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Dissertation Information for Lisa Sheryl Jacobson

NAME:
- Lisa Sheryl Jacobson

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1997)

ADVISORS:
- Mary Yeager
- Regina Moranzt-Sanchez

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Joyce Oldham Appleby
- Cecile Whiting

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Raising consumers: Children, childrearing, and the American mass market, 1890-1940

Abstract: Long before the advent of television, the child consumer figured prominently in corporate dreams of market expansion and debates over children's changing relationship to the outside world. My dissertation analyzes how children's encounters with consumer culture in the early twentieth century exposed deeper tensions over the meanings of childhood, the sanctity of the family, and the authority of the marketplace.

I contend that changes in the family led business to embrace children as allies who could help them consolidate national markets. By the 1920s, advertisers recognized that the newly egalitarian middle-class companionate family allowed children more influence over family spending. Marketing that directly targeted children thus aimed not only to expand juvenile markets but to enlist children as selling agents within the home.

Parents, educators, and child experts initially responded to children's stepped-up demands with money training programs that emphasized habitual saving. But during the 1920s and 1930s, as consumer desire became linked to a well-adjusted personality, experts advocated allowances to teach children how to spend wisely. Praise for the savvy child spender also reflected a new gendering of consumer desire. Breaking with a long tradition of identifying consumption with feminine excess, advertisers constructed the boy consumer as an entrepreneurially minded student of manufacturing trends who readily embraced the new. He provided reassurance that the consumption ethic could be reconciled with bourgeois values.

Children's own consumer experiences also shaped their socialization as consumers. Eager to quench their yearnings for autonomy, they pressured parents to purchase goods that would secure them premiums and membership in advertising clubs. Children, however, experienced bitter disappointments when they discovered that premiums failed to measure up to advertisers' hype. This childhood rite of passage marked children's fall from innocence.

Children's socialization as consumers also gave rise to new understandings of play and parenting. During the 1920s and 1930s, alarm spread that commercial recreation was eroding family ties. Yet rather than reject commercial culture, parents and child experts embraced its ethos of enticement in constructing a wholesome alternative playworld within the home. Ironically, such strategies of containment further blurred the boundaries between family values and commercial values.

MPACT Scores for Lisa Sheryl Jacobson

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-10-14 13:49:21

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Students under Lisa Sheryl Jacobson

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None