| Review | Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive era, 7.3

Book Reviews

Buying into Globalism: American Women Consume the World

HOGANSON, KRISTIN L. Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 416 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-8078-3089-5, $65.00 (cloth); 978-0-8078-5793-9, $24.95 (paper).

Kristin Hoganson's gracefully written survey of the international elements of American consumption in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a tour de force as well as a household tour du monde. Hoganson, who teaches history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, demonstrates how the United States' rise to prominence at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century absorbed the world, even as it was asserting its own national presence abroad. Her book reveals the myriad ways in which the presumably parochial American housewife was in fact an instrument of internationalization through what Hoganson calls "the consumers' imperium."

Hoganson does not deny the reality of rising American hegemony, but she does cast it in a new light. Rather than seeing a one-way flow of goods and culture out of America into the rest of the world, she recognizes the return current that brought the world back to America. Her real contribution is not just in drawing attention to the many ways in which foreignness seeped into the nation's most intimate spaces, but also in showing how Americans were able to domesticate the foreignness so that it not only posed no danger to their conventional values but actually contributed to this country's sense of superiority.

In her first chapter, Hoganson establishes her thesis (and title) by describing the Victorian home decorator's attraction to Oriental motifs, especially in "cosy corners" that were furnished with furniture, pillows, rugs, curtains, and shawls meant to evoke harems and other elements of the exotic East. The author points out that by copying European interest in Asian art and artifacts, American housewives were able to participate vicariously in Old World imperialism through what Hoganson calls "cosmopolitan domesticity," thus creating a "consumers' imperium."

One of Hoganson's great strengths here, as it is throughout the book, is her willingness to take on the apparent contradictions in her topic. Americans were embracing Orientalism even as they were excluding Asians. Some were decorating with Oriental opulence while many others were calling for a return to arts-and-crafts simplicity. The author resolves the conflict by showing convincingly that buying the products of the East was not an act of cultural deference (as it would have been with French fashion), but an exercise in economic and cultural domination. Not all conflicts are so neatly resolved, and it would not be hard to pick minor contradictions and omissions from the broad variety of ideas that she addresses. Hoganson, however, makes a compelling case that even when Americans disagreed on how best to be American, they did not disagree that it was best to be American.

If American women constructed Oriental cosy corners because it was fashionably European to do so, then they dressed in Paris fashions for same reason. Using Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," Hoganson suggests that American women wore the latest French styles as a way of imagining themselves part of the sophisticated and cosmopolitan community of European imperialism. The French incorporated elements of their overseas empire into their fashions, and the Americans borrowed from both when they dressed like Parisians. To be sure, there was a countercurrent epitomized by the tailored look of the Gibson girl. Shirtwaists may have been fine for work or daytime play, but evening activities demanded that American women acknowledge the preeminence of European taste and participate sartorially in the consumers' imperium.

With a similar agenda and respect for counterevidence, Hoganson reviews the role of foreign foods in the American diet and of fictive travel clubs (it was the travel that was fictive, not the clubs) in developing a tourist mentality among women who themselves might never get a chance to travel abroad. Foreign food allowed Americans literally to consume otherness, and make-believe travel offered them the opportunity imaginatively to consume the alien with a minimum of inconvenience. The book ends with a fascinating chapter called "Immigrant Gifts, American Appropriations" that traces the campaign led by settlement-house workers and other women's groups to acknowledge the "gifts" that foreigners had to give to Americans—not just the foreigners who labored in the rug factories or the coffee groves, nor only those who designed high-fashion apparel, but the foreigners who came to live in America.

When discussing the decades around the turn of the century, most historians have focused on the Americanization efforts that sought to erase immigrants' foreignness, often with an unconcealed disdain for their native cultures. Hoganson points out, however, that there was a significant group of Americans who sought to celebrate rather than suppress the dress, food, music, and even the language of newcomers. In this final chapter, the author manages to weave together the themes in the earlier parts of the book and show how embracing immigrants' exoticism actually contributed toward their assimilation into the mainstream. By making them feel welcome and emphasizing the idea that every group had some sort of gift to contribute to their new home, the immigrant gift movement helped to break down distinctions among European (and sometimes other) nationalities and subsume them all into their new identity as equal Americans.

Hoganson's research is meticulous, and the press was generous enough to allow her to include a thirty-page appendix of travel clubs. It is also worth noting that the University of North Carolina has thankfully abandoned (at least here) the infuriatingly difficult-to-use Chicago style of citations, providing instead a forty-seven-page bibliography that makes the whole book more user-friendly.


	Steven Gelber Santa Clara University

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