Drömmar och kompetens. Kvinnor och det tidiga 1900-talets varuhus

Abstract

This article is a historical investigation into department stores and consumer culture from a gender perspective. The analysis focuses on two dichotomies: hedonistic versus rational consumption and emancipatory versus oppressive consumption. These two dichotomies are interdependent in many ways. In studies on consumer culture and gender history there are two major interpretations of the significance of the early department store. The stores are perceived as either emancipatory or as oppressive institutions towards women. These two alternative interpretations approach the dichotomy of rational versus hedonistic consumption in very different ways. Scholars who argue for the emancipatory importance of the stores dissolve the dichotomy. Their studies imply that hedonistic and mainly pleasure-seeking consumption was not necessarily irrational. inauthentic and manipulated. In contrast, researchers arguing for the other, rather negative interpretation are actually maintain the conventional dichotomy; or more precisely, they think within the framework of that dichotomy, instead of treating it as a cultural construction, or as an analytical tool in interpreting historical material. Earlier research on the history of consumption has asserted that female consumers were depicted by their contemporaries at the turn of the century and in the early twentieth century as easily manipulated, impulsive, pleasure-seeking and foolish. This image, which corresponds to the ideal type of the hedonistic consumer, was contrasted to that of the male as rational and autonomous, even as a consumer. My research shows that, in the world of the Swedish department store, NK, at least as depicted in its staff-newspaper, consumers were characterized differently. Women-consumers were often described there as self-confident and competent, whereas men were said to be irrational, incompetent and easily tempted. The traditional dichotomy is thus reversed. My analysis of the department store NK shows that mechanisms which conserve the subordination of women and mechanisms that act against it coexist, and that these are often manifested in various representations of hedonistic and rational consumption. However these are merely representations and nothing more. In the actual practice of consumption, in the ways people use and appropriate the store, the 'hedonistic' and the 'rational' elements are always combined.