both illuminates the ways in which
female activists imagined their relation to the wider world and expands our knowledge about how they
practiced politics. With the possible exception of a rather dry chapter on The Woman's Journal, her analysis
of suffragists' embrace of consumerism is consistently entertaining and insightful, and makes a substantial
contribution to the history of woman suffrage in the United States.
While suffrage blouses and WOMANALLS might suggest that commodities could be liberating for women,
Tupperware is likely to summon up an image of suburban conformity and conservative domesticity. Alison
J. Clarke complicates that image in Tupperware. Clarke, a design historian, asks "why certain objects come
to matter more than others do," and finds the answer not in Tupperware's design or its functionality but in
the way that it valorized women's lived experience, both as an object to be used and as a commodity to be
sold (4). In other words, the reasons why Tupperware became "indispensable" are found in its social
circulation among women.
The story of Tupperware is far more fascinating than one might imagine. It begins with Earl Tupper, an
eccentric part-time tree surgeon and inventor whose design endeavors reflected both his marginalized
relationship to corporate capitalism and a moral commitment to solving social problems through
technology. Working as an independent contractor with DuPont, he manufactured a variety of plastic goods,
in concert with female kin who assisted and critiqued his endeavors. In 1942, he produced a "flexible,
injection-molded, polyethylene bell-shaped container," which became the basis for his line of kitchenware,
first known as Poly-T and later to become Tupperware. Despite critical raves for its utility and modernist
design, however, Tupperware failed to sell widely. Consumers' previous experience with plastic products,
which tended to be smelly, brittle, and combustible, made them wary. Tupper sought to counter their
skepticism by marketing his kitchenware and Poly-T novelty items such as cigarette cases, poker chips, and
place card holders as tasteful accoutrements necessary to the middle-class woman's hostess responsibilities.
In so doing, he emphasized Tupperware's sociality, "bridging the gulf between traditional customs and the
newly formulating manners of the postwar home" (57).
Yet it was not until 1951, when Tupper pulled his goods out of the department and hardware stores where
they were being sold and turned to the "home party plan," that Tupperware became indispensable to
consumers. Direct sales outfits had used home parties to market other household goods since the 1920s, and
some of these distributors independently began offering Tupperware as well. Noting their success, Tupper
appointed one such salesperson, a divorced mother from Detroit named Brownie Wise, to oversee a party
distribution network for Tupperware. The history of the commodity was forever changed.
As Clarke demonstrates, Wise created a corporate culture that self-consciously venerated the feminine.
Tupperware parties exploited networks of neighbors and kin, relying on female traditions of mutuality,
conviviality, and loyalty to sell products. They celebrated domestic responsibilities while providing
entertainment and escape from the domestic sphere for hostesses, guests, and dealers. Tupperware products
were consistently redesigned in accord with consumers' suggestions. Perhaps most significant, Wise
fashioned a work environment for her distributors, 95 percent of whom were women, that incorporated selfrealization,
interpersonal relationships, fantasy, and glamour. She articulated a feminized version of positive
thinking, encouraging women to consider their sales jobs as serious careers and imploring them to "see
`your dreams come true with Tupperware'" (136). At the same time, she imbued the job with glamour, both
through her widely publicized lifestyle and at the annual "homecomings" held for distributors at corporate
headquarters. At one of these yearly pilgrimages, for example, hundreds of women participated in a "Dig
for Gold," unearthing mink coats, diamond rings, toasters, and a toy car to be traded in for the real thing.
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Finally, although the majority of Tupperware executives were men, Wise made sure that the company was
represented as a female domain. In publicity photos, for example, male executives were pictured walking
ten paces behind Wise or offering her gifts on bended knee; at one homecoming, they appeared before
female distributors in a fashion show, scantily clad and posing provocatively. All of this was apparently too
much for Earl Tupper, who engineered Wise's departure in 1958 and subsequently sold the company.
Clarke's effort to consider "mass consumption and Tupperware ... as wholly valid aspects of women's
history" is only partly successful (5). She convincingly demonstrates the importance of examining how
women, as consumers and distributors, put products into social circulation, joining other scholars who have
complicated our picture of corporate hegemony during the postwar period by investigating the meanings
consumers have made of commodities.(4) Moreover, her evocation of the reasons why women made
Tupperware a successful product, particularly how it valorized domestic life while also offering a departure
from it, is alert to the incongruities of women's lives during the 1950s. Yet the story she tells remains
disconnected from the extensive and growing literature on the history of the era, including much of the
scholarship on women's history.(5) Consequently her analysis of Tupperware's conservative and subversive
meanings remains superficial. Nonetheless, it is clear that the history of Tupperware yields one more
example of the contradictions of life in 1950s America, and in consumer society generally.
