Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2014, Website

Call for panelists from Erika Rappaport: Though scholars have long known that men and women do not neatly fit into neat categories of producer and consumer, this trope has meant that much scholarship on the gendered nature of modern consumer society has focused on how various cultural forms and commercial practices that have produced normative understandings of femininity. I am looking for co-panelists who are interested instead in considering the role that women have played in shaping and/or producing consumer society. Along the lines of works such as, Susan Porter Benson’s Counter Cultres: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores and Kristin L. Hoganson’s Consumers Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920, my paper “Every Kitchen an Empire Kitchen:” Tea and the Politics of the Imperial Consumerism in Early Twentieth-Century Britain,” examines the way that middle-class educated women cast themselves as imperial experts and worked to sell tea for large companies and planters associations in the 1920s and 1930s. I am looking for papers which explore similar issues, in diverse geographic settings.

Please respond to me off list at rappaport@history.ucsb.edu

Erika Rappaport
Associate Professor
Department of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410
rappaport@history.ucsb.edu
(805) 893-8439

Source: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU