Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-06, Section: A, page: 2538.

Director: Nancy F. Cott.

This dissertation examines elite white women's reform activism and publicity as these were situated in the social and economic relations of nascent consumer culture at the turn of the century. The propaganda and consumer-based political strategies of the National Consumers' League, a Progressive reform group with predominantly female leaders and members, are examined as one instance in which such women appropriated and reinterpreted prevailing ideologies about consumption and female consumers for reform ends. The League promoted moral consumption, urged supporters to purchase only goods made without the exploitation of workers, and successfully won protective labor legislation for working-class women and children. Arguing that consumer demand was not morally neutral, League reform publicity rhetorically and symbolically linked producers and consumers, using alternative or utopian meanings of products to illuminate the social relations of production.

Consumers' League propaganda was part of a larger debate about the ethics of commercial culture. In League rhetoric, female consumers, shopping practices and consumer goods themselves became sites of contested meaning. Older sentimental ideals, liberal Protestantism, contemporary economic theories and new media techniques drawn from reform and commercial venues were combined to place women at the center of political economy. Positing female consumers and moral consumption as powerful economic forces, the Consumers' League's critique of consumption also became the basis for its redefinition of the productive work of female reform professionals and elite housewives.

Integrating the history of consumer culture and U.S women's history, the study complicates the simplistic stereotype of the white middle-class female consumer found in much of the current literature in history and cultural studies. The strategies and ideology of the Consumers' League demonstrate that the emergent commercial culture was not uncontested. The disputed, fluid, and gendered meanings of "consumer" allowed people of all classes, but especially upper- and middle-class women, to redefine new and old social roles in order to become self-conscious political actors. The dissertation also complements the work of women's historians who have characterized reformers in this period as "social housekeepers" or "maternalists" by examining female consumers as portrayed and mobilized by the Consumers' League.