A plastic bowl is never just a plastic bowl, as Clarke insists. Nor is a blouse ever just a blouse, a department
store just a department store, or a hat just a hat. These four books remind us that analyzing women's
interactions with commodities is key to understanding how consumption has been gendered and how gender
is produced within consumer culture. In delineating the politics of consumption in a variety of contexts,
they reveal the complexities of women's relationships not just to the market but also to wage labor, the
public sphere, their families and communities, and themselves.
NOTES
(1) For an explication of these ideas, see Victoria de Grazia with Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things:
Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
(2) See, for example, Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); and Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures:
Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1986).
(3) Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Joyce Shaw Peterson, "Working Girls and Millionaires: The
Melodramatic Romances of Laura Jean Libbey," American Studies 24, 1 (spring 1983): 19-35.
(4) See, for example, Lynn Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
(5) Clark is cognizant of some of this literature but does not fully place the history of Tupperware within the
context it provides. See Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New
York: Basic Books, 1988); Joanne Meyerowitz, ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar
America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never
Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Barbara Ehrenreich, The
Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Doubleday, 1983); Cynthia
E. Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945-1968 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988); Eugenia Kaledin, Mothers and More: American Women in the 1950s (Boston:
Twayne, 1984); Michael Rogin, "Ronald Reagan," The Movie: and Other Episodes in Political Demonology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums:
The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987);
Spigel, Make Room for TV. For more recent contributions, see Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the
Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst:
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University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); Laura McEnaney, Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization
Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).
ANDREA FRIEDMAN is assistant professor of history and women's studies at Washington University in
St. Louis, Missouri. She is author of Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York
City, 1909-1945 (2000) and currently is working on a book on sex and politics in cold war America.
Friedman, Andrea
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Friedman, Andrea. "Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End." Journal of
Women's History, vol. 13, no. 2, 2001, p. 159. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A79027499/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=32e8579f.
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Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the
Making of London's West End
Yasemin Besen
Journal of International Women's Studies.
6.2 (June 2005): p156+.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Bridgewater State College
http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/
Full Text:
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End. Erika Diane Rappaport. 2000.
Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 323 pp. $24.95 paperback.
Women and shopping have often been linked in the literature on consumption and gender, and traditional
accounts analyzed shopping as a way in which women are manipulated as passive objects of capitalism. In
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End, Erika Rappaport explores the complex
relationship between women and shopping in a different light as she focuses exclusively on the making of
London's West End shopping district in the Victorian and Edwardian era. She investigates the intertwined
relationship between the rise of consumer culture and women which resulted not only in making shopping a
leisure activity for middle class women where they became consumers and objects of consumption, but also
in emancipation of women through shopping. The book captures, describes and illuminates the dual role of
one of the most central and ubiquitous practices of the modern world--shopping--by historically tracing how
consumer culture thrived on women's shopping while at the same time helped women's emancipation by
increasing their visibility in the public domain.
The Rappaport ably captures this historically complex process of the incorporation of women into the
public sphere through shopping as a multi-faceted change of the British society. Instead of reducing the
mechanisms behind the incorporation of women into the public sphere to shopping, she portrays it as the
result of a unique combination of a myriad of factors such as the rise of capitalism, proliferation of
consumer culture with the opening of department stores, availability of credit and the simultaneous rise of
the feminist movement. She analyzes a dual problem where women are not only manipulated as objects of
consumption in the act of shopping, they simultaneously gain public visibility and are incorporated into the
public sphere. Rappaport's rich, insightful analysis is reinforced by her consideration of other movements
and developments, such as the feminist movement, which helped the process, as well as counter-forces that
hindered the incorporation of women into the public sphere, including anxious husbands and judges who
viewed women's shopping on credit as immoral.
The book consists of six chapters. Rappaport begins by describing the historical emergence of shopping as
an everyday, leisure activity for the middle class, as well as its uniquely gendered nature. The author
identifies a dramatic change in British society starting in the 1870's with the rise of capitalism and consumer
culture, in which not only did shopping became an acceptable leisure activity, but women also started to
appear in public in the shopping districts. The increased visibility of women in the public sphere through
shopping not only emancipated women from the domestic sphere, but also transformed the public sphere; it
was feminized as an extension of the domestic sphere, and thus, gave rise to a unique female urban culture.
