Mystifying Oppression

In Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure I really appreciate the way she moves from close readings of various representations (films, periodicals, clothing), to people’s interpretations at the time, to commenting on the general practices of these representations, grounding them in larger historical and theoretical contexts. Her analysis of the New York hat in the intro provides a good example of this. She emphasizes the importance of going beyond audience response in order to understand, “how products are shaped and imbued with meanings at various points of production and consumption” (12).

One of the conclusions Enstad reaches, that is of special interest to me, is when she states: “capitalist production mystified the labor process and presented commodities seemingly devoid of meanings stemming from production” (25). I don’t think this mystification could have happened without the proper ad campaign, and this came in the form of the “new middle-class women’s magazines of the 1840s” that “disseminated information about fashion and played a key role in the formation of new meanings of commodities” by obscuring the “classed nature of their [magazine’s] ideology” (25-6). This classed nature was replaced instead by taste and moral value (27). Here Enstad provides a very specific instance of a process that I have been grappling with: how injustices seem to disappear and then reappear in a neutralized form.