Looking Backwards: Lessons from Progressive-Era Consumer Reform

• In Event: Corporeal Dissent: The Flesh, Clothing & Tattoos

Abstract

Among the achievements of Progressive Era labor reforms, sweatshops, mills, and factories are well-known venues of activism. This paper considers a less-discussed component of Progressive discourse by focusing on the labor of department store shopgirls. In doing so, it illuminates the ways social class, race, and consumer desire have characterized Progressive dissent and continue to shape contemporary consumer activism. In the early 1900s, American department stores were bastions of capitalism, glamorous palaces of consumer desire staffed by shopgirls whose long hours and paltry compensation rivaled conditions found in sweatshops. What makes the department store—and the character of the dissent it sparked—so unique is the striking visibility of this labor, as consumers came face-to-face with shopgirl labor each time they entered the store to shop. Shopgirls’ visibility behind the counter put a face on worker exploitation that women’s consumer groups rallied around to agitate reform. Examining forms of dissent including public rallies, political cartoons, and works of popular fiction, this paper considers both the power and the limitations of these consumer advocacy movements, particularly in relation to the race and class positions of the largely white, middle- and upper-class authors and activists.

This paper also tracks a parallel between Progressive consumer activism surrounding the shopgirl and contemporary consumer movements around issues such as minimum wage, equal pay, and fair trade. Although consumer culture in the United States has undergone numerous transitions over the past century, Americans’ readiness to overlook the service industry that facilitates their consumer transactions remains strikingly intact. Furthermore, labor has grown increasingly invisible in our digital age, where consumption transacted over the ambiguous networks of the Internet obscures the palpable lives and labor of the workers involved. This paper, then, asks what roles class privilege and consumer desire continue to play in shaping consumer reform.

Author

• Ashley E Palmer, University of Tampa