Consumer Culture

Books

Purchasing Power: Women and the Rise of Canadian Consumer Culture. University of Toronto Press, 2020. Winner of the 2021 City of Regina Book Award.

What Canadians bought, and refused to buy, was a form of political action. Drawing on the records of women's organizations across the country, this book shows how settler women used consumption as a vehicle for public advocacy and cultural change. Behind the figure of the female shopper is a political actor who is rarely recognized as an economic force.

University of Toronto Press →

Retail Nation: Department Stores and the Making of Modern Canada. UBC Press, 2011. Pierre Savard Award · Honourable Mention, Sir John A. Macdonald Prize · Shortlisted, John W. Dafoe Book Prize.

Between 1890 and 1940, Eaton's, Simpson's, and the Hudson's Bay Company sold more than goods. They sold a vision of Canada and who belonged to this nation: people who were acquisitive, modern, and British. This book examines department stores as sites of desire and exclusion, as workplaces for tens of thousands of mostly female clerks, and as active agents in building a national identity that served some Canadians far better than others.

UBC Press →

Research Articles

• 2014
  "Conservative Consumerism: Consumer Advocacy in Woman's Century Magazine during and after World War I"

  Histoire sociale / Social History 47, no. 93 (2014): 111–38. DOI: 10.1353/his.2014.0002 · [Full text: pending clearance]

  Women's consumer advocacy in early twentieth-century Canada was not apolitical. Rather it was a form of political economy that challenged manufacturers, retailers, and the state on behalf of working-class households.
• 2013
  "Sexual Spectacles: Women in Canadian Department Store Magazines between 1920 and 1950"

  In Writing Feminist History: Productive Pasts and New Directions, ed. Catherine Carstairs and Nancy Janovicek, 135–58. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. [Full text: pending clearance]

  Department store staff magazines often sexualized its photographs of company saleswomen, both for readers' entertainment and to sell goods back to their employees.
• 2011
  "Crazy for Bargains: Inventing the Irrational Female Shopper in Modernizing English Canada"

  The Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 4 (2011): 581–606. DOI: 10.3138/chr.92.4.581 · [Full text: pending clearance]

  Winner, Hilda Neatby Article Prize. Department stores in early twentieth-century Canada invented the figure of the irrational female shopper as impulsive, easily manipulated, and susceptible to display. They did this to manage and contain women's real economic power as the majority of retail customers.
• 2011
  "Virtue and Vice: Consumer Culture in English Canadian Fiction before 1940"

  International Journal of Canadian Studies 43, no. 1 (2011): 165–88. DOI: 10.7202/1009459ar Open Access

  How English Canadian novelists between 1890 and 1940 wrestled with the moral implications of mass consumption, and what their anxieties reveal about class, gender, and national identity.
• 2007
  "Negotiating Paternalism: Women and Canada's Largest Department Stores, 1890 to 1960"

  The Journal of Women's History 19, no. 1 (2007): 58–81. DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2007.0004 · [Full text: pending clearance]

  How women workers in Canadian department stores navigated paternalistic management systems, and sometimes pushed back.
• 2006
  "A Labour Force for the Consumer Century: Commodification in Canada's Largest Stores, 1890–1940"

  Labour / Le travail 58, no. 2 (2006): 107–44. Open Access

  The labour history behind the department store counter: how Canada's largest retailers commodified their own workers alongside the goods they sold.
• 2005
  "Exploring Postwar Consumption: The Campaign to Unionize Eaton's in Toronto, 1948–1952"

  The Canadian Historical Review 86, no. 4 (2005): 641–72. DOI: 10.3138/CHR/86.4.641 · [Full text: pending clearance]

  Republished in Joan Sangster, ed., "Women's Voices," Canadian Historical Review vol. 102, Supplement 3 (2021); and in Home, Work, and Play, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015). The largely forgotten unionization campaign at Eaton's and what it reveals about class, gender, and the limits of postwar consumer prosperity.
• 2003
  "Toward a Canadian Consumer History"

  Labour / Le travail 52, no. 2 (2003): 181–206. DOI: 10.2307/25149387 Open Access

  The foundational argument: why consumer history matters for understanding Canadian capitalism, and a methodological roadmap for the field.
• 1999
  "'Granting a Square Deal': The Brandon Unemployed Worker and the Political Education of Brandon's Jobless during the Great Depression"

  Manitoba History 36, no. 2 (1999): 37–40. [Full text: pending clearance]

  How unemployed workers in Depression-era Brandon used a self-published newspaper to develop a political language of consumer rights and economic citizenship.

Book Reviews

• 2019
  Review of Bettina Liverant, Buying Happiness: The Emergence of Consumer Consciousness in English Canada

  American Review of Canadian Studies 49, no. 2 (2019): 365–367. [Full text: pending clearance]
• 2016
  Review of Douglas McCalla, Consumers in the Bush: Shopping in Rural Upper Canada

  Canadian Historical Review (2016): 449–452. [Full text: pending clearance]
• 2014
  Review of Graham Broad, A Small Price to Pay: Consumer Culture on the Canadian Home Front, 1939–45

  Labour / Le Travail 74, no. 1 (2014): 357–358. [Full text: pending clearance]
• 2012
  Review of Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth Century America

  Journal of Consumer Culture (2012): 371–373. DOI: 10.1177/1469540512456935 · [Full text: pending clearance]
• 2006
  Review Essay: "Suburbanization and Mass Culture in North America"

  Labour / Le travail 57, no. 1 (2006): 135–44. Open Access