| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the Journal of Social History online. About 311 words from this article are provided below; about 605 words remain.

If you are an individual subscriber to the Journal of Social History, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Journal of Social History, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Journal of Social History.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to the journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. By Lisa Jacobson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.xii plus 299 pp. $35.00).
Lisa Jacobson's book, Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century is the latest contribution to the growing scholarship on children in consumer society. Her work joins other recent titles such as Gary Cross's The Cute and The Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children's Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004 ) and Kelly Schrum's Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920–1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). All of these works argue that children became consumers much earlier than previous histories have suggested. Whereas scholars once assumed that youngsters went from being innocent creatures sheltered from economic or material concerns to acquisitive consumers only after World War II, these new works argue that the transformation occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century and that children's role in the consumer economy has been expanding ever since.	1
Jacobson's argument is a persuasive one. She presents significant evidence of advertisers' efforts to reach out to children in the early twentieth century. She also shows how their efforts were abetted by other cultural forces at the time. School curricula, once dedicated to teaching industry, thrift, and delayed gratification through School Savings Bank programs, gradually shifted towards lessons in wise spending rather than saving. By the 1930s, consumer education had overtaken thrift education. Simultaneously, American middle-class parents showed an increasing willingness to give their children allowances, with the hope that this would teach their children prudent spending habits. They too were training their children for participation in the consumer economy. Jacobson ably demonstrates how the allowance gradually eroded the boundary between public commercial life and private family life, and how money and affection became more and more intertwined.	. . .

There are about 605 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.