Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wg55d Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-14T15:26:58.390Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Manly Boys and Enterprising Dreamers: Business Ideology and the Construction of the Boy Consumer, 1910–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Lisa Jacobson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Early twentieth-century advertising discourses on the archetypal boy consumer promoted a masculinized ideal of consumption that broke decisively from the stereotype of the emotion-driven female shopper. Boys were lauded as rational, informed buyers who prized technological innovation and influenced parents and peers. While touting boys' ample consumer appetites, promoters of the boy consumer also depicted boys' interest in advertised goods as worthy of entrepreneurial-minded self-improvers. The ideal of the boy consumer thus harmonized the potentially hedonistic ethos of consumerism with older ideals of productivity and industriousness. New ideologies of manhood that valorized enthusiasm, loyalty, and salesmanship confirmed the boy consumer's manly vitality.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 2001 , pp. 225 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Enterprise and Society 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bibliography of Works Cited

Books

Abelson, Elaine. When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store. New York, 1989.Google Scholar
Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago, 1995.Google Scholar
Blaszczyk, Regina Lee. Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning. Baltimore, Md., 2000.Google Scholar
Cohn, Jan. Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and The Saturday Evening Post. Pittsburgh, Pa., 1989.Google Scholar
Cross, Gary. Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. Cambridge, Mass., 1997.Google Scholar
de Grazia, Victoria, ed. The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective. Berkeley, Calif., 1996.Google Scholar
Douglas, Susan. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore, Md., 1987.Google Scholar
Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment. New York, 1983.Google Scholar
Fass, Paula. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York, 1977.Google Scholar
Filene, Peter. Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3d ed., rev. 1974; Baltimore, Md., 1998.Google Scholar
Finnegan, Margaret. SellingSuffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women. New York, 1999.Google Scholar
Formanek-Brunnell, Miriam. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930. New Haven, Conn., 1993.Google Scholar
Garvey, Ellen. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York, 1996.Google Scholar
Griswold, Robert. Fatherhood in America: A Cultural History. New York, 1993.Google Scholar
Grumbine, E., Evalyn. Reaching Juvenile Markets: How to Advertise, Sell and Merchandise Through Boys and Girls. New York, 1938.Google Scholar
Johnston, Patricia. Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography. Berkeley, Calif., 1997.Google Scholar
Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York, 1996.Google Scholar
Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930. Baltimore, Md., 1994.Google Scholar
Laird, Pamela Walker. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore, Md., 1998.Google Scholar
Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt. 1922; New York, 1996.Google Scholar
Macleod, David. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920. Madison, Wisc., 1983.Google Scholar
Marchand, Roland. Advertisingthe American Dream: MakingWay for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley, Calif., 1985.Google Scholar
Mintz, Steven, and Kellogg, Susan. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York, 1988.Google Scholar
Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York, 1993.Google Scholar
Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York, 1995.Google Scholar
Scharff, Virginia. Takingthe Wheel: Women and the Comingof the Motor Age. Albuquerque, N.M., 1991.Google Scholar
Seiter, Ellen. Sold Separately: Parents and Children in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, N.J., 1993.Google Scholar
Sekora, John. Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought. Baltimore, Md., 1977.Google Scholar
Spears, Timothy. 100 Years on the Road: The TravelingSalesman in American Culture. New Haven, Conn., 1995.Google Scholar
Brezeale, Kenon. “In Spite of Women: Esquire Magazine and the Construction of the Male Consumer.” Signs 20 (Autumn 1994): 1–22.Google Scholar
Hantover, Jeffrey P. “The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity.” In The American Man, ed. Elizabeth, and Joseph, Pleck. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1980, pp. 185–201.Google Scholar
Leac, William. “Child-World in the Promised Land.” In The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination & American Culture, ed. James, Gilbert. Belmont, Calif., 1993, pp. 209–38.Google Scholar
Lears, T. J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” In The Culture ofConsumption: Critical Essays in American History, ed. Fox, Richard Wrightman and Lears, T. J. Jackson. New York, 1983, pp. 1–38.Google Scholar
Oldenziel, Ruth. “Boys and Their Toys: The Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild, 1930-1968, and the Making of a Male Technical Domain.” Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 60–96.Google Scholar
Segal, Eric J. “Norman Rockwell and the Fashioning of American Masculinity.” Art Bulletin 78 (Dec. 1996): 633–46.Google Scholar
Susman, Warren I. “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture.” In Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Societyin the Twentieth Century. New York, 1984, pp. 271–85.Google Scholar
Swienicki, Mark A. “Consuming Brotherhood: Men’s Culture, Style and Recreation as Consumer Culture, 1880-1930.” Journal of Social History 31 (Summer 1998): 773–808.Google Scholar
Advertising& Selling. 1930.Google Scholar
American Boy. 1917-30.Google Scholar
Printed Salesmanship. 1927.Google Scholar
Printers’ Ink 1912-33.Google Scholar
Printers’ Ink Monthly. 1922-34.Google Scholar
Jacobson, Lisa. “Raising Consumers: Children, Childrearing, and the American Mass Market, 1890-1940.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997.Google Scholar
J. Walter Thompson Company Archives, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, Sales & Marketing History, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Google Scholar
N. W. Ayer Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Google Scholar
Wayne P. Ellis Collection of Kodakiana, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Google Scholar