Princeton University Press
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End
Key Metrics
- Erika Rappaport
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691044767
- 9.72 X 5.72 X 0.82 inches
- 1.08 pounds
- History > Europe - Great Britain - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
In Shopping for Pleasure, Erika Rappaport reconstructs London's Victorian and Edwardian West End as an entertainment and retail center. In this neighborhood of stately homes, royal palaces, and spacious parks and squares, a dramatic transformation unfolded that ultimately changed the meaning of femininity and the lives of women, shaping their experience of modernity. Rappaport illuminates the various forces of the period that encouraged and discouraged women's enjoyment of public life and particularly shows how shopping came to be seen as the quintessential leisure activity for middle- and upper-class women. Through extensive histories of department stores, women's magazines, clubs, teashops, restaurants, and the theater as interwoven sites of consumption, Shopping for Pleasure uncovers how a new female urban culture emerged before and after the turn of the twentieth century.
Moving beyond the question of whether shopping promoted or limited women's freedom, the author draws on diverse sources to explore how business practices, legal decisions, and cultural changes affected women in the market. In particular, she focuses on how and why stores presented themselves as pleasurable, secure places for the urban woman, in some cases defining themselves as instrumental to civic improvement and women's emancipation. Rappaport also considers such influences as merchandizing strategies, credit policies, changes in public transportation, feminism, and the financial balance of power within the home. Shopping for Pleasure is thus both a social and cultural history of the West End, but on a broader scale it reveals the essential interplay between the rise of consumer society, the birth of modern femininity, and the making of contemporary London.
Author Bio
I am a European cultural historian, interested in the history of gender and consumer cultures in Modern Britain and its Empire. I study how how the history of consumption and commodities were integral to the construction of identities, politics, and economies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
My recent work positions the British Empire within a broader global framework. I enjoy teaching comparative histories of gender, consumerism, urban history, food history, and the history of empires, capitalism and globalization.
Current Research Interests
My current book project, tentatively titled White Mischief : Public Relations at the End of Empire, explores how the relatively new field of public relations managed the process and memory of decolonization between the late 1940s and 1970s.
During these years international public relations campaigns shaped capital investments, promoted capitalist values, and secured colonial relationships decades after political imperial ties were severed.
The project reveals the global power of PR and also demonstrates how global forces shaped the history of public relations. It offers as well a genealogy of the political power of business in the postwar world.
Source: University of California, Santa Barbara - Department of History
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