| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Daniel Thomas Cook. The Commodification of Childhood: The Children's Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 211. $21.95.

This brief but important book exemplifies how historians and other social scientists can learn from each other. Sociologist Daniel Thomas Cook situates his study of children and consumerism in the period between 1917 and the 1950s, when, he believes, the children's wear industry helped to "commodify" childhood and thereby form the foundation of modern consumer society. In crafting his analysis around children, Cook squeezes his way between two current theoretical models: the vulnerable child, exploited by adults, especially commercially minded adults, on one hand, and the agentive child, exerting her or his desires and will to create an independent culture, on the other. Cook asserts that the creation of the child consumer has its own special history (he purposely uses the pronoun "it" to distinguish the child consumer as a "discursive construct") with age-defined stages that take on economic exchange value. Thus, Cook sees a dynamic, not binary, "interplay between constructions of childhood, expressions of children's desire as reported by merchants and others, and the interests and problems of those creating an industry through time" (p. 6).

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