Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A Historical Handbook and Guide

by Lisa Jacobson

Overview

Children play a crucial role in today's economy. According to some estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Jourbanalists, sociologists, and media reformers often present mass marketing toward children as a recent fall from grace, but the roots of children's consumerism — and the anxieties over it — date back more than a century. Throughout the twentieth century, a wide variety of groups — including advertisers, retailers, parents, social reformers, child experts, public schools, and children themselves — helped to socialize children as consumers and struggled to define the proper boundaries of the market. The essays and documents in this volume illuminate the historical circumstances and cultural conflicts that helped to produce, shape, and legitimize children's consumerism.

Focusing primarily on the period from the Gilded Age through the twentieth century, this book examines how and why children and adolescents acquired new economic roles as consumers, and how these new roles both reflected and produced dynamic changes in family life and the culture of capitalism. This volume also reveals how children and adolescents have used consumer goods to define personal identities and peer relationships — sometimes in opposition to marketers' expectations and parental intentions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313331404
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/30/2007
Series:	Children and Youth: History and Culture
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

LISA JACOBSON is Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century and has published articles and reviews in such jourbanals as the Jourbanal of Social History, Enterprise & Society, and Technology and Culture.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword   Miriam Forman-Brunell     ix
Preface     xiii
Acknowledgments     xvii
Essays
Advertising, Mass Merchandising, and the Creation of Children's Consumer Culture   Lisa Jacobson     3
Children's Media Consumption and Struggles for Cultural Authority in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries   Amanda Bruce     27
Reforming the Delinquent Child Consumer: Institutional Responses to Children's Consumption from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present   Paul Ringel     43
Parents and Children in the Consumer Household: Regulating and Negotiating the Boundaries of Children's Consumer Freedoms and Family Obligations   Lisa Jacobson     63
Documents
Promoting the Child Consumer     85
"How Does This Service Fit Your Needs?" (1916)$dSt. Nicholas promotional ad     86
"Dictator to the Universe" (1912)$dAmerican Boy promotional ad     87
"When Slim Watson Talks Carburetors" (1926)$dAmerican Boy promotional ad     88
"When They Crack the Whip You Jump" (1926)$dAmerican Boy promotional ad     89
"When Is a Girl Worth {dollar}11,690,499?" (1948)$dSeventeen promotional ad     90
"Teena, A Girl with Influence" (1947)$dSeventeen promotional ad     91
Courting Child Consumers     93
"Building aBusiness on Children's Good Will" (1920)   S. C. Lambert     94
"What Kind of Advertisements Do Boys Like?" (1920)   Horace A. Wade     97
"Children as Consumers and Persuaders" (1932)$dPrinters' Ink     99
"Radio's Most Critical Audience" (1934)   Bernard A. Grimes     100
"Children and Radio" (1936)   Don Gridley     102
Child Consumers, the Mass Media, and Mass Amusements     105
"Vampire Literature" (1891)   Anthony Comstock     106
The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets (1909)   Jane Addams     108
The Revolt of Modern Youth (1927)   Judge Ben B. Lindsey   Wainwright Evans     112
"The Path to Delinquency" (1934)   Henry James Forman     114
Seduction of the Innocent (1953)   Frederic Wertham     116
"How to Communicate with Children on Television" (1987)   Cy Schneider     120
Advertising in the Public Schools     125
"How Advertisers Are Getting Schools to Use Their Literature" (1927)   John Allen Murphy     126
"Education and the Consumer" (1934)   Dewey H. Palmer   Frederick J. Schlink     128
Thrift Education and School Savings Banks      133
"Teaching Thrift as a Branch of Public Instruction" (1916)   Andrew Price     134
"Is the School Bank Worthwhile?" (1927)   Russell Curtis Grimshaw     136
"Bank Day" (1930)   Chester T. Crowell     137
"Wise Spending as a Teacher Sees It" (1924)   Olive M. Jones     140
King of the Hill (1972)   A. E. Hotchner     143
"Hold It! You Belong in This Picture" (1947)$dFarmers and Mechanics Savings Bank     144
Parenting and Parent-Child Relationships in the Consumer Household     147
"Children and Money" (1924)   Sidonie Gruenberg     148
"Selling Food to Children" (1928)$dMother's Own Book     152
"Child-rearing" (1929)   Robert S. Lynd   Helen Merrell Lynd     157
"Food, Clothing, and Housework" (1929)   Robert S. Lynd   Helen Merrell Lynd     162
"Boy Dates Girl: One Girl's Family" (1940)   Gay Head     164
Bibliography
Children, Youth, and Consumer Culture     169
Consumer Culture: General Works     177
History of Childhood, Childrearing, and the Family: General Works, 1870-2000     183
Index     187
About the Editor and Contributors     197

Editorial Reviews

This series, Children and Youth: History and Culture, puts children and youth at the center of research, and as such, focuses our attention on those groups that, for the most part, have been ignored. . . . The essays in the first part often refer to documents in the second part, which are reprints, either in part or in total, of primary source documents. Related topics are introduced in the second part, with examples from the marketing literature that shows what appeals were used to attract youthful consumers. Thus, one can be studying the essays in the first part and then look at the examples of advertisements and appeals that are shown in the second part. The third part of this work is a very detailed current bibliography on the topics. This will be valuable for those trying to understand how the consumer culture targeted children and the effect that children's desires now have on purchasing decisions.” —ARBA

From the Publisher