CLASS & THE CULTURE OF CONSUMPTION

...They spent a good deal of their discretionary income, for example, on fashionable cloaks and willow plume hats, not because they were pleasure addicts or mindless followers of silly fads, but because they knew that, in public, they would be identified by their dress as either slovenly working girls or fashionable young ladies...

...Kathy Peiss focuses on the other side of the story...

...By the middle 1920s and 1930s, Horowitz argues, social critics like Helen and Robert Lynd had become so thoroughly disheartened by the ways in which the culture of consumption had permeated the lives of working class and middle class alike that they rejected it entirely, hoping somehow to substitute in its place an older, preindustrial, artisanal culture...

...288 pp...

...While the working class wasted time and money on commercial amusements, the "new" middle class would, the critics hoped, follow the lead of the "old" one in spending on "advancement...

...And this public culture rapidly displaces the older, established class-bound institutions that preceded it...

...Twentieth-century cultural historians are indeed caught in a bind...

...Is the conflict between those who argued for a genteel culture of uplife, refinement, and prudence and those who patronized the dance halls, amusement parks, vaudeville palaces, and movie theaters best described in terms of "class...

...All agreed that discretionary income should not be wasted on fun and frivolity...

...Philadelphia: Temple University Press...

...Horowitz attempts to skirt the problems by dividing the middle class into an "old" segment that upheld the culture of restraint and a "new" segment attracted to the culture of consumption...

...Daniel Horowitz and Kathy Peiss are part of a generation of cultural historians that works with the language and categories of class...

...In her beautifully written, meticulously documented, and precisely argued study, she describes in detail how young working women spent their free time and money...

...In Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930, Lewis Erenberg describes the appeal of the nightclubs, cabarets, and cafés to young upper- and middle-class men and women in much the same way that Peiss describes the public dance halls' attraction for working-class women...

...What little evidence we have argues the opposite—that the new public entertainments appealed to working and middle class alike...

...Middleclass families should, instead, spend their extra income on education, culture, and refinement...

...The women understood the danger they courted in accepting "treats" from strange 116 men, but they earned just enough to buy their way into the theaters, amusement parks, and dance halls...

...Plumb, authors of The Birth of a Consumer Society, have, in the past decade, been pushing back its birth date and extending its gestation period...

...No matter where they worked or for how many hours a week, the women seldom earned a decent or even a living wage...

...The new amusements, entertainments, and fashions met "real," Not false, needs...

...There was, she asserts, a "cultural conflict" that developed along (as well as within) class lines, "as middle-class ideals of womanhood met the flamboyant working-class version of the "New Woman" and "middle-class women" guide&by "Victorian values" opposed the entrance of working women into the new arenas of public entertainment...

...If freedom, romance, and adventure could not be found there, they were, at least, closer at hand than anywhere else...

...Even the saloon—which, as Roy Rosenzweig demonstrates in Eight Hours For What We Will, was in its heyday a workingman's club tied to the workplace (and, I would argue, only quasi-public)—is dethroned by the coming of the movie theater...

...Peiss makes it clear that the new Coney Island amusement parks crossed class lines in their appeal, though, as she suggests, "class distinctions did not entirely disappear...

...Daniel Horowitz, in The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 18751940, takes the most common approach of U.S...

...Regrettably, he can offer no evidence to back up this assumption...

...For most, home was no "haven in a heartless world," but a kingdom ruled by fathers and mothers and the last place they wanted to spend their free time...

...Clothes, like it or not, made the woman...

...Horowitz informs us early that his study is not of the consumer culture itself but rather "an intellectual history of attitudes toward consumption...

...It is impossible to date the birth of this culture with any specificity (especially if one substitutes the word "consumption" for "abundance," as 115 many have done...

...cultural historians locate one such period somewhere in the latter half of the nineteenth century when a "culture of abundance" (to use Warren Susman's term) with new institutions (department stores, amusement parks, nightclubs, and hotels), new forms (the comics and moving pictures), new values (a penny saved was a penny wasted), and a new style (exuberance, expressiveness, and lack of restraint) contested an older, genteel culture and its institutions, forms, values, and style...

...Working- and middle-class women also wore the same types of clothes when they went "out...

...And that appealed to men and women of all classes...

...The young working women of the city saved nickels and dimes for admission to the city's dance halls, amusement parts, vaudeville shows, and movies theaters...

...Fortunately, there was a world where, for the price of admission, they could escape the restrictions of workplace and tenement, employers and parents...

...To adopt the adjective "mass" in referring to the new culture gets us nowhere, for the term is usually a pejorative one, used by those who feared (and fear) that the middle classes are being infected by lower-class habits...

...As we enter what is perhaps a new "transitional period" in cultural history, with rock concerts, Broadway theater, movies, and opera being piped into our homes and the "public" culture in full retreat before the new home entertainment technologies, it may be the perfect time for reflection on our recent past—and its larger meanings...

...They are interested not in culture in the abstract but in the development of class cultures...

...CHEAP AMUSEMENTS: WORKING WOMEN AND LEISURE IN TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY NEW YORK, by Kathy Peiss...

...In defining his work as intellectual history, he justifies his choice of focus...

...What role did it play in the ascendance of a new American patriotism, defined by a celebration of capitalism and its wonders...

...As Peiss notes, correctly I think, the "tough dancing" in the dance halls was far more blatantly sexual than the dancing in the nightclubs...

...The culture of the dance halls encouraged release, escape, sensuality, expressiveness, movement, and fun...

...Though many, especially in the stores and factories, worked overtime in the busy seasons, the average number of hours in the workday had decreased since the 1880s and would continue to decrease through the 1920s...

