Lisa Jacobson, "Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A Historical Handbook and Guide"

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Lisa Jacobson, "Children and Consumer Culture in American Society: A Historical Handbook and Guide"

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Children play a crucial role in today's economy. According to some estimates, children spend or influence the spending of up to $500 billion annually. Journalists, sociologists, and media reformers often present mass marketing toward children as a recent fall from grace, but the roots of children's consumerism ― and the anxieties over it ― date back more than a century. Throughout the twentieth century, a wide variety of groups ― including advertisers, retailers, parents, social reformers, child experts, public schools, and children themselves ― helped to socialize children as consumers and struggled to define the proper boundaries of the market. The essays and documents in this volume illuminate the historical circumstances and cultural conflicts that helped to produce, shape, and legitimize children's consumerism.

Focusing primarily on the period from the Gilded Age through the twentieth century, this book examines how and why children and adolescents acquired new economic roles as consumers, and how these new roles both reflected and produced dynamic changes in family life and the culture of capitalism. This volume also reveals how children and adolescents have used consumer goods to define personal identities and peer relationships ― sometimes in opposition to marketers' expectations and parental intentions.

Review
"This series, Children and Youth: History and Culture, puts children and youth at the center of research, and as such, focuses our attention on those groups that, for the most part, have been ignored. . . . The essays in the first part often refer to documents in the second part, which are reprints, either in part or in total, of primary source documents. Related topics are introduced in the second part, with examples from the marketing literature that shows what appeals were used to attract youthful consumers. Thus, one can be studying the essays in the first part and then look at the examples of advertisements and appeals that are shown in the second part. The third part of this work is a very detailed current bibliography on the topics. This will be valuable for those trying to understand how the consumer culture targeted children and the effect that children's desires now have on purchasing decisions." - ARBA

About the Author
LISA JACOBSON is Associate Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century and has published articles and reviews in such journals as the Journal of Social History, Enterprise & Society, and Technology and Culture.