The second chapter explores how this new leisure activity resulted in the increased visibility of women in
the public sphere and unravels the tension and anxieties experienced by the actors, including women
customers, husbands and credit traders. The author identifies the economic factors, such as the availability
of credit, that enabled women's shopping, and discusses the counter-forces that hindered it, including
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husbands who were apprehensive about this new activity. This chapter relies in particular on a rich source of
trials and court cases involving women's use of credit, including an 1892 case involving a tailor working on
credit for a woman shopper and the refusal of the latter's husband to pay for his wife's shopping. Through a
rich analysis of this case (particularly the judge's praise of the husband who refused to pay for his wife's
shopping), Rappaport portrays the counter-forces standing against women's shopping and increased public
visibility from moral and judicial standpoints.
The discussion of counter-forces is followed in the third chapter by an extensive analysis of the combination
of forces which helped the incorporation of women into the public sphere through shopping and the role
played by the bourgeoning feminist movement in shaping the gendered nature of shopping in the West End
district. Parallel to the development of retail stores, there emerged feminist-inspired tearooms, public toilets,
clubs and restaurants, all of which inevitably contributed to the creation of a feminine public sphere as a
safe extension of the domestic realm in the shopping districts. While the emerging feminist movement
created such establishments as an alternative to retail stores, they not only facilitated women's incorporation
into the public sphere through shopping, but simultaneously reinforced the idea of shopping as a distinctly
feminine activity.
While the earlier sections focused on structural changes in the society, the fourth chapter explores the role
of women as consumers and attempts to revive the "lived experience" of shopping. Rappaport discusses the
rise of the modern women, who appropriated the public sphere as a distinctly feminine space and thus, the
emergence of a modern feminine shopping culture. Through the examples of women's magazines and the
Lady Guide Association's tour guides, she identifies the emergence of shopping as an "urban leisure
activity, akin to sightseeing." By instructing middle-class women on consumption, such magazines and
guides established the experience of shopping--both seeing and being seen in the shopping districts--as a
"central component of a modern women's identity."
The next section identifies how these forces, which started in the late 1870s, resulted in the extravagant
opening of the first American-owned and influenced department store, Selfridges, on Oxford Street in 1909.
The opening of this large-scale department store not only symbolized the pinnacle of consumerism, mass
consumption, marketing and advertising, and highlighted the newly emerged role of women as consumers,
but also raised important questions about the decline of British power and the increasing American
dominance.
The final section offers an analogy to this newly emerging form of leisure and attempts to compare
shopping with the theatre of the time as a form of female spectatorship. The author points to the alliance
between the theatre and commercial culture between the 1890s and WWI. During that period the theatre
functioned as a store window, displaying the fashion of the time. Through musical theatre, Rappaport
identifies the emergence of woman's consumption as a tool to create herself as a sexual object.
To accurately portray the complex relationship between the rise of consumption, modern femininity and
women's visibility in the public sphere, Rappaport employs a rich collection of historical data. Primarily
historical in approach, the work recaptures the emergence and the lived experience of shopping through
historical records and a detailed literature review of secondary sources. The historical accounts are
reinforced also by the extensive use of women's journals, court records, novels and songs. While the
historical records and official accounts help to describe the over-time changes, the detailed use of court
cases, anecdotes, newspapers, women's journals, novels and songs of the period better capture the lived
experience of these changes from the perspective of the actors involved--women, husbands of the women
who shopped, women's organizations, shopkeepers, etc.
The wide array of sources and the rich historical analysis is presented with an extensive use of visual aids
consisting of maps of the shopping district, photographs of the shops and clubs women enjoyed, store
advertisements, and caricatures and social satire from the press of the period. Such visual aids help to revive
the lived experience of shopping by portraying the actual physical appearance of the shops, the way they
were marketed and promoted to the women who shopped them, and the way it was perceived and portrayed
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in the media. Such aids not only lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the lived experience, but
also render such a detailed historical study more accessible to a wider audience.
Shopping for Pleasure. Women in the Making of London's West End offers a welcome contribution to the
understanding of shopping for pleasure and its implications for women, with a fine-grained analysis of rich
and detailed historical data from a myriad of sources. Through evocative examples and anecdotes it helps
revive the emergence of shopping as a leisurely activity and explores its implications for the British society.
