Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America. By Carolyn M. Goldstein (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. xi plus 412 pp.)

Extract

Today’s baby boomers might snicker when recalling the junior high Home Ec teacher who taught them how to deep fry donuts and make pancakes from Bisquick. Home Ec could be fun and modestly informative, but it wasn’t where serious learning—or serious critiques of consumer products—occurred. In their heyday during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, however, home economists enjoyed broad respect for their consumer expertise and consumer advocacy. Creating Consumers persuasively argues that home economists played a central role in the development of modern consumer society by serving as “mediators” between consumers and manufacturers. They told corporations what consumers needed and wanted, taught homemakers how to use the new products, and encouraged them to choose value over false bargains. As mediators, home economists warred with their desire to reform consumer capitalism even as they championed its contributions to the American standard of living. The end result, not surprisingly, was a contradictory legacy. Their advocacy on behalf of consumers, particularly during the 1930s and World War II, helped to sow the seeds of the modern consumer movement, but their work on behalf of consumer products firms and power companies did much to empower corporate interests.