A01=Erika Rappaport
Advertising
Amy Levy
Author_Erika Rappaport
Bond Street
Bourgeoisie
Business ethics
Cambridge University Press
Capitalism
Category=JBSF1
Category=KNP
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
club movement
Commodity
Competition
Consumerism
Criticism
Customer
Debt
Department store
Dining room
Drapers
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Femininity
Feminism
Feminism (international relations)
Feminist movement
Finery (company)
Frances Power Cobbe
Gazette
Harrods
Household
Housewife
Ideology
Institution
Interior design
Journalism
Leonore Davidoff
Literature
Mass production
Meal
Melodrama
Middle class
Modernity
Mrs.
Narrative
New Woman
Newspaper
Oxford Street
Pioneer Club (women's club)
Politics
Popular culture
Prostitution
Public space
Public sphere
Public transport
Publicity
R.
Regent Street
Restaurant
Retail
Routledge
Selfridges
Separate spheres
Shopkeeper
Shopping
Shopping mall
Social status
Streets (ice cream)
Suffrage
Tottenham Court Road
Tourism
University of California Press
Urbanization
Wealth
Westbourne Grove
Product details
- ISBN 9780691044767
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 09 Sep 2001
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Erika Rappaport is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