Rappaport addresses shopping as a social experience, rather than taking it for granted, and brings into light
the experience of consumers and those around them, all of whom have been traditionally neglected in the
study of consumption.
The rich historical analysis is embellished with interesting examples, anecdotes and court cases; however
the nature of these examples, as well as the large number of them, calls for further exploration and analysis.
The overwhelming majority of interesting examples require a more organized presentation and further
clarification in their support for and effects on the larger themes the author explores.
Furthermore, while all of the perspectives on shopping in the West End presented by the author are of vital
importance to the understanding of the emergent experience studied, each of the sections appears to be
independent of the others. These different aspects of the shopping experience, such as the lived experience
of the women involved, and the structural barriers against the incorporation of women into the public sphere
call for a more organized presentation and require more detailed linkages.
Overall, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End focuses on shopping--an
important, widespread and often taken for granted practice. By tracing it from its emergence in the context
of London's West End with in-depth analyses of it as a leisure activity, as well as its gendered nature, the
author is able to provide the reader with both evocative examples and a comprehensive study of the
historical data. With its rich historical analysis and multi-faceted perspective, not only does it constitute a
valuable contribution to the literature, but with its current subject matter, accessible language and
interesting examples, it would be an excellent source for the classroom in the understanding of gender and
consumption.
Reviewed by Yasemin Besen (2)
(2) Yasemin Besen is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, Montclair State University.
Besen, Yasemin
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Besen, Yasemin. "Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End." Journal of
International Women's Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2005, p. 156+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A176131074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=04f2812d.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
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Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the
Making of London's West End
Christopher P. Hosgood
The English Historical Review.
118.476 (Apr. 2003): p543+.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Oxford University Press
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/
Full Text:
by Erika Diane Rappaport (Princeton: Princeton U.P., 2001; pp. 344. Pb. 13.95 [pounds sterling]).
At the outset Erika Rappaport states that her study of the West End is not a social history of shopping.
Perhaps not, but it is very good social history and we learn a great deal about shopping. The author does a
superb job of situating women shoppers within the broader culture of West End life. In a telling section near
the conclusion there is a brief account of the Suffragettes' window smashing campaign of 1912; the author
observes that the window smashers recognized themselves as consumers and 'partly accepted retailers'
claims that shopping was a female "right" or form of "emancipation"'. Significantly, however, by smashing
windows women were not only reminding retailers that they should use their vote to support the rights of
women, they were also arguing that 'political rights, not department stores, brought about female
emancipation and independence' (p. 217). Women in the public gaze were commonly represented as
shoppers. In many instances popular magazines and journals ridiculed such women as suffering from a lack
of reason, at best, or as disorderly (usually when attending the sales), at worst. Rappaport's book is
important because she begins to identify the cause of the public's wider concern. Shopping 'became one of
the primary fault lines in Victorian and Edwardian culture because it challenged received notions of stable
class and gender identities and clearly demarcated physical spaces' (p. 221). Shopping both provided
women with the opportunity to escape the domestic sphere, but also placed them in a space where they
could be manipulated by consumer culture. Rappaport should not be criticized for failing to reconcile this
contradiction; it is enough that she introduces the shopping dilemma so thoughtfully. The author suggests
that her examination of the West End analyses the 'production and consumption of a set of discourses that
constituted the city as a pleasurable arena during the latter half of the nineteenth century' (p. 4). Working in
the tradition of Judith Walkowitz, she suggests that public space and gender identities were produced
together and, as the city became a pleasure zone, so the shopper became a pleasure seeker. Wealthy women
travelled from their homes to a world of department stores, theatres, tea-rooms and women's clubs. Indeed,
Chapter three, 'Resting Places for Women Wayfarers' is particularly intriguing because it engages the
process by which women were able to start entering the West End world. For example, in 1879 the Gazette
worked with the Ladies Sanitary Association to persuade London's vestries to build public lavatories for
women. The West End women's clubs that emerged to serve women shoppers also provided toilets, but also
so much more. Such clubs reinforced West End commercial culture and developed as an ideal female space.
