Abstract
Here we apply the multilevel narrative approach of critical oral history to develop intergenerational narratives that show how social change in consumer culture is enacted through family interrelations. The research uses intergenerational storytelling to describe memories of women as mothers and daughters in families. Places and practices around provisioning, budgeting, cooking, childcare, and domestic labour provide the setting in which the dialectics of family and gender are transformed through evolving family signatures. Families develop enduring myths that function as a means of making sense of consumption. The oral histories show how family signatures proliferate, how they are shaped by retail innovation, and how they become structured into everyday practices and family norms. This further demonstrates that family is important to understand the relationship between individuals and consumer culture.
Highlights
We apply the multi-level narrative approach of critical oral history to develop intergenerational narratives that show how social change in consumer culture is produced and enacted through family interrelations
Places and practices around provisioning, budgeting, cooking, childcare and domestic labour provide the setting in which the dialectics of family and gender are transformed and enacted through evolving family signatures
The oral histories show how family signatures operate and proliferate, how they are shaped by retail innovation and change and how they become structured into everyday practices, attitudes and family norms
Summary
Especially women as mothers, are afforded a central place in much consumer discourse from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and there seems to be a broadly accepted consensus that gender identities and gender politics shaped the emerging suburban culture of early consumer society (Glennie and Thrift 1996; Witkowski 1999). Rappaport (2000) shows how 19th century West End retailers redesigned operations to compete for the suburban female shopper and this created “a bourgeois femininity born in the public realm.” Over time these new expectations and gender norms (feminine subjectivities) required further retail innovation and adaptation, to accommodate a more autonomous, independent and ‘adventurer’ urban women. The structure of the dialectic process between mothers and daughters is necessarily complex (Flax 1978) and for Blume and Blume (2003) female identity, sexuality and the body are used to structure a dialectical model to frame the social discourse that reproduces gender in families This approach is valuable because it helps to illuminate underlying tensions and apparent indeterminacies between roles. Identity emerges from ambiguities arising from competing claims to experience/modernity, technology/nature, and around issues relating to convenience, quality/price and so on These positions are structured as multi-directional, with values and meaning transferring from mothers to daughters and from daughters to mothers. The dialectic approach overcomes the problems of cultural transmission down family chains by acknowledging that mother-daughter relations are not fixed identity positions but continually emerge within the context of these relationships. Oral historians use a layered approach in their analysis of life history interviews and have shown how the small, mundane and everyday thoughts and actions of ordinary people mark the movement in history and discourse (Davies 2011; Kelova 2009; Thompson 1975, 1981)
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