Introduction: Specifying mothers/motherhoods

Abstract

The place of mothers and motherhoods in commercial life represents one of the great under-told stories of consumer culture. At once revered and despised as leisure shoppers, women nevertheless have borne the brunt of the labor of consumption for the household and thus have garnered the attention of advertisers and marketers since at least the early decades of the 20th century. During these formative years, the ‘mother’, as conceptual persona, can be found informing the design and staffing of retail spaces of urban department stores in the USA (Benson, 1986; Cook, 2004), completing the ‘family circle’ in depictions of the ‘housewife’ in advertising promotions (Marchand 1985) and occupying center stage in consumer education efforts of the time (Frederick, 1929). A good deal of the story of the mother– consumer – in both historical and contemporary treatments – has until recently remained enfolded into, and perhaps lost in, the general figure of a ‘female’ consumer with all if of its attendant ideologically inflected foibles and presumptions. Indeed, relatively recent key works focusing on women and shopping, such as those by DeVault (1991), Miller (1998) and Zukin (2004), tend to elide the specificities of what women do as mothers and thus of how constructs and understandings of motherhood may inform those of womanhood as well as those regarding consumption. Motherhood remains caught in the tussle between seemingly disparate forms of value and valuation. Abiding cultural norms continue to set expectations for mothers to defer some measure of personal gratification to their children’s ‘needs’, or at least to their wants, both at home and in the marketplace. Yet, it is in the regular handling of children’s desires that the sorting of priorities and the fabricating of value take place on a fundamental, everyday basis. It also is in the handling of such desires that various motherhoods come to be constituted as social practice (cf. Warde, 2005). As Douglas and Isherwood remind us, consumption, in the broad sense, constitutes the way the materials of culture become organized. It is ‘the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape’ (1979: 57). Consumption here includes the sorting of values – of good from bad, of appropriate from