Clubland was supplemented by the rapid rise of chain tea-shops, catering to a largely lower-middle-class
clientele. By 1909 Rappaport informs us that Joseph Lyons was claiming to serve 300,000 customers a day
in his various shops and restaurants (p. 103). Chapter two examines the vital issue of consumption and
women's credit. The author makes a persuasive case for the argument that women's shopping on credit was
considered immoral and socially dangerous; the courts attempted to contain husbands' liability for their
wives' extravagance. Cash traders, including William Whiteley, could safely sell to a mass market of
women; credit traders worried less about improving their market share and more about sustaining an honest
clientele. At the heart of this study are William Whiteley and Gordon Selfridge, two self-proclaimed giants
of London retailing. In part Rappaport sustains these men's inflated sense of importance by privileging their
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establishments, and department stores generally, over the more numerous and arguably important shops and
emporiums. None the less, Rappaport sympathetically chronicles the emergence of Whiteley's Westbourne
Grove retailing empire, the opposition of his neighbours and competitors, and the emergence of Bayswater
as a vibrant, but potentially dangerous, space. By 1909, when Gordon Selfridge opened his American
department store, the West End had been cemented in the popular imagination as the female playground (p.
175). Although this study reads more like a collection of essays than a tightly argued book, and while
theoretical concerns occasionally confuse the narrative, Rappaport has provided us with an important work
in so far as it confirms shopping as a vital cultural, social, economic and political activity at the heart of
women's urban experience. Rappaport's impressive control of a huge body of literature, journalism, and
archival material is astonishing; she constructs a compelling account of the gendering of the new shopping
experience of the late nineteenth century.
CHRISTOPHER P. HOSGOOD
University of Lethbridge
Hosgood, Christopher P.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hosgood, Christopher P. "Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End." The
English Historical Review, vol. 118, no. 476, 2003, p. 543+. General OneFile,
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A Thirst for Empire by Erika Rappaport — for the love of tea
How moralists and marketers turned an obscure ‘China drink’ into a world-conquering commodity
© Getty
Pietra Rivoli AUGUST 17, 2017 1
I write this on a sweltering day in Washington, DC, and so have a bottle of water at hand. The label alludes to many virtues: the water is purified, living, certified and premium-grade, bottled by a family firm at an ancient spring in Maine; the bottle itself is BPA-free and 100 per cent recyclable. It is the genius of marketing to imbue a product with moral heft and exclusivity, transferring a sense of virtuousness to the consumer who starts out thirsty and ends up — $3 later — feeling special, sacred and pristine.
The sleights of hand that conflate consumption with virtue are a central theme in A Thirst for Empire, a sweeping and richly detailed history of tea by the historian Erika Rappaport. How did tea evolve from an obscure “China drink” to a universal beverage imbued with civilising properties? The answer, in brief, revolves around this conflation, not only by profit-motivated marketers but by a wide variety of interest groups. While abundant historical records have allowed the study of how tea itself moved from east to west, Rappaport is focused on the movement of the idea of tea to suit particular purposes.
Beginning in the 1700s, the temperance movement advocated for tea as a pleasure that cheered but did not inebriate, and industrialists soon borrowed this moral argument in advancing their case for free trade in tea (and hence more open markets for their textiles). Factory owners joined in, compelled by the cause of a sober workforce, while Christian missionaries discovered that tea “would soothe any colonial encounter”. During the second world war, tea service was presented as a social and patriotic activity that uplifted soldiers and calmed refugees.
But it was tea’s consumer-directed marketing by importers and retailers — and later by brands — that most closely portends my water bottle and current trade debates. An early version of the “farm to table” movement was sparked by anti-Chinese sentiment and concerns over trade deficits, as well as by the reality and threat of adulterated tea containing dirt and hedge clippings. Lipton was soon advertising “from the Garden to Tea Cup” supply chains originating in British India and supervised by “educated Englishmen”. While tea marketing always presented direct consumer benefits (health, energy, relaxation), tea drinkers were also assured that they were participating in a larger noble project that advanced the causes of family, nation and civilisation.
A Thirst for Empire is an authoritative and exhaustive work of scholarship, and Rappaport supports her broad claims by building from the ground up, with meticulous referencing comprising more than 100 pages. Yet if some commodity histories err on the side of unsupported grand claims of how a product changed the course of history, Rappaport sometimes swings too far in other directions, at least for the general reader. The level of detail (12 per cent of Cornish households had coffee and tea equipment in the 1740s) inspires the reader’s confidence that one is in expert hands but sometimes distracts from Rappaport’s arguments. On the other hand, a rich trove of paintings, engravings and photographs beautifully illustrate her themes.
