In The Scramble for the Teenage Dollar, Katharine Rollwagen examines how teens became recognized as a desirable market segment in English Canada during and after the Second World War. Carefully mining women’s magazines, advertisements, and department store archives, she focuses on how the selling of fashion helped to shape new understandings of young middle-class high school students as consumers. Rollwagen is adept at tracing the evolving terminology involved in marketing women’s clothing: using catalogues, she tracks how the division between adults’ sizing and children’s sizing began to shift in the 1930s and 1940s, with new categories such as Senior Girls, Juniors, Misses, and Teenster reflecting not only changes in sizing but different colors and styles specifically aimed at teens.

Eaton’s department store gets a lot of attention, not only because of its prominence as a national department store chain but also because it devoted a lot of resources to courting teenagers. Rollwagen documents the fascinating efforts that Eaton’s put into the creation of its Junior Council and Executive program, which enlisted high school students to act as style ambassadors, sponsoring field trips and fashion shows for chosen teens. Decades before marketers coolhunted in high school hallways, Eaton’s partnered with school officials to select potential candidates for the program. Dozens of high schools in four provinces participated in what was viewed as a mutually beneficial exchange, giving Eaton’s access to schools to create displays of sporting goods and to print materials such as student timetables with the store logo prominently displayed and providing in return funding for classroom items requested by teachers. Rollwagen deftly explores the implications of the department store’s presence in the educational system, highlighting how many of the lessons that Eaton’s hoped to teach involved shaping a new generation of consumers. She is also careful to acknowledge how this idealized view of the teen consumer was overwhelmingly white and middle-class; racialized groups and working-class teens were largely ignored by advertisers and retailers.

Given the dominance of American retailers, advertisers, and media, it would be useful to consider further how influences from south of the border helped to shape the Canadian teen experience. In the book’s introduction, Rollwagen asks, “But is this really a Canadian story, or just part of an American one?” (p. 6). She succeeds in mining many distinctly Canadian sources, particularly magazines such as the Canadian Home Journal and Chatelaine. Yet teens had easy access to American culture—a fact that caused no little degree of hand-wringing by Canadian cultural elites throughout the twentieth century. To not mention Hollywood movies, American popular music, or radio in a work describing the experiences of Canadian teens during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s seems remiss. Even some of the ad campaigns that appeared in Canadian magazines had origins in the United States. Her discussion of fads such as the zoot suit and sloppy joe sweater briefly touches on the US origins of these trends, but more could be said about how Canadians were becoming enmeshed in global networks of media and trade. Rollwagen might ponder how coveting American cultural and consumer products was indeed a central part of many Canadian teen experiences, even as local retailers hoped to act as mediators, bringing American or international trends home to Canada. This minor point aside, Rollwagen has written a highly readable and well-documented treatment of the evolution of teen consumers in Canada. This book makes a contribution to the history of fashion and marketing and adds to a growing literature on the culture of adolescence in specific national contexts.