Through the “meaning-making process” of commodity consumption working class women were not merely the passive peons of the capitalist and the bourgeois housewife, rather they found autonomous agency through the subjectivities formed in their relationship to commodities. In other words, consumerism was not a sign of women’s mass deception.
According to Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, commodities offered women an empowering “new range of representations, symbols, activities, and spaces with which to create class gender and ethnic identities.” Enstad attempts to disprove that a coherent subject is at the root of political action. Constantly citing Judith Butler, she argues that identity categories are necessarily based on exclusions that carry an inherent tyranny; for, “labels shape identities and experiences” – in the case of Enstad’s study, those oppressive classifications are “worker” and “woman.”
The attack on women’s popular culture activities by privileging representations of the “rational,” “serious girl striker” (both during the 19th century and in our modern historical narratives) undermines the critical process of shaping the female worker identity. “Working women’s version of ladyhood differed greatly from middle-class ideals: it challenged middle-class perceptions of labor as degrading to femininity and created a utopian language or entitlement rooted in workplace experiences.” Likewise, “Their style was not an imitation of middle class identity but an appropriation of a valued set of codes.” Through ready-made evening gowns, silk underwear, and “Peg O’ the Movies” the working-class women stood outside the dominant middle-class discourse of film and fashion and part-took in a culture of inherent resistance.
Liberal critic Thomas Frank has drawn a parallel between the emerging consensus of the 1980s “New Economy” and the widespread acceptance of commodity consumption as a means of asserting agency. Frank is dumbfounded by the absence of analysis of American business culture (the defining landscape of the 1990s), never mind dissent from the academy regarding corporate interests. He satirically writes, “Cultural Studies was teeming with stories of aesthetic hierarchies rudely overturned; with subversive mallwalkers dauntlessly using up the mall’s air-conditioning.” By casting the caricature of the “elitists” critic (unhappy with the shift toward cultural democracy, desperately clinging to the mass culture critique) as the villain, “cult studs” got in line with the myriad of journalists, politicians, and media monguls relentlessly celebrating the revolutionary power of popular culture. Cultural studies trademark language of audience agency and subversive text mirrored all too perfectly the anti-elitist, anti-hierarchical rhetoric pouring forth from the conservative populist movement and boardrooms alike. Ultimately, Thomas Frank charges the “cult studs” academic radicalism with being an indistinguishable hegemonic function of the market.
Of course, Frank is driven by the question that has motivated many of the cultural critics we have looked at this semester: What is the best way to subvert the system? How can we overturn unjust capitalism? This is where I see Enstand’s critique diverge. Her work is not propelled by the proposition of a radical new order. She represents a history of how a group achieves some freedom, some decency, and a place to hang their hats within the existing system. In this way, citing the desire for silk underwear as a distinct political act, a form of agency that operates outside bourgeois epistemology, mirrors the theoretical foundation and implicit ambition of Enstad’s project. “Thus silk underwear signaled the invisible interior ladyhood, similar to that promised by the dime novels, to which working women laid claim”(82). Enstad successfully marries politics and culture because of the way she defines political action. Acute policy change, a shifting of the cultural terrain to the interests of an oppressed group, dignity through identity formation, these are significant forms of political action to Enstad, and it seems that an investment in this kind of political action is best expressed through Cultural Studies.
Other thoughts:
-Veblen, can imitation can be radical?
-Ironically, Enstad priviledges a distinct female working class narrative. For example, in New York City at the end of the Civil War there were upwards of six hundred brothels. In 1846 a police source estimated the number of prostitutes in New York City to be 7,000 (10% of young females) while an alderman and minster source estimated the number to be 20,000 (28% of young girls). Regardless of the exact figure, these staggering official approximations indicate prostitution’s unavoidable physical and social presence. In 1855 tailor shops had the highest cash value, $7,592,696, of manufactured articles/goods in New York City. Tailor shops were followed by prostitution which brought in an estimated $6,350,760 in 1855. While prostitution did not involve the production of goods, it became a highly visible and exceptionally lucrative business.
Why is prostitution so clearly excluded from a historical narrative to which is belongs (even on page 28 the citation of the “Bowery Ghals” speaks to the significant presence of the brothel culture).
- Funny to see one of T.S. Eliots most significant arguments regarding culture, “cultural consumption without taste will lead to moral fall,” was originally championed by the indistinct body of middle class women.
-Dime novels about working class girl marrying millionaires, etc. seriously discredits Langland’s argument.
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