Rappaport’s treatment of her subject is refreshingly apolitical. Indeed, it is a virtue that readers will be unable to guess her political orientation: both the miracle of markets and capitalism’s dark underbelly are evident in tea’s complex story, as are the complicated effects of British colonialism. Shortly into this history the reader relaxes: Rappaport is clearly motivated by truth-telling rather than case-making.
Commodity histories are now themselves commodities: recent works investigate cotton, salt, cod, sugar, chocolate, paper and milk. And morality marketing is now a commodity as well, applied to food, “fair trade” apparel and eco-tourism. Yet tea is, Rappaport makes clear, a world apart — an astonishing success story in which tea marketers not only succeeded in conveying a sense of moral elevation to the consumer but also arguably did advance the cause of civilisation and community.
I have been offered tea at a British garden party, a Bedouin campfire, a Turkish carpet shop and a Japanese chashitsu, to name a few settings. In each case the offering was more an idea — friendship, community, respect — than a drink, and in each case the idea then created a reality. It is not a stretch to say that tea marketers have advanced the particularly noble cause of human dialogue and friendship. Rappaport recounts that in London during the second world war, Admiral Lord Mountevans commented that tea drinking had become widespread among soldiers and it was a magic of sorts: “It gave us courage and that matey feeling which gets the best effort out of us to help our fellow humans.” That matey feeling is surely what all humans seek, and it does seem that — thanks to centuries of brilliant marketing — tea plays a universal role in creating it.
A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, by Erika Rappaport, Princeton University Press, RRP£32.95/$39.50, 568 pages
Pietra Rivoli is author of ‘The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy’ (Wiley)
Photograph: Getty
A Thirst for Empire review: Erika Rappaport on the sheer power of a good cuppa
By Alan Attwood12 October 2017 — 11:57am
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HISTORY
A Thirst For Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World
Erika Rappaport
Princeton University Press, $79
It has never been enough for tea just to taste good. Or be refreshing. Or a catalyst for conversation. Throughout its long history, people have gone to great lengths to spruik its beneficial qualities. In China in 780, Lu Yu compiled his Classic of Tea, arguing that tea stimulated the mental faculties and cured diseases. Not only that, it promoted "the liveliness of poetic feelings" and "subtly awakens... pure thoughts". That's a lot of bang for each cup.
Bandsmen of the A.I.F. drink tea during a break while training at Sydney's Prince Alfred Park in 1942.
Bandsmen of the A.I.F. drink tea during a break while training at Sydney's Prince Alfred Park in 1942.
In the centuries since, tea promotions have stuck with the "good for you" argument. In the 12th century, a Buddhist monk extolled tea as "a miraculous technique for extending one's lifespan". Five centuries on, a founding member of Britain's Royal Society translated a Chinese text claiming that tea purified the liver and prevented consumption. The mid-1930s saw the launch of a long running "Tea Revives You" campaign, accompanied by a jovial Mr T. Pott (and his Cuplets). Then Gracie Fields, England's music-hall queen, was featured on posters suggesting, somewhat alarmingly, "A Cup of Tea Downs the Droops".
In wartime, ads went global: "Tea Revives the World". George Orwell put his kettle on and decided that the essence of British life was "the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the 'nice cup of tea"'. Propaganda pictures showed brave boys queuing for a mug in Egypt. Doing his bit for the war effort, fashion photographer Cecil Beaton snapped an incongruously shirtless member of HM Forces raising a cup in front of a sign saying "The Soldiers' Drink".
Frank Sinatra contemplates a cup of tea as he is met by reporters at Sydney Airport in 1961.
Frank Sinatra contemplates a cup of tea as he is met by reporters at Sydney Airport in 1961.
The story of tea is the story of colonialism. And commerce. And empire building. Erika Rappaport, a proponent of what she calls a "commodity-centred approach" to history, argues that tea "charts the history of several interconnected transnational communities ... united by a powerful belief that tea was not just a plant or a beverage but a civilising force that healed bodies, nations, and world problems".
But it was neither an ad nor a compelling table of export figures that prompted her to start studying the tea-leaves. No, it was a photograph of Frank Sinatra, apparently sipping from a cuppa during a concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, which she found gracing the cover of the annual report of the UK Tea Council in 1975. How, she wondered, had Sinatra ended up promoting tea?
