In the late nineteenth century, controversy over the social  ramifications of the emerging consumer marketplace beset the  industrialized nations of the West.  In France, various commentators  expressed concern that rampant commercialization threatened the  republican ideal of civic-mindedness as well as the French reputation  for good taste.  The female bourgeois consumer was a particularly  charged figure because she represented consumption run amok.  Critics  feared that the marketplace compromised her morality and aesthetic  discernment, with dire repercussions for domestic life and public  order.  Marianne in the Market traces debates about the woman consumer  to examine the complex encounter between the market and the republic  in nineteenth-century France.  It explores how agents of  capitalism -- advertisers, department store managers, fashion  journalists, self-styled taste experts -- addressed fears of consumerism  through the forging of an aesthetics of the marketplace: a  ''marketplace modernism.'' In so doing, they constructed an image of the  bourgeois woman as the solution to the problem of unrestrained,  individualized, and irrational consumption.  Commercial professionals  used taste to civilize the market and to produce consumers who would  preserve the French aesthetic patrimony.  Tasteful consumption  legitimized women's presence in the urban public and reconciled their  roles as consumers with their domestic and civic responsibilities.  A  fascinating case study, Marianne in the Market builds on a wide range  of sources such as the feminine press, decorating handbooks,  exposition reports, advertising materials, novels, and etiquette  books.  Lisa Tiersten draws on these materials to make the compelling  argument that market professionals used the allure of aesthetically  informed consumerism to promote new models of the female consumer and  the market in keeping with Republican ideals.

Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siecle PDF

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