...In the new nightspots, businessmen and their wives, socialites and debutantes, respectable and prosperous men 117 and women enjoyed themselves 'til the wee hours of the morning, dancing "the turkey trot, Texas Tommy, bunny hug, monkey hug, lame duck, foxtrot, and tango...

...The dance hall," she tells us, "was the favorite arena in which young working women played out their cultural style...

...But, as they lamented in their studies, the attraction of the new entertainments was such that a good deal of time and money was being squandered on saloons, dance halls, and "other forms of commercial recreation...

...We need to know more," states Horowitz, "about the meaning consumption and spending had for workers and immigrants...

...It is to argue that what was most striking about the new culture was the commonalities across class lines, not the divisions...

...They protected themselves, as best they could, by arriving and departing with "lady friends...

...Going out"—defined as leaving home—becomes synonymous with leisure-time activities...

...The home, the quintessential "private" domain, becomes less and less important as a center of entertainment, amusement, and social life...

...Nonetheless, the similarities far outweigh the differences...

...The two books under review provide an excellent starting point...

...The amusement park, as Peiss shows, represents "not only the decline of a genteel middle-class cultural hegemony," but the emergence of a culture that, in John Kasson's words, prizes release instead of restraint and encourages rather than discourages "intimacy and an easing of inhibitions" between men and women and "extravagance, gaiety, abandon, revelry . . . against the values of thrift, sobriety, industry, and ambition...

...In the second decade of the new century, the budget experts shifted their attention from the workers to the "new" and expanding middle classes...

...THESE YOUNG WOMEN KNEW precisely what they were doing...

...Approaching his subject with intelligence and imagination, Horowitz interrogates "attitudes toward the consumer society" by examining the numerous "budget studies," most of them of workingand lower-middle-class households, that were produced and published between 1875 and the late 1930s...

...Without the right ones, they would attract neither the men they needed to treat them nor the respect they sought on the streets and in the dance halls...

...Although the dance halls that Peiss describes were patronized exclusively by working men and women, there were, as she recognizes, analogous institutions for "the elite and the middle classes...

...What we see developing here are new cultural institutions, forms, values, and styles...

...It is much easier to chronicle the emergence of this new public culture than it is to understand its role in twentieth-century social life...

...Though the quality of the shirtwaists, willow plume hats, and jewelry worn by the working women was no doubt inferior, the "style" was the same as that of more prosperous women...

...I wonder how far such language takes us and how much it obscures...

...The types of vaudeville acts and films that appeared in the neighborhood theaters and nickel dumps were the same as those shown in the lavish "palaces" in the downtown entertainment districts...

...What we see developing is a new "public" culture...

...The decline in the workweek during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth provided workers with more leisure time...

...24.95...

...Concurrently, a decrease in the amount of the family budget that had to be devoted to food, shelter, and clothing gave them more money to spend...

...Kathy Peiss, in Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, focuses directly on this subject, though her book is also instructive in other areas...

...Historians like Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H...

...Once within, the women looked for men to "treat" them to drinks, food, and fun in return for a brief flirtation...

...Immigrant social clubs and elite men's clubs, church and church-sponsored associations, union halls, fraternal orders, women's clubs and sewing circles are all displaced by the theaters, movies, ballparks, and amusement parks...

...The "attitudes toward consumption" that he is concerned with are those that were written down and can be read back...

...Peiss, in subtitling her book, "Working Women and Leisure in Turnofthe-Century New York," implies that there was something distinctive about these young women and their leisure activities...

...not a utopia but a privileged space int he world where they could interact with men, free from the controlling gaze of parents and employers...

...Unless they could find a man to treat them, their pleasures would be short-lived...

...I treat attitudes toward workers and immigrants, not the responses of these groups themselves...

...Almost all lived in their parents' homes or in cramped, underheated, unventilated rooms...

...By writing about these young women as active subjects rather than mere pawns, Peiss opens up a new perspective on the the twentieth-century culture of abundance...

...Peiss devotes an entire chapter to what she calls "dance madness...

...What do we gain—and what do we lose— by such a formulation, especially when we acknowledge that the middle-class culture of gentility was soon overwhelmed...

...cultural historians by locating the transitional period around the turn of the century...

...Fortunately, a number of historians have taken up the challenge of uncovering "the meaning consumption and spending had for workers and immigrants...

...By the early years of the new century, more and more young women were employed full time in New York City's factories, stores, and offices...

...When we turn from amusement parks and dance halls to vaudeville, movies and "fashion," we see the same congruence in cultural styles and values...

...These hopes did not last long...

...Cultural historians, like other historians, are forever in search of transitional periods, moments when historical change occurs so dramatically that long-term developments are encapsulated in almost self-explanatory words and images...

...In these studies, intended to be sober reports of "how Americans spent their money," social critics and commentators assessed and criticized the ways in which working people lived their lives...

...There is little or no evidence to support the view of a congruence between social class and cultural attitudes implied in the use of "middle-class" as a modifier in referring to critics of the new culture of abundance...

...What part did it play in the assimilation of the immigrant working class...

...The budget experts wanted the workers and immigrants to use their free time and money for "the 'proper enjoyment of . . . evening privileges' like lectures, concerts, and social events at settlement houses...

...The nightclubs also, by seating customers at tables and excluding unescorted women, regulated the "promiscuous" and "intimate" contact between men and women that took place in the dance halls...

...they offered women something they could not find elsewhere...

...On the other hand, it is evident that the old class distinctions fall apart in twentieth-century culture...

...This is not to say that the new culture of abundance was fully democratized or knew no class distinctions...

...THERE WERE, OF COURSE, ENORMOUS DIFFERENCES between the dance halls and cabarets...

...They entered, unescorted, into this new world devoted to pleasure, a world where young, unmarried men and women could chat, dance, giggle, flirt, and have a good time...