It's appropriate that this photo was taken in England, as Britain floats in a sea of tea. Which is surprising, as the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) is totally unsuited to its climate. It must be imported. Rappaport depicts the history of tea as one of opportunism and economics and, often, exploitation of primary producers. "Tea had grown and been consumed in Assam long before the British arrived," she writes, "but the British Empire transformed the region into a vast tea garden able to satisfy world markets. This was a sordid business."
As Britain's reach extended across the globe, so too did the taste for tea. By the 1930s, 70 per cent of tea was produced in the Empire. Much of it went to Australia, renowned as "one of the greatest tea-drinking countries in the world". But why? The climate is hardly conducive to the brewing of hot drinks. Then again, the first colonists had arrived as confirmed tea-drinkers. Later, it became accepted that locals liked their tea strong enough to tan a horse's hide. Billy tea was a uniquely Australian innovation that would have bemused Victorian-era marketing folk who sold tea as a civilised beverage that "cheers but does not inebriate".
A Goldenia Tea sign in Leichhardt acts as a backdrop for an impromptu cricket match.
A Goldenia Tea sign in Leichhardt acts as a backdrop for an impromptu cricket match.
Photo: Paul Matthews/Fairfax Media
Without tea there could not have been afternoon teas, an excuse to consume mountains of sweet stuff. When World War I necessitated belt-tightening in Britain and "The Cake and Pastry Order" banned the manufacture and sale of fancy pastries, cafe proprietors protested that "afternoon tea was a democratic meal enjoyed by men and women of all classes, and as such it aided the war effort". One officer, meanwhile, declared his men "would put up with almost any deprivation as long as they had their tea".
Rappaport's focus on commodities comes at the expense of people. More would have been welcome, for example, on Sir Thomas Lipton, a Scot and "the most famous grocer to exploit the mass market". In the late-19th century, Sir Thomas decided the US represented "a practically limitless market for an enterprising merchant confident in his wares". He journeyed there only to find that "to all intents and purposes there was no tea-trade in America". Seeking refreshment at his hotel, he asked for tea only to have the waiter look at him "in blank amazement". Little has changed since.
A Thirst For Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, by Erika Rappaport.
A Thirst For Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World, by Erika Rappaport.
The US has often vexed those in the tea trade. Because of the Boston Tea Party (resentment to taxes imposed in London), tea was regarded as a precursor to revolution. But by 1843 the ladies of Cincinnati hosted former president John Quincy Adams at a Temperance Tea attended by 5000 people. By then, "American business was heavily involved in the tea trade and the beverage no longer carried any threat to ... independence". The next century, gridiron players featured in US ads accompanied by the slogan "For Vitality, Turn to Tea Today". Tea was also portrayed as part of feminine English culture that American women could enjoy.
After the 1930s, when home refrigerators became common in the US, fruit syrups were added and iced tea took off. Long before hip-hop, Mr T. Pott became Mr Ice Cube. Then the US flooded the world with its own drinks. Visiting South Africa in 1947, a member of the International Tea Market Expansion Board reported his alarm "at the obvious inroads competitive beverages are making into tea's natural market. I refer especially to the Coca-Cola Company... It was quite a common sight to see an extremely smartly dressed woman ... sucking a Coca-Cola from a bottle." This was a sticky sort of cultural imperialism. By the mid-1960s, even Britons were consuming less tea, prompting a BBC commentator to ask: "Tea drinkers of Britain, could we have braved the Blitz with instant coffee?"
For all its heft – more than 400 pages, plus another 140 for notes and an index, which means many mugs are required to get through this book – much is missing. The contemporary boom in herbal teas is ignored, and the reader is left wondering how or why Earl Grey and Queen Anne ended up with their names on packets of tea (which first appeared in the 19th century). Tea-bags, meanwhile, receive short shrift. The company founded by Joseph Tetley introduced tea-bags before World War II. By the 1950s, however, ads presented these as an American innovation, "The Modern Way to Make Delicious Tea". They were convenient for busy people or a housewife wanting just one cup.
For all her academic rigour, it is surprising that Rappaport has taken that photo of Ol' Blue Eyes at the Albert Hall on trust. Was he indeed sipping a "cup that cheers", as the Tea Council claimed, or something stronger? The name "Sinatra" is synonymous with many drinks, but not tea. When he wearily sings Set 'em up, Joe in One For My Baby ... he's not talking about Twinings. Cranky Franky would not have tolerated Mr T. Pott. Though he might have made a move on a Cuplet.
