THE LONG HISTORY OF CHILDREN AS CONSUMERS
Source: muse.jhu.edu
Topic: Teen Fashion
Sort Desciption: the teenage years resulted in merchants creation of teen fashion boards to. advise their in-house buyers as well as to attract additional teens to their ...
Content Inside: REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2005 84 Reviews in American History 33 (2005) 8488 2005 by The Johns Hopkins University Press THE LONG HISTORY OF CHILDREN AS CONSUMERS Gail S. Murray Daniel Thomas Cook. The Commodification of Childhood: The Childrens Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham: Duke University Press 2004. ix + 211 pp. Appendix illustrations notes bibliography and index. $74.95 (cloth); $21.95 (paper). Few areas of postmodern life may be more disconcerting to parents and other adults than the $5 billion name-brand childrens clothing market. Perhaps it is of some comfort to learn that merchants and advertisers have been pitching their wares to children since the early years of the twentieth century. In The Commodification of Childhood sociologist Daniel Thomas Cook traces this development from the earliest trade discussions of marketing childrens wear in 1917 through the explosion of childrens specialty shops in the 1960s. His deeply interdisciplinary approach and nuanced interpretation result in a penetrating examination of much more than just the childrens clothing industry. He enters the highly contested turf surrounding the social construc- tion of childhood the evolution of family governance the shifts in the American cultural landscape and the business of selling itself. Cook deftly lays his historical evidence onto a theoretical grid that moves The Commodification of Childhood well beyond existing studies of childrens toys literature and culture. Cook originally intended to study childrens fashion. Instead he has crafted a deeply researched wide-ranging exploration of twentieth-century American childhood placing Cook squarely in the fore- front of a growing interdisciplinary literature on the culture of childhood. 1 To explain the commodification of childhood of the title Cook points to the intersection of two competing ideologies. One is the idea of the purely oppressive markets which invade childhood ...
long history of children as consumers,
daniel thomas cook