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Book Review
| Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. By Lisa Jacobson. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xviii, 299 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-231-11388-9.)
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| In recent years, historical studies of both consumption and childhood have become something of a land-office business. Ranging from the polemical to the thoughtful, these studies have explored children/adolescents as consumers from different perspectives in an equal number of different time periods. Deftly integrating a wide array of primary and secondary sources, Lisa Jacobson's work represents one of the strongest offerings in the group. |
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Jacobson begins by documenting advertisers' discovery and development of the juvenile market and provides solid evidence for redefining the child-as-consumer timeline. Rather than seeing the child as consumer as a product of the postwar television era, Jacobson pushes back the idea's origin to the turn of the century, locating it particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. She continues by discussing the shift from juvenile thrift education, a product of the nineteenth century, to consumer training, the coming trend of the twentieth century, via analysis of school savings programs, the allowance debate, and the emergence of the democratic family and finds that, despite parental qualms, consumer training became the uneasy compromise between nineteenth- and twentieth-century notions regarding saving and buying. |
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