Alan Attwood is a former editor of The Big Issue and habitual maker and consumer of tea.
More than a tempest in a teapot
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By Aram Bakshian Jr. - - Sunday, January 7, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
There’s nothing new about globalism. Ocean and desert trade routes brought the silk and spices of the east to ancient Rome. Hellenistic culture — admittedly at sword point — reached as far as the Indian subcontinent thanks to Alexander the Great’s endless lust for new lands to conquer.
To this day in villages in Nuristan, an eastern province of Afghanistan, you can find blue-eyed descendants of the Greek and Macedonian invaders who colonized the area long before the birth of Christ.
But the first really massive commercial globalism came about in the 15th through 17th centuries as the great Western powers discovered the Americas, clashed with the mighty Ottoman Empire on the eastern fringes of Europe and, in the case of India and China, interacted with the ancient cultures of Asia.
Three of the most abiding legacies of these global phenomena come in liquid form: chocolate (originally introduced to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors who encountered it in Mexico as a beverage), coffee (popularized in the first European coffee houses in Vienna after a horde of the beans was taken as plunder from retreating Turkish besiegers in 1683) and tea (originally acquired in coastal trade with China but then raised on a massive commercial scale in British India, soon becoming a staple for millions of English-speaking people around the globe.
Happily, all three of these commodities, besides being incredibly popular, are actually good for you; modern medical opinion considers them healthy energy sources that contribute to mental as well as physical well-being. Tea, in particular, has also become an imbedded part of Anglo-Saxon social life from England to Australia. How it came to occupy such an iconic place in our societies makes for a fascinating story.
In “A Thirst for Empire,” Erika Rappaport, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has dedicated a thoroughly-detailed, scrupulously-researched volume to telling it. She even includes a thumbnail sketch of the charming old “Ceylon Tea Centre” on London’s Lower Regent Street (since moved).
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With its mixture of Art Deco design and South Asian motifs, the “Centre” was a charming spot to take an afternoon tea break between bibulous lunches at nearby London clubs in St. James’s and evening cocktails and dinner at fashionable — or fashionably louche — West End restaurants. In 1971 it was also one of the few spots in London where you could get a really good glass of iced tea, something that came in handy for this reviewer during a sudden hot spell that hit the metropolis during a summer visit.
If Ms. Rappaport’s book has one shortcoming for the general reader, it is that she often garbs her colorful subject with the dry, drab, politically-correct economic jargon so common in contemporary academe. But even these forays into alleged economic exploitation and imperialist abuses have their lively moments.
Anyone who ever enjoyed “high tea” in a genteel English household or one of the elegant old London hotels like The Connaught, The Ritz, Claridge’s or Brown’s (before its all-too-trendy renovation), will recall being offered a wide selection of teas to go with the pastries and mini sandwiches. The rough dividing line was always a choice between “India or China?” This because once British rule (direct or indirect) extended over most of India, large areas of Assam and Darjeeling were converted into plantations for the newly-introduced leaf which soon became a major cash crop.
The development of vast tea-growing areas in Ceylon, manned by imported South Indian Tamil laborers soon followed, the genesis of the ethnic tensions that still exist in what is now Sri Lanka between Singhalese and other “native” groups and the descendants of those original Tamil harvesters.
All of this tea production within the confines of the British Empire led to one of the first massive commercial PR campaigns, urging English and other Imperial subjects to “buy British” on patriotic grounds, backed by largely spurious claims that Indian tea was superior in flavor and the result of a much more modern, sanitary harvesting and processing system.
In reality, while some hearty Indian and Ceylon varieties still make for the ideal morning cuppa served with milk rather than lemon, China always was and still is the source of the noblest, subtlest brews whether your taste runs to Lungching greens, semi-oxidized Oolongs, traditional blacks, or bold ancient varieties like Yunnan Bonay, still grown where the first Chinese teas were cultivated thousands of years ago.
In the end, of course, the choice is yours. And, whatever you choose, you’ll probably agree with an anonymous 1960s English housewife quoted by the author: “Tea gives you a lift, more energy — a new lease on life.”
• Aram Bakshian Jr., an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, writes widely on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts.
• • •
A THIRST FOR EMPIRE: HOW TEA SHAPED THE MODERN WORLD
By Erika Rappaport
Princeton University Press, $39.